these boys are all the same: the bowl cut the soft chin the skinny arms under the thrift shop jacket the aspergers gaze (not quite at the camera, not quite at you) in the one photo that 48 hours after becomes the only photo the new old hate (girls, blacks, one parent or the other) the manifesto. they always look so young; i will show you three pictures–the shooter at 12 the shooter at 15 the shooter at 20–and i challenge you to tell me which is which.

and you say, “of course. it’s this beta male thing. they feel ineffectual powerless, can’t get laid. and their parents kept guns in the house so they are going to kill somebody eventually. they are going to kill because they are wimps losers maladjusted. and we gave them the tools to do it.” it’d be better i guess if we only gave them the means to kill themselves.

but they took the flag down. and that is the impressive display the proof of power and not the nine people he shot dead. that must have been simple, easy enough (with the extra ammo in his fanny pack). but to take this lifeless tacky symbol this piece of cemetery kitsch so much like a hallmark bear or a vase of nylon roses  this piece of stagnant dead fabric with its half dozen calcified irrelevant interpretations and to make so many (incl. the good ol boys in the state house and the sons and daughters of the sons & daughters of the confederacy) recoil from it with the same automatic revulsion you feel when the stick the broken twig that you have been half looking at for what seems like hours moves once just a little and reveals itself to be a snake; that’s transubstantiation. that’s moses laying his rod before the feet of the pharaoh’s sorcerers.  after that, how could you ever feel small pathetic impotent again?

so now when i think of dylann i imagine him sitting in his cell like magneto (another superhuman bigot) straining to bend the bars with his mind.