What Goes Around Comes Around: A Parable of Global Warfare

The month following the U.S. commemoration of the thousands who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center brought a new wave of terror: a sniper in the Washington suburbs. Not the mass catastrophe produced by tons of collapsing steel and burning jet fuel, the sniper's campaign wrought massive uncertainty punctuated by randomly chosen, but precisely aimed shots. Ordinary people doing ordinary things were transformed into targets, the suburbs into a shooting range. Seven people fell during the first three days of the sniper's attack. "Killed while sitting on a park bench," "killed while walking across a parking lot," "killed while doing lawn work," "killed while putting gas in his taxi cab," "killed while vacuuming her minivan," "killed on the street corner," or "shot while loading packages into her car," ¹ each victim was a mark, frozen in a rifle's telescopic sight, isolated from his or her surroundings, a target in an exercise in marksmanship. Six more would fall before the snipers, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, were finally apprehended. In terms of numbers, thirteen shooting deaths in the space of three weeks is hardly remarkable in the gun-crazy United States. Los Angeles alone can yield six hundred shooting deaths in a year, with the notorious South Central area contributing twenty per week. Even Muhammad and Malvo's exploits might have gone unnoticed had they spread their victims out instead of concentrating them in the highly visible topography of the D.C. area. Indeed, prior shootings in Louisiana and Alabama that were subsequently attributed to the snipers might have remained in the homicide limbo of unsolved crime—just another random shooting death. Only by concentrating their attack did the snipers' serial spree take on the proportion of terror to emerge as what Jean Baudrillard might call a "singularity [in] the heart of a system of generalized exchange." ²

October was a month of relentless uncertainty, steeped in the awful reality that anyone could get a bullet through the head while pumping gas. The sniper attacks brought a lottery of death to the suburbs. The banal landscape of car-choked roadways and parking lots, the commerce of gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls were reconfigured in a new terrain of risk. The cloak of uneventful malaise that passes for security was torn asunder to reveal a population gripped with fear and anxiety. The media and law enforcement officials issued palliatives meant to calm, all the while fanning our fears with more uncertainty. We were told that the likelihood of death by the sniper's bullet was a one-million-to-one shot and we were reminded that death in a car crash is far more likely than death by a random sniper. But the stakes seemed much higher, since every victim was so unremarkably just like us. Beyond reason and gripped by the faith we bestow in the luck of the individual (whether good or bad), we fell prey to sniper anxiety.

During the height of the sniper attacks, USA Today reported that Americans were more worried by the sniper than they were by impending war with Iraq and the plummeting economy. Even people far from the sniper's epicenter, in places like Montana, worried that the sniper would generate copycat versions in their own neighborhoods. ³ We, the society of rampant individualism and the culture of commodity replication (whose apparent contradiction has recently found resolution in the reported birth of the first cloned human), are doomed to the fear that every individual event will spawn its unwanted copycat replicant. So, we plotted the sniper's strikes on a mental map of crisscrossing interstates from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Ashland, Virginia, wondering if the sniper would move further south or do something truly spectacular like take a plane to the West Coast and begin anew with a fresh set of victims. Our fear enhanced the sniper's aura. The FBI...