TPM Reader AC has a disturbing, thought-provoking suggestion, one based on personal experience …
In a week full of super-heated and violent rhetoric, with talk of metaphorical guns being held to the collective head of the body politic, civil wars and the like, the actions of the House of Representatives have been deemed suicidal with some frequency. Representative Devin Nunes of California likened some of his colleagues to “lemmings with suicide vests.” Charles Krauthammer and The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza have both used the term “suicide caucus” to describe the GOP’s nihilists. White House advisor Dan Pfeiffer likened them to “people with a bomb strapped to their chest.” And so on.
Next thing you know, two profoundly ill and delusional people chose the District of Columbia as the place to stage spectacular suicides: one a “suicide by cop,” the other a suicide by self-immolation.
Delusional, violently ill people often believe themselves to be surveilled or influenced by larger forces. They may believe that they are receiving instructions from their televisions, or that public figures are speaking to them directly. Those with urges to suicide or homicide may interpret provocative language as coded signals, or target symbols of power to act out grandiose fantasies of empowerment, self-destruction, or both.
It’s possible that neither Miriam Carey nor the as-yet unidentified man who burned himself on the Mall took any heed of the violent rhetoric swirling around DC but, as someone who has suffered from paranoia, delusional thinking and suicidal urges, I can easily imagine how they might have interpreted them. Their deaths may have been coincidental to the rhetoric, but if so, they were hellish coincidences. I hope we’ve seen the last of them, but I suspect we haven’t.
