There's nothing brave about murder
"Raoul Moat was a callous murderer, full stop, end of story. I cannot understand how there can be any public sympathy for him."
That was David Cameron's response to the news that 3,000 people had contributed to a Facebook fan site honouring the killer.
I wonder if Cameron meant this literally. Is it really beyond his imagination to see how some people can identify with Moat?
Maybe he used the word 'understand' in the same spirit as one of his predecessors, John Major, who said about crime that we should 'condemn more and understand less', as if understanding and condemnation were mutually exclusive, which of course they're not.
I think I do understand the sympathy for Moat, much as I despise it.
There are a lot of frustrated, lonely men out there, powder kegs of redundant brawn, thwarted love and crackling paranoia. The difference is that most of them do the decent thing and suffer quietly. Where a troubled man begins to lose the right to the sympathy to which he should otherwise be entitled is the moment when he picks up a gun and starts blasting.
Unfortunately, it is this very difference between him and his more placid brothers which, in the eyes of some of Moat's Facebook devotees, makes him as a hero.
Partly the media are to blame for this. But, as with most cases in which the media are to blame, consumers are equally culpable.
If the papers had relegated the Moat story to a filler on page 12, he would not have tugged the heart strings of so many Facebook contributors, and there would probably be a lower risk of someone else being inspired to follow his example.
But the media give us what they know we want. And from Billy the Kid to Taxi Driver to Thelma and Louise, we love the story of a killer on the run.
There is also our fascination with motive, encouraged perhaps by detective stories as well as our natural craving for closure.
Why did he do it? we always ask.
Personally, the mystery of why some people go beserk with a gun is one I'm less inclined to solve. And here I'm surprised to find myself in sympathy with John Major's reluctance to understand, lest it bring us too close to condoning.
There's a great novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin, about a boy who commits a high school massacre, told from the point of view of his mother. Shriver is rightly ambiguous on the question of motivation. But I remember that one theory she suggests is that murder is a form of 'appropriation'. Murder is a profoundly selfish act, and a species of greed. Just because it requires a degree of resistance to squeamishness, that doesn't make it brave.
Joseph Conrad writes of the 'laziness' of the terrorist, and it's true that destruction is easier than creativity. Whatever your gripe, you have less, not more, of a right for it to be heard once you resort to violence.
One of the sanest things I read in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was by someone who suggested we should have no more interest in the hijackers' views on foreign policy than we have in Peter Sutcliffe's views on prostitution. What a different world we would be living in now if our collective response to 9/11 had been a Cameronian 'callous murderers, full stop, end of story'.
Sympathy for Raoul Moat? Perhaps. Respect? Never.
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Weather for Cleckheaton
Monday 13 February 2012
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