1 Boring Old Man

Scott Roeder doesn’t look to me like a man who has been chosen to change the world for the better – nor did Timothy McVeigh, or Eric Rudolph, or all the others. After a time, it’s even hard to remember what their issue was. They actually seem to be cut from the same cloth – Freemen, Militia, violent Pro-Life, Waco, Aryan Nation, KKK, NRA, Y2K, bombs, guns, loners with violence on their minds. I’m not sure the topic they choose to fixate on matters so much as the fact that there is one – something to blame for their felt alienation and to focus their rage. But it is interesting that they all seem drawn to the same anarchist fringes of American life.

Scott Roeder’s ex-wife says that he underwent a dramatic personalitry change back in the mid-90’s and she divorced him because he couldn’t deal with life. All he talked about were taxes, and the Freemen, and Abortion. Apparently his now 22 year old son avoided him as much as possible. I can’t find any report of his employment, or where he lived. Just reports about his frequent picketting at Abortion Clinics. And for someone who was an anarchist, he sure was preoccuppied with when he would get to see a lawyer in his arraignment video.

I suspect that when the information about his life begins to percolate out of the ether, there won’t be much there to learn. He’ll just be another empty loner who filled his mind with a single organizing passion. And that’s the whole point. His feelings about the Pro-Life Movement will be debated for as long as the news cycle will allow, but that discussion will make little difference in the future of the issue, nor will it explain very much about Scott Roeder.

Serial killers, rapists, many pedophiles, guys like the rogues gallery above, all share a number of characteristics. They don’t play well with others – so there aren’t successful marriages or good friends. They can’t focus on professional life, so they move from job to job or are underemployed. They don’t have hobbies or avocational interests to speak of. It is said that one measures a life by three parameters – work, love, and play. These people fail in all three categories. You can see them on what I call "bad person t.v." [those shows like Dateline or 48 Hours] where they are running down some serial killer, or bigamist, or rapist – the shows that end up with the tell-tale DNA tests. And what they choose to fill their minds with doesn’t really matter that much. What matters is that whatever their choice of obsession, it occupies their minds. One of the surprising things I found in my psychiatric career was that one might think that interviewing them would be challenging or interesting. Not so. They are very boring people. Very boring.

Maybe Scott Roeder had strong convictions about late term abortion. But that’s not what drives a man with his story. What drives the motor is the emptiness that needs something like that to enliven the inner deadness. In some cases, that deadness is a symptom of a major mental illness like Schizophrenia or some form of Autism. In other cases it’s the result of developmental failures. In McVeigh’s case, it may have been part of a War Neurosis. Such cases are always hard to say much about because they rarely stick around for psychotherapy or even examination. In the old days, they often found their way into mental hospitals for the long haul. With those gone, they gravitate to other institutions – sometimes prison or death row. But as a group, they are people who have no idea how to manage the freedom they claim to desire above all else.