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You are here: Home / Politics / War on Terror / War on Terror aka GSAVE® / The San Bernardino Shooters: “How Could A Young Mother??…

The San Bernardino Shooters: “How Could A Young Mother??…

by Anne Laurie|  December 4, 20159:28 pm| 168 Comments

This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Women's Rights Are Human Rights

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That seems to be the catchphrase of the day on the evening news, so I’ll take my own second-wave-feminist WAG: Tashfeen Malik, as Adam mentioned earlier, was a new mom in very isolated circumstances. She was thousands of miles from her family, shy around her (Americanized) inlaws, didn’t speak English well. She “chose not to drive” — that’s influence from her childhood in Saudi Arabia — which I’m assuming meant, in a Southern California suburb, that there isn’t much in the way of public transit, and she couldn’t take cabs because of the talking-to-strange-men Wahhabi prohibition. The American internet boards for new moms where she might otherwise have found some outlets tend to be (from my outsider perspective) larded with “everyday” praise-Jesus talk that would have made her very, very uncomfortable even if she understood them as no more than folk affirmations.

She was, from all descriptions, a bright and educated woman stuck alone in a house in a strange country, day after day, with a helpless screaming needy piss and vomit machine infant. And when her poor husband came home from another long day of facing The Infidel (I assume a Muslim guy from Detroit named ‘Sayed Farook’ could’ve written a book about microagressions), he’d have been greeted by a woman desperate for grown-up interaction… possibly ashamed by her inability to be a ‘good wife’, overwhelmed by her hormones and her responsibilities as a mother.

We’ll probably never know if Malik suffered from post-partum depression, but it surely wouldn’t have come as a surprise if she did. I remember the guy responsible for Desperate Housewives saying he conceived the idea when he was watching the news with his mother and expressed surprise that a different “new mother” could be so damaged as to kill her baby before committing suicide… and his mom told him, Don’t be — I often thought about doing that myself, when you were a baby.

And, tragically, the “consolation” of religion in Malik’s case gave her a ready-made instruction set for making something blessed of her despair and her husband’s weariness. People get radicalized because they need something they can’t find elsewhere. Was Malik and Farook’s radicalization due, at least as a contributing factor, to a new mom’s isolation and her husband’s feeling of helplessness?

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Reader Interactions

168Comments

  1. 1.

    craigie

    December 4, 2015 at 9:30 pm

    That was well thought out – very liberal of you. The conservative version of that would be “well, she was brown and had a funny name. QED”

  2. 2.

    raven

    December 4, 2015 at 9:31 pm

    I can’t seem to dig up a reason to have any sympathy.

  3. 3.

    Ruckus

    December 4, 2015 at 9:38 pm

    Well of course we will probably never know. The two people that may have been able to explain can’t be reached.
    What makes people go on a killing spree? It may be complex it may be very simple. We like to assign reason to things that we can not imagine in ourselves. To make sense of the world. Sometimes there is no sense to humans. We can be highly educated and still be morons. We can be dirt poor and still have happy moments or stinking rich and miserable. We can love and hate in the same moment. We have expectations that are vastly untenable and beliefs in fairy tales. We adore things that are figments of someone’s imagination and hate reality.

  4. 4.

    raven

    December 4, 2015 at 9:39 pm

    @Ruckus: It’s that duality thing sir!

  5. 5.

    tybee

    December 4, 2015 at 9:41 pm

    some animals eat their young.

  6. 6.

    Debbie

    December 4, 2015 at 9:42 pm

    All I’ve been hearing all day is that she radicalized him. Hope you’re right, but it does seem kind of bleeding heart.

  7. 7.

    raven

    December 4, 2015 at 9:42 pm

    @tybee: Hey, I smoked em on the emerald coast.

    https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5622/22865185610_83fc0820b6_b.jpg

  8. 8.

    tybee

    December 4, 2015 at 9:43 pm

    @raven:

    but just the young ones. :)

  9. 9.

    Starfish

    December 4, 2015 at 9:46 pm

    There is one really large point that you have overlooked here. A lot of times, men with wives who do not speak English keep them isolated so they cannot leave the marriage. If the wives do not know the language, they cannot ask for help and put up with a lot of horrific abuse. This happens to foreign women of many different cultures.

    Though she lived in Saudi Arabia, she was from Pakistan originally. When did she leave Pakistan for Saudi Arabia? Was she old enough to drive before she made the move?

    Though a lot of mommy boards may be fond of Jesus, there are some that are more into cloth diapering and natural child birth. Those tend to police you for proper leftist thoughts.

  10. 10.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 9:47 pm

    What an absolutely ridiculous orgy of speculation in the guise of….lemme get this right…..”second-wave feminism.”

  11. 11.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    December 4, 2015 at 9:47 pm

    There was a story in our local newspaper several years ago where a Marine had gone home on leave to Alabama and married his girlfriend of 14 with the permission of her parents. He then brought her back to Jacksonville and rented them an apartment. He got her pregnant and was then promptly deployed and left his 14 year old pregnant wife to fend for herself. Being 14 she couldn’t drive, couldn’t go to the bank to get money, couldn’t get a job, couldn’t get groceries. She was basically destitute in the apartment until CPS stepped in. Said Marine was dragged back from deployment post haste and told to take care of the shit. This story reminds me of that.

  12. 12.

    rikyrah

    December 4, 2015 at 9:47 pm

    I think she was the radical, but that’s my tinfoil hat talking

  13. 13.

    Anne Laurie

    December 4, 2015 at 9:49 pm

    @Debbie:

    All I’ve been hearing all day is that she radicalized him

    See, he was American — she was just a filthy furriner. He’d never have picked up murderous ideas like that in Detroit, or SoCal, but you know how it is: Guy takes up with a broad he thinks loves him for himself, next thing you know she’s got him skipping bowling night for Lamaze classes, or shooting up his workplace. Same difference — the Magical Vagina clouds mens’ minds!

    (I don’t know if this is what the Mens Rights Activists are actually saying, because I’m not gonna go look.)

  14. 14.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 9:51 pm

    helpless screaming needy piss and vomit machine infant.

    Also, since you don’t know jack shit about having a baby, howzabout you refrain from slandering the experience?

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    December 4, 2015 at 9:53 pm

    Leave the long-distance armchair diagnosis to Frist.

  16. 16.

    JPL

    December 4, 2015 at 9:54 pm

    This my two cents.. I have no idea.

  17. 17.

    Amir Khalid

    December 4, 2015 at 9:55 pm

    I understand and sympathise with the urge to speculate about Tashfeen Malik and psychoanalyse her, But it’s based on still-incomplete information, so I don’t know if it’s helpful. For instance, I’m not sure how isolated she was. Were there no other women to offer her moral support at the mosque she and Rizwan attended? That doesn’t strike me as very likely.

  18. 18.

    John Revolta

    December 4, 2015 at 9:55 pm

    Ooo. This here is some A1, gourmet trollbait.

  19. 19.

    Ruviana

    December 4, 2015 at 9:56 pm

    Here’s another view of Malik’s place in this that fills in a few bits of information. Women, like men, do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. I could buy her as the radicalizing element.

  20. 20.

    Starfish

    December 4, 2015 at 9:56 pm

    @eemom: Six months is when the babies get super cute with their sitting up and smiling and maybe letting you get six hours of sleep a night so.

  21. 21.

    schrodinger's cat

    December 4, 2015 at 9:56 pm

    @Starfish: She grew up in SA. She just went back to Pakistan to go to college.

  22. 22.

    Mandalay

    December 4, 2015 at 9:59 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    helpless screaming needy piss and vomit machine

    WTF???

    Even by your normal standards of sneering and condescension that’s a doozy. Perhaps you should issue an apology for that vile effort at humor.

  23. 23.

    Amir Khalid

    December 4, 2015 at 10:00 pm

    @Litlebritdifrnt:
    I am appalled to read such a story. Is it really still legal in Alabama to marry off 14-year-old girls?

  24. 24.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 10:01 pm

    I admit, I’m pretty disturbed that a normal-seeming young couple was willing to abandon their infant daughter to go on a killing spree. I know some people were comparing her to Chechen women fighters who did the same thing, but fighting a civil war against Russia isn’t the same thing as attacking a holiday party in San Bernardino.

    Folie a deux is what I keep thinking — two people whose insanity egged each other on until this happened. Even the cops keep saying that there are a lot of things that aren’t making sense.

    And not to go all One True Scotsman, but just because someone declares themselves a jihadist fighter (in a FaceBook message that was quickly deleted) doesn’t make them one. I can claim to be the Queen of Romania all day long, but no one is going to hand me a crown based on that.

  25. 25.

    Anne Laurie

    December 4, 2015 at 10:01 pm

    @Starfish:

    There is one really large point that you have overlooked here. A lot of times, men with wives who do not speak English keep them isolated so they cannot leave the marriage. If the wives do not know the language, they cannot ask for help and put up with a lot of horrific abuse. This happens to foreign women of many different cultures.

    True enough. But the little we’ve been told so far about Farook, sounds like he was a genuinely low-key guy who didn’t get huffy about Jewish cubicle-mates or difficult clients (when you’re investigating restaurants for the health dept there are only difficult clients). IF she was the one who radicalized him, as the present narrative goes, I can easily visual a scenario where she was increasingly depressed/desperate, he got sucked into a vortex, and fad-of-the-moment “religious practice” gave them a mutual us-against-them outlet.

    We’re not getting the usual “He got weirder and weirder and then there was a trigger” narrative. It sounds like he kept things together until some last nerve snapped, and then he — impulsively? — dropped the baby with grandma, grabbed his wife and a small portion of his all-American arsenal, and decided to go down in a blaze of publicity like Bonnie and Clyde.

    But more support for young mothers, IMO, could only have helped, no matter which folie a deux partner was “responsible” for the eventual tragedy.

  26. 26.

    Mandalay

    December 4, 2015 at 10:02 pm

    @John Revolta:

    This here is some A1, gourmet trollbait.

    Really? Sure about that?…

  27. 27.

    HRA

    December 4, 2015 at 10:05 pm

    Not all mothers who do not speak English fit your description and the same is true of your description of babies.
    My mother was European and did not speak English when she came here.
    I had 6 children and I would never use that description for any of them.
    Your scenario is way off the mark about this woman..
    .

  28. 28.

    Heliopause

    December 4, 2015 at 10:07 pm

    “How Could A Young Mother??”

    Yeah, I’ve been trying all day to figure out why the MSM idiots are saying this. “How could a homicidal maniac abandon her child???” Seriously, how much brain trauma does it take to be hired as an MSM reporter?

  29. 29.

    Llelldorin

    December 4, 2015 at 10:07 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    I keep thinking that but for the presence of the wife, “armed nebbish snaps and starts shooting coworkers” is an almost quintessentially American story. Heck, my high school had a plaque memorializing the 4 dead and three wounded when a JHS principal snapped similarly back in 1940.

  30. 30.

    schrodinger's cat

    December 4, 2015 at 10:07 pm

    @Starfish: She went to college in Pakistan and couldn’t speak English? That I find hard to believe. Unless Pakistan is very different from India, most University education is conducted in English.

    I also had a Pakistani roommate, originally from Karachi and her English was flawless. She was an EE major.

  31. 31.

    Anne Laurie

    December 4, 2015 at 10:11 pm

    @Mandalay:

    Even by your normal standards of sneering and condescension that’s a doozy.

    I was nine when my youngest sibs were born. I’ve had lots of friends give birth to babies they loved unreservedly. If babies weren’t so adorable, the human race would’ve died out long ago!

    But let’s not pretend that every minute of every new mom’s life is blissful snuggles and adorable infant smiles… newborns are a lot of responsibility, and it can wear even a strong and dedicated woman down, however briefly. It overwhelms some women, and that’s when there’s a thirty-second lead on the evening news and a spate of “people who shouldn’t be allowed to breed” comments.

    And lying about the less pleasant side of having a baby doesn’t help the women who are feeling overwhelmed and who most need to reach out… it just (further) convinces them that they’re monsters who deserve to be punished.

  32. 32.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 10:11 pm

    Technically, we’re all piss and shit machines with some occasional vomit related malfunctions.

  33. 33.

    JimV

    December 4, 2015 at 10:12 pm

    Thanks for the post. It seems a plausible scenario to me (among others, and as a contributing factor to others). Most mean animals get that way by being treated meanly – isn’t that what they say about dogs?

  34. 34.

    Mike J

    December 4, 2015 at 10:12 pm

    @Anne Laurie:

    See, he was American

    More American than Ted Cruz, anyway.

  35. 35.

    GregB

    December 4, 2015 at 10:13 pm

    I am tired of armed douche-bags of any color, nationality or faith killing people because their life might happen to suck at that point in time.

  36. 36.

    Davebo

    December 4, 2015 at 10:14 pm

    That’s a ton of assumptions piled on top of limited knowledge.

  37. 37.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 10:15 pm

    @HRA:

    It’s tough, though, because postnatal depression or even psychosis is a real problem, and a lot of women don’t get the help they need because society still tells them that mothers should be happy happy happy all the time or they’re bad mothers. I think it’s starting to get a little better because there’s more awareness and support, but I could see that someone who’s new to the US might have trouble accessing that support.

    For the record, I decided that I would not make a good mother, but I do like hanging around with kids. That’s when my lifelong immaturity finally pays off!
    ;-)

  38. 38.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 10:17 pm

    @JPL:

    This my two cents.. I have no idea.

    I second your analysis.

  39. 39.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 10:17 pm

    @JimV: I’m sure most criminals – violent or otherwise – had less than ideal childhoods.

    We are literally baked with the sins of our parents. Odds are a child molester was molested themselves as a child. Murderers are trained to be violent. This world is sad and tragic and ruins so many.

  40. 40.

    vikram

    December 4, 2015 at 10:19 pm

    Anne,

    I assume this is sarcasm, because if it isn’t, then its a piss-poor argument. Post partum depression and loneliness doesnt cause a woman to go out and stockpile ammo and battle fatigues. These are the kind of arguments best left for Salon.com, and not here in the real world. This is Balloon Juice and the one thing we have here is a firm grip on reality! :)

  41. 41.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    December 4, 2015 at 10:19 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet):

    Folie a deux is what I keep thinking — two people whose insanity egged each other on

    One of the more interesting features of the folie a deux disorder is that in the classic definition, one person was the carrier, so to speak, and affected the other.

    Shared psychotic disorder, also known as folie a deux (“the folly of two”), is a rare condition in which an otherwise healthy person (secondary case) shares the delusions of a person with a psychotic disorder (primary case), such as schizophrenia

    One of the ways they know that is that often when they’re separated, one gets better and the other stays the same.

    I’m not saying that I know that’s what this was or which was which if so, but it did come to my mind also.

  42. 42.

    GoBlue72

    December 4, 2015 at 10:20 pm

    @Anne Laurie: Thank you. The motherhood and children on a 24-7 pedestal crap in this country is just so much B.S. And counter-productive.

    Course, it helps to maintain a system that is wholly family un-friendly when it comes to government support for maternity care when the culture expects that mothers should just consider themselves so BLESSED to have a child.

  43. 43.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 10:22 pm

    We all assume Republican’s and the media’s heated dialogue about Planned Parenthood played a role in Deer’s shooting.

    Could not the same be said for the coverage of ISIS here?

    I see anti-ISIS signs here in East Bumfuck Maine and there’s literally 0.002 percent chance of any ISIS attack going on here. But the rednecks are still afraid.

  44. 44.

    GoBlue72

    December 4, 2015 at 10:23 pm

    Isn’t it also possible this was a mutually reinforcing descent into a psychopathic break?

    The Columbine massacre involved TWO teenagers who were friends. For example.

  45. 45.

    Botsplainer

    December 4, 2015 at 10:27 pm

    Watching John Wick finally. He kills more people than an NRA spree killer.

    Damn…

  46. 46.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 10:32 pm

    @Botsplainer: Tell us what you think when done. It’s a curious movie.

  47. 47.

    Debbie

    December 4, 2015 at 10:32 pm

    @efgoldman:

    Vultures. Apparently the cops were finished, but they were filming and sending pictures of the baby without blurring.

  48. 48.

    scav

    December 4, 2015 at 10:34 pm

    @Debbie: Cops being done doesn’t mean it was legal, let alone ethical.

  49. 49.

    Will R

    December 4, 2015 at 10:40 pm

    Well, this post is certainly thought-provoking so there’s that. Like others have said.. who the hell knows?

    It can happen anywhere, anytime and there’s really not much we can do to eliminate the radicalization process. We can combat it with counter-propaganda but we’re always going to be vulnerable to these kinds of attacks as long as it remains easy to obtain firearms and stockpile ammo.

  50. 50.

    p.a.

    December 4, 2015 at 10:41 pm

    I would posit isolation at home; ammo is compact and hideable but I’m not sure bomb making in an apartment wouldn’t cause noticeable evidence if you had visitors. Kicking dirty clothes into a closet it ain’t.

  51. 51.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 10:41 pm

    @Will R: Our media plays a huge part in the radicalization of Americans.

  52. 52.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 10:42 pm

    @Amir Khalid:

    It’s such an anomalous story that it’s hard to resist the temptation to speculate. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard of a case where parents left their infant behind to engage in a workplace shooting spree.

    Hell, I remember that it was hugely controversial when JK Rowling had the mother of an infant fight and die in an effort to stop an apocalypse in the last Harry Potter book.

    We have a ton of pieces, but none of them fit together in a way that makes any sense, and none of us here are willing to go, Well, those Mooslims just don’t have the same respect for human life that we do, so that’s why.

  53. 53.

    Chat Noir

    December 4, 2015 at 10:45 pm

    @eemom: I agree.

  54. 54.

    GoBlue72

    December 4, 2015 at 10:45 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Or maybe they were just whack.

    Folks want to see reason where there isn’t necessarily any. Sometimes people just go nuts. Which in most places isn’t a big deal, but here in the U.S. where we give away a handgun as a prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, it is.

  55. 55.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 10:46 pm

    @Will R:

    One thing I’ve always heard is that the US has had very few homegrown attacks by native-born or immigrant Muslims because we have a lot less official and unofficial discrimination against them than there is in Europe.

    What worries me is that all of the recent Islamophobia from the right wing is changing that and making it more likely that American Muslims will become radicalized because their fellow Americans are being assholes to them.

  56. 56.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 10:50 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): We don’t have enough information at this point for informed speculation. Since they are dead, we probably never will. Not all questions can be answered.

  57. 57.

    Starfish

    December 4, 2015 at 10:50 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: I have not been paying much attention to this because the people who have been talking about this think the answer is more guns. What do we know about her?

    But if we are wildly speculating, we can wildly speculate all sorts of things.

  58. 58.

    Amir Khalid

    December 4, 2015 at 10:52 pm

    @efgoldman:
    I should note here that Tashfeen Malik was from Pakistan, not the Middle East. But of course we’re talking about people who are unaware of the distinction, or indifferent to it.

  59. 59.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 10:52 pm

    OT but brilliant: The Onion on Planned Parenthood myths vs facts.

  60. 60.

    Starfish

    December 4, 2015 at 10:54 pm

    @Anne Laurie: It’s not the vomiting or crying that is the problem with new babies. It is the chronic sleep deprivation. The sleep when the baby sleeps people need to stfu. Adults need more than 4 consecutive hours of sleep.

  61. 61.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 10:55 pm

    @efgoldman: Landlord can’t just let people in.

  62. 62.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 10:57 pm

    @srv: Burn your bras, bros.

  63. 63.

    scav

    December 4, 2015 at 10:58 pm

    @efgoldman: I don’t quite see how landlords can invite the media into rental property even if the tenants that signed the agreement are dead — it still would seem to be the heirs’.

  64. 64.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 10:59 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Humans are storytelling animals. The right wing has already constructed their story about San Bernardino, which is See, we told you that all Muslims are murderous jihadists just waiting for an opportunity to kill us all. It would be nice if we could have a story to combat that so we don’t get left flat-footed. Again.

  65. 65.

    Helen

    December 4, 2015 at 10:59 pm

    Today was my last day at work. I quit. I told you about that. Never fear: They are in panic mode. They will hire me back. I mention my job because we all went out and I am a little bit drunk. So maybe my opinion is a bit skewed. BUT:

    On topic and sorry if anyone else said this. This looks MEGA MRA. Let’s blame the girl. Cuz, boy? Boyz commit murder? SHUT UP.

  66. 66.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 11:02 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet):

    It’s such an anomalous story that it’s hard to resist the temptation to speculate. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard of a case where parents left their infant behind to engage in a workplace shooting spree.

    Hell, I remember that it was hugely controversial when JK Rowling had the mother of an infant fight and die in an effort to stop an apocalypse in the last Harry Potter book.

    Congratulations, you’ve outdone Peggy Noonan — not only glorifying useless speculation, but citing Hogwarts to support it.

  67. 67.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 4, 2015 at 11:03 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): In regular mass shootings, as in not going to ever be classified as terrorism (domestic or international), that have two perpetrators they typology is that one is a psychopath and the other is usually schizotypical. Now this typology was based on the very limited number of partnered/paired mass shootings, all of which, to my recall involved school kids shooting up there schools.

  68. 68.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 11:03 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Well, if we are making up stories, I doubt that the piss and vomit machine one is a winner. There aren’t enough facts here for a plausible, fact based story.

  69. 69.

    Peale

    December 4, 2015 at 11:04 pm

    We are talking about middle class people throwing their lot in with a group of criminals who debate whether sex with seven year old girls kidnapped at gunpoint is acceptable or if it’s permissible to wait until 8. I don’t think any amount of isolation, anomie or post partum depression explains that.

  70. 70.

    mai naem mobile

    December 4, 2015 at 11:06 pm

    This whole shooting just makes me sick. I don’t even know why I feel heartsick about this one as compared to the others. I’ve heard the one fellow mosque member interviewed and how great this mosque is etc. etc. WTF? They don’t have some kind of women’s auxiliary or whatever at the mosque to help people/women settle in as new moms/immigrants? And what about the mom and the sister? WTF. I find it hard to believe she didn’t speak english not just because she went to college but because he was brought up here. These two were just ayss holes. Who the fvck goes into a a facility with developmentally disabled people and shoots it up? These two have zero excuses. Zero.

  71. 71.

    the Conster

    December 4, 2015 at 11:09 pm

    It makes a ton of sense that in her isolation she’d develop a world view that couldn’t survive any test in a real western world context as a subjugated Pakistani woman raised in misogynistic Saudi Arabia, and she’s the perfect example of the kind of person ISIS successfully recruits. Of course there will be no attempt to understand any of the context, because all Muslims are the same/

  72. 72.

    amk

    December 4, 2015 at 11:10 pm

    Lotsa idle speculations without any facts to support them,

  73. 73.

    Ruckus

    December 4, 2015 at 11:10 pm

    @efgoldman:
    transcribe the voices in her head.
    I believe those are the drunk voices in her head.

  74. 74.

    Mister Papercut

    December 4, 2015 at 11:12 pm

    Not sure this is a devil I’m particularly interested in seeing advocated for.

    /VT grad

  75. 75.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 11:12 pm

    Let’s get one thing straight: being the mother of a newborn baby is an intensely complex experience. Yes, it includes sleep deprivation and changing a shitload of shitty diapers. And it can also include really bad postpartum depression and exacerbation of other mental illness. I can speak to all of that, because I’ve lived it.

    And I frankly find this facile imaginary bullshit, from people who have NOT, to be offensive. Including but not limited to the description of a baby as a “pissing vomiting machine.”

  76. 76.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:13 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I don’t particularly agree with Anne Laurie’s version, either. It seems as overly simplistic as the other speculations I’ve seen.

    Like I said, it’s so unusual for parents to abandon their infant and go on a workplace shooting spree that I really don’t know which direction this investigation is going to go. Shared psychosis seems to be the only semi-logical explanation in this situation, which by definition means we’ll never really know.

  77. 77.

    schrodinger's cat

    December 4, 2015 at 11:16 pm

    The baby made her do it, is a tad simplistic but very clickbaity!

  78. 78.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 11:17 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: What if the baby was Damian?

  79. 79.

    the Conster

    December 4, 2015 at 11:17 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    It’s Anne Laurie’s hot take.

  80. 80.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 4, 2015 at 11:18 pm

    @efgoldman: @scav: At LGF, which I linked to in my post earlier, several of their commenters who are lawyers provided the CA legal code and explained that the lease stays in effect, in case of the renter predeceasing the end of the lease, until the end of the lease. It just transfers to the heirs of the deceased. As such the landlord, unless he had a specific maintenance reason for being in there, violated the California statutes. The journalists doxxing Farook’s mother is something else entirely.

  81. 81.

    debbie

    December 4, 2015 at 11:18 pm

    @efgoldman:

    You know, on Law and Order, they always left a patrolman behind to guard the place. Just saying…

  82. 82.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:18 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    That’s another thing that seems weird to me with this — when other people have snapped and decided to kill people for “jihad,” haven’t they usually left some kind of video or manifesto behind? So far, the police and FBI have said that this couple destroyed their hard drive and other documents, and the only “jihad”-type declaration was deleted from Facebook.

    Of course, the investigation seems to be pretty sloppy since the journalists let into the apartment found so much left behind, so I probably shouldn’t assume there’s no video given the screwups so far.

  83. 83.

    scav

    December 4, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    Seems to be a lot of competing stereotypes here, and a real need to reduce everything to a simple, comforting narrative that re-enforces whichever is the personally preferred one. Peoples, even mothers, just like fathers, are complex and not always internally coherent — let alone cozy.

  84. 84.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: IT’S ALL FOR YOU DAMIEN!

  85. 85.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 11:20 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: So the infant owes next month’s rent?

  86. 86.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 11:21 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: I am not licensed in CA, but that would be my general take on the legal situation.

    @redshirt: The estate owes next month’s rent.

  87. 87.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 11:21 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    What if the baby was Damian?

    I watched that again recently. As far as antichrist movies go it really kind of sucked.

  88. 88.

    amk

    December 4, 2015 at 11:21 pm

    I would be interested in AL’s ‘take’ on the mass murderers of white bread hue.

  89. 89.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 4, 2015 at 11:22 pm

    @efgoldman: Not anymore. What originally freaked me out was when I used to explain what the real outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was to get each side back to engaging in only normal/criminal violence: homicides, assaults, that sort of thing and get them away from engaging in terrorism, insurgency, and war.

  90. 90.

    p.a.

    December 4, 2015 at 11:22 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: It’s Abraham’s fault. When he heard a voice he should’ve thrown himself off a cliff.

  91. 91.

    debbie

    December 4, 2015 at 11:22 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Great chart. Every time I drive by the picketers (always men, for some reason), I so want to yell something at them, but I’m paranoid enough to think they’ll get my license plate number and track me down.

  92. 92.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:24 pm

    @eemom:

    If you’ve heard of another criminal case where the parents of an infant abandoned it to go on a mass killing spree at the parent’s workplace, I’d love to see a link to it.

    Even if you take the baby out of the equation, I’m trying to think of another case where a workplace killing spree was committed by two or more people working as a team, and I’m coming up blank. I’m sure it’s happened, but I can’t think of one. Lone killers seem to be much, much more common in workplace killings.

  93. 93.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 4, 2015 at 11:24 pm

    @debbie: Law and Order has a better budget for spare patrolmen than the San Bernardino PD.

  94. 94.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 11:25 pm

    @eemom: The Greg Peck version? Or the remake?

    @debbie: The picketers here in Madison are mixed, but they are a fair weather crowd.

  95. 95.

    p.a.

    December 4, 2015 at 11:26 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): American ‘culture’ is always cutting edge.

  96. 96.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 11:26 pm

    @efgoldman: The Exorcist didn’t feature the Antichrist.

  97. 97.

    Botsplainer

    December 4, 2015 at 11:27 pm

    @redshirt:

    I liked it a lot. Total dark farce, of course.

  98. 98.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:28 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Some landlords will let the family take an extra month with the rental unit and let the deposit act as the last month’s rent. We had a fun time this summer when we discovered my brother’s estranged wife had never bothered to pay the deposit and we had to scramble to come up with the final month’s rent so his girlfriend had time to move out in an orderly fashion.

  99. 99.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 11:29 pm

    @Botsplainer: Farce is a good way of describing it that I’ve not seen before. Really applies to the strange mythology the movie presents.

  100. 100.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 4, 2015 at 11:29 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): As I’ve written a couple of times, we basically have to wait and see what emerges in the investigation. The IS connection is interesting, but it may wind up being not much of anything when they’re done running everything to ground. Or it might be that they had, like McVeigh did with the supremacist, separatist extreme right, subjectively identified with IS and their doctrine and decided to do something. And there planning was moving along, but wasn’t all the way there (as in they’d built some of the bombs, but hadn’t tested anything to make sure they’d work and hadn’t really identified a good target) when something set them off. Or it may be something else. Everyone rushes to judgement because a narrative, any narrative allows people to place this into some sort of comfortable category. And the media is going to do what it does because it just can’t help itself. The companies that own it want eyeballs on advertising and the reporters seem to have socialized themselves to not knowing any better.

  101. 101.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:31 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: So, it’s analogous to having a garden-variety Christian commit an act of violence in this country, rather than an evangelical misusing bible verses and assaulting LGBT folk or a PP.

    It is surreal, but I do get what you’re describing (I think).

  102. 102.

    p.a.

    December 4, 2015 at 11:31 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: Well Jews have been the object of violence for millennia. They’re playing catch-up. Old Onion headline: Palestinians Lead World in Production of Rubble.

  103. 103.

    Liberal

    December 4, 2015 at 11:33 pm

    @Starfish: four consecutive hours? With our twins, the most we were getting was 90 min.

  104. 104.

    Corner Stone

    December 4, 2015 at 11:34 pm

    @eemom:

    Let’s get one thing straight: being the mother of a newborn baby is an intensely complex experience. Yes, it includes sleep deprivation and changing a shitload of shitty diapers. And it can also include really bad postpartum depression and exacerbation of other mental illness.

    It can absolutely change mental states, and lives involved. Moms, dads, everyone.
    Waking up each day being 100% responsible for the life of someone else can be way too much for a human being who otherwise previously thought that was what they were about.

  105. 105.

    p.a.

    December 4, 2015 at 11:34 pm

    @debbie: The ones I’ve seen have been both sexes, but all obviously Medicare eligible.

  106. 106.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 4, 2015 at 11:34 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: @redshirt: It wasn’t clear to me if any of the LGF commenters were either, but one of them actually posted the pertinent bit from the California code. I know that when my (crazy*) aunt died, and she’d been living in my grandparent’s condo on a life estate, the estate was on the hook for the Home Owners fees every month until we sold the place.

    * How crazy you ask? Well when we were cleaning the place out to get it ready for the estate sale folks** and the realtor to do their things, I found a contact report from the cops. My aunt had called the cops on the Windsor Garden’s 4th of July party because they were making too much noise, in violation of the covenant, and setting off sparklers, also in violation of the covenant and she wanted the cops to enforce the covenant.

    ** I highly recommend Treasures Limited for anyone in the Denver/front range area that might, unfortunately, need someone to handle their estate sale. Stan and Desiree are the best and you’ll not do any better.

  107. 107.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:35 pm

    @efgoldman:

    Our second date was “Blood Simple.” I had had food poisoning the night before, but I didn’t want to cancel and scare him off. He says now that he was worried the date wasn’t going well until I explained I had been puking my guts out the night before and didn’t have much of an appetite. And here we are, 15 years later.

  108. 108.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 11:37 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet):

    All of which has zero (0) to do with the merits of speculating about what caused it.

  109. 109.

    Corner Stone

    December 4, 2015 at 11:37 pm

    @Liberal: Every time he woke up, I was up. It never seemed to bother me.

  110. 110.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 11:39 pm

    @efgoldman: LOL. Sounds like an awesome date, and in retrospect clearly it was!

    But it’s just some demon/devil/aspect of the devil possessing the girl, not the Anti-Christ, which has a whole different mythology associated with it.

    Whereas in The Omen, the evil boy IS the Anti-Christ, and is not possessed or inhabited by a demon.

    Big difference!

  111. 111.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 11:39 pm

    @efgoldman:

    Rosemary’s Baby, the grandmother of all antichrists, was an absolutely awesome movie.

  112. 112.

    Corner Stone

    December 4, 2015 at 11:40 pm

    Kids aren’t for everyone.

  113. 113.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:40 pm

    @eemom:

    People speculate, especially when you have a lot of pieces that don’t fit together. At this point, I really doubt there’s going to be any kind of simple explanation, whether it’s “jihad” or “postpartum depression.”

  114. 114.

    Amir Khalid

    December 4, 2015 at 11:42 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Right on.

  115. 115.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 11:42 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    the Peck version; I didn’t even know there was a remake, which surely must have sucked even worse.

  116. 116.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 4, 2015 at 11:43 pm

    @ThresherK (GPad): What I was trying to do was describe to students taking my course at UF on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute when I was post-doc that we were really looking at the following dynamics:
    1) The Israelis were being asked to trade something tangible, land, for something that is hard to measure peace or security or both depending on who was doing the talking.
    2) The outcome of this was to get the Israelis into their corner and the Palestinian into theirs, to use a boxing term. This would allow each society to stop engaging in political violence with each other and just get back to the normal violence we see in societies, which are criminal.
    3) That once we actually get the Israelis and Palestinians separated, we’re not really rid of the problem in the area. Rather it will morph to two new problems: intra-Israeli and an intra-Palestinian one. The Israelis, freed from the unifying factor of the Palestinian threat would then have the societal time and space to settle their own grievances: a) Ultra-devout (Haredim) versus the Devout (Dateet) versus the Secular Israelis; b) the fight over ethnic/racial cleavages that has long simmered under the surface: Israelis of European descent (Ashkenazim) versus those of Middl Eastern descent (the Mizrahim) versus those from Africa (the Banu Dan from Ethiopia); c) the settlers versus everyone else as they try to dismantle some of those. On the Palestinian side you’ve got a) the Gazans vs the West Bankers, which will also likely really be the Hamas folks versus the PA/Fatah folks; b) more religious/devout versus less religious/devout vs more secular Muslim Palestinians; c) former refugees versus everyone else; d) Muslim versus Christian Palestinians.

  117. 117.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    December 4, 2015 at 11:43 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Or baby Hilter, they should have just called jeb?.

  118. 118.

    chopper

    December 4, 2015 at 11:43 pm

    stuck alone in a house in a strange country, day after day, with a helpless screaming needy piss and vomit machineinfant

    wow, you really nailed parenthood. it’s almost like you know even a tiny bit of what you’re talking about!

  119. 119.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 11:43 pm

    @eemom: Liev Schreiber as Peck. The less said about it the better.

  120. 120.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:44 pm

    @efgoldman:

    I just asked, and he says he was pretty sure I didn’t really like him until I accepted a third date, which was to go see “Aliens.”

    (If these movie release dates aren’t adding up for anyone, it’s because “Blood Simple” was a re-release and “Aliens” was a midnight movie.)

  121. 121.

    Liberal

    December 4, 2015 at 11:44 pm

    AFAICT isolation is mainly due to not having family around to help. In the old days that wouldn’t be the case.

  122. 122.

    Doug R

    December 4, 2015 at 11:46 pm

    Here’s my talking out my ass take on it. Seems like they were planning something-it’s just that the party may not have been the original target-that after a heated argument, things got moved up. Or it was some kind of perverse culling.
    My daughter is on the autistic spectrum and she goes to places like this. Why any fucker would shoot up a place like this with the most vunerable trusting people is beyond me.

  123. 123.

    Helen

    December 4, 2015 at 11:47 pm

    @Corner Stone: Yeah. No. This is not really about “mental states.” It is more about “physiological states” Hormones taking over.

  124. 124.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 11:48 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Game over, man!

  125. 125.

    Liberal

    December 4, 2015 at 11:48 pm

    @Corner Stone: yeah…

    Marriage as a life change is a rounding error compared to becoming a parent.

  126. 126.

    redshirt

    December 4, 2015 at 11:49 pm

    @Doug R: Gotta shoot up something….

  127. 127.

    eemom

    December 4, 2015 at 11:49 pm

    @efgoldman:

    Same here. But Rosemary’s Baby was an original novel by Ira Levin, who was a master of the horror/suspense genre long before anyone ever heard of Stephen King (other Levin works include A Kiss Before Dying, The Boys From Brazil, and The Stepford Wives), whereas IIRC The Omen book was just a novelized version of the film. (They did that back then, dunno if they still do.)

  128. 128.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    December 4, 2015 at 11:51 pm

    @efgoldman:

    how come Apple hasn’t sued about that name

    Cause iHop had it first, oh wait, that never stopped Apple before.

  129. 129.

    amk

    December 4, 2015 at 11:52 pm

    funny tweets under #muslimapartment

  130. 130.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 4, 2015 at 11:53 pm

    @redshirt:

    All right, we waste him. No offense.

    (Edited to fix the quote per IMDb)

  131. 131.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    December 4, 2015 at 11:54 pm

    @Adam L Silverman:

    the Hamas folks

    I believe you mean “the Hummus folks”, per Dr. Ben Carson.

  132. 132.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 4, 2015 at 11:57 pm

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Jeebus! I have some hummus in my fridge. I have been infiltrated.

  133. 133.

    NotMax

    December 4, 2015 at 11:59 pm

    @Menmosyne

    First movie ever took a date to was definitely not a typical choice.

    It was Taras Bulba.

    Only film then playing which neither of us had yet seen.

  134. 134.

    redshirt

    December 5, 2015 at 12:00 am

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.

  135. 135.

    Doug R

    December 5, 2015 at 12:05 am

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Get away from her you Bitch.

  136. 136.

    Doug R

    December 5, 2015 at 12:05 am

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Get away from her you B*tch.

  137. 137.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 5, 2015 at 12:08 am

    @NotMax:

    We were both film majors (though we met after college) so we have somewhat eclectic taste.

    He sealed the deal with me when he brought me a gift taped off TCM since I didn’t have cable: The Haunting in widescreen (which was not available commercially at the time) and Peter Jackson’s mockumentary Forgotten Silver. He’s been trapped in my clutches ever since.
    ;-)

  138. 138.

    David Koch

    December 5, 2015 at 12:10 am

    It’s an interesting question how people become radicalized.

    Take the Weatherman Underground, most of them were rich, came from privileged upbringings, and insulated from the draft..

    No real explanation why they gave up an easy life to live life on the run, eating hand to mouth, titling at wind mills.

  139. 139.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    December 5, 2015 at 12:12 am

    @Doug R:

    It’ll be dark soon, and they mostly come out at night. Mostly.

  140. 140.

    redshirt

    December 5, 2015 at 12:19 am

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Alien 3’s greatest crime (for an otherwise interesting film) was killing Newt and Hicks offscreen. Especially Newt. I would have loved to see an early adult version of Newt in an action flick.

  141. 141.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 5, 2015 at 12:23 am

    @David Koch: The Baader-Meinhof folks came from comfortable backgrounds. Danton and Marat were middle class professionals. Should we look at the backgrounds of the the US founding fathers? All educated and middle class at the least. Add in Castro and Che. Revolution is a bourgeois pastime.

  142. 142.

    oldgold

    December 5, 2015 at 12:24 am

    As an explanation – meh. As an excuse – excreble.

  143. 143.

    catbirdman

    December 5, 2015 at 12:50 am

    Speculation like this on any “side” makes me ill. Who the fuck knows, at this point? Saudi Arabia is a fucked up place, I know that — and I know it’s fucked-uppedness has been soft-pedaled to you and me all our lives. Because of the oil. I don’t know how you come out of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, meet some dude from San Berdoo on the internet, come back to that hell hole with him, pop out a kid, walk around in a fucking burka every day, and not be completely fucked up from my white male perspective. But I will refrain from speculating on what the fuck happened with those two fuckwads, because truth in these matters is damned hard to pin down. The people closest to them had no idea this was going to happen, so I doubt you came up with the correct answer after two glasses of wine.

  144. 144.

    redshirt

    December 5, 2015 at 12:52 am

    @catbirdman: Bam!

  145. 145.

    Omnes Omnibus

    December 5, 2015 at 12:54 am

    @catbirdman: Wow, you managed to be offensive and insightful. Congratulations?

  146. 146.

    Gian

    December 5, 2015 at 12:59 am

    the 6 month old was 12 pounds (according to my wife who was watching this all day)

    that’s way under-weight for an average 6 month old. http://www.babycenter.com/400_about-6-month-old-babys-weight_9247045_562.bc

  147. 147.

    Cathie from Canada

    December 5, 2015 at 1:36 am

    In this case I am saving my tears for the families of the victims and the family of the attackers. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can excuse or justify or even explain what these two people did to their friends and coworkers.

  148. 148.

    Ajabu

    December 5, 2015 at 2:22 am

    Personally, I’m glad the topic veered off into movies. I’ve got nuthin’ re: San Bernardino.
    As for film adaptations: I read William Goldman’s “Magic” novel & was looking forward to the film (Goldman wrote his own screenplay) but it failed – for me – because relationships that were importantly unclear in the book were revealed too early in the film – because film… and that fucked up the suspense twist.
    Same problem with “Marathon Man”. Both good films but far superior books.
    My favorite film of all time is “Black Orpheus”. It was released in 1959 and I took every serious date to see that film (it was always playing somewhere) right into the 70’s. It was something I used as a litmus test for compatibility.
    Mrs. Ajabu got to see it post wedding at home on VHS. I already knew she was Ms. Right from the jump. Didn’t need to test her like I did with the various Ms. Right Nows…

  149. 149.

    GoBlue72

    December 5, 2015 at 3:08 am

    @eemom: oh please get over yourself and the high horse you rode in on. Nobody gives a shit about your Internet fauxtrage.

  150. 150.

    sm*t cl*de

    December 5, 2015 at 6:00 am

    And now there is a loon all across the Interwebs claiming to be a lawyer for the murderers’ extended family, and spouting a stream of truther / tea-party bullsh about ‘gun-grabber Obama’ and ‘Sandy Hook was a hoax’.

    For all I know he could be a complete fabulist with nothing to do with the family (it’s not as if the media would check his claims that he speaks for them, if what he says is headline material). Or perhaps he is their representative, and the couple’s ‘radicalisation’ came from the tea-party milieu, given a Wahhabist spin rather than the usual telibangelism.

  151. 151.

    Darkrose

    December 5, 2015 at 6:39 am

    @Helen: Congrats! Quitting my job was one of the best moves I’ve made recently.

  152. 152.

    Joel

    December 5, 2015 at 7:10 am

    I can’t rouse myself to empathy. They can spend their lives in prison, and hope they die there, some fifty years from now.

  153. 153.

    msdc

    December 5, 2015 at 7:15 am

    @Anne Laurie:

    I don’t know if this is what the Mens Rights Activists are actually saying, because I’m not gonna go look.

    Why bother? You’ve just made shit up about the shooters, might as well imagine what the MRAs are saying too so you can write off any facts that conflict with your little fairy tale.

    I assume a Muslim guy from Detroit named ‘Sayed Farook’ could’ve written a book about microagressions

    Too bad he didn’t write a book instead of going on a rampage and killing 14 people.

    Are you really trying to make the shooters into the victims here? I mean, you’ve posted a metric ton of conspiracy theory fanfic here, but this is a new low.

  154. 154.

    GOLFINA

    December 5, 2015 at 8:14 am

    There is no excuse for some actions. This is one of them. So, a sad childhood, post partum depression, ill treatment at work, or anything else that can be dredged up is not an excuse. Adults are responsible for their own actions regardless. When we forget that, we make excuses for the inexcusable.

  155. 155.

    different-church-lady

    December 5, 2015 at 8:31 am

    My ability to sympathize ends where murdering begins.

    I don’t care if your baby shits down your throat, gunning people down is not an acceptable response to your own situation.

  156. 156.

    g

    December 5, 2015 at 10:02 am

    And when her poor husband came home from another long day of facing The Infidel (I assume a Muslim guy from Detroit named ‘Sayed Farook’ could’ve written a book about microagressions)

    I get the point in your post, but this sentence reveals your total ignorance about the Southern California community Farook worked for. It is a multi-cultural community. A Muslim guy (raised in SoCal, BTW, not Detroit) named Farook working for the county would have been interacting with Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Iranian, Pakistani, Gujarati, Salvadorean, Greek, Pacific Islander, Russian, Israeli, LGBT, African American and white American co-workers and customers. Some of his victims were fellow Muslims.

  157. 157.

    LAC

    December 5, 2015 at 11:04 am

    @eemom: thank you. What the fuck was this drivel written for? Denigrating the experience of having a child, making sweeping generalizations about new mom’s groups, and trying to make an excuse for this horror as some outward manifestation of post partum depression? Jaysus…

  158. 158.

    Feathers

    December 5, 2015 at 11:23 am

    @David Koch: A good source of insight would be the novels of Ross MacDonald. He’s usually pegged as the heir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but writes about dysfunctional families and the corruption of wealth. He’s writing from the 50’s through the 70’s, so he’s covering the children of the Weather Underground period. The Galton Case is a good place to start on the books, but none are bade. He’s being reissued by The Library of America, currently, so there is a major uptick in interest. I read them all quite some time ago, recently pulled out my bought used cheesy covered 70s paperbacks, and damn they hold up.

    His wife, Margaret Millar, is also good (and also in Library of America). She writes suspense about the same rich California families. Their marriage doesn’t appear to have been happy and their daughter had a brief and tragically horrible life. They are both writing what they know.

    Two movies were made, Harper and The Drowning Pool, both with Paul Newman. Strong post-classic-pre-neo entries in the noir canon, but quite different from the books.

    Typing this up, I got to thinking about how we talk about TV as the ruining things, and families, etc. But reading these, families got themselves into a hideous amount of trouble without the boob tube to distract them.

  159. 159.

    chopper

    December 5, 2015 at 11:30 am

    @LAC:

    yeah, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how post-partum depression leads a young mother to strap on body armor and drive over to her husband’s work and shoot 30 people. it doesn’t fucking work that way.

  160. 160.

    Dolly Llama

    December 5, 2015 at 11:57 am

    @Mandalay: Yeah. I don’t have kids and never will, but even I thought that harsh.

  161. 161.

    Gretchen

    December 5, 2015 at 4:17 pm

    @eemom: I have four kids and I laughed out loud at the piss/shit/vomit machine characterization. So true. You don’t have to have pushed them out yourself to know that. In addition, mine never slept.
    Re: Everybody who says I don’t care why they did it, they’re just evil. That’s EXACTLY what George W. Bush said after 9/11. Anybody who asked why they did it was siding with the terrorists; all we needed to know is that they’re evil people who hate our freedoms. Remember how that worked out?
    You have to understand why people do things to keep them from doing it again. Understanding is not the same thing as agreement or sympathy. It’s the first damn step to protecting ourselves!

  162. 162.

    Gretchen

    December 5, 2015 at 4:19 pm

    To clarify, in case it’s necessary. I love my four now grown kids dearly, and greatly enjoyed raising them. But there were some damn hard times in there being home with them all day, and there were days when I was standing on the porch watching for my husband’s car to round the corner and give me some relief.

  163. 163.

    Gretchen

    December 5, 2015 at 4:22 pm

    @chopper: So how does it fucking work? Why did she do it? Nobody’s seen anything quite like this. I know how we hate complexity, but maybe mental illness and radicalism and isolation and postpartum depression all played into and fed each other? Nope, it’s just terrorism and they were evil. All we need to know.

  164. 164.

    JMS

    December 5, 2015 at 4:47 pm

    What a tortured way of excusing the unexcusable. It is true that the scenario of a new mother committing violence against anyone (other than someone threatening her child or a close family member OR her child or a close family–both scenarios somewhat more understandable) is fleetingly rare. Any mundane explanation (she didn’t speak English–she didn’t drive) isn’t going to be relevant here, or else we’d see *some* evidence of these factors leading to violence among other isolated new mothers–which we don’t. Generally in “out of the ordinary” mass shootings, there’s a combination of factors that come together–ideology, access to weapons, opportunity, mental health–remove one or more factors and you’ve greatly lessened the chance of an event. But no, post-partum depression or isolation have never been associated with women committing violence against strangers. Something other combination of factors was likely at work. And why isn’t it possible that she was just as deluded and evil as any domestic right wing white male terrorist? There is no need to try to excuse *her* behavior. What you do as a good liberal is try to make sure that nobody who is superficially like her is judged unfairly.

  165. 165.

    Bitter Scribe

    December 5, 2015 at 4:54 pm

    Oh fuck this. That woman and her husband killed 14 people who had never done them any harm, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about her language barrier or her postpartum depression or any of her other problems.

  166. 166.

    Sam Dobermann

    December 6, 2015 at 3:58 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: I think a lot of AL’s scenario makes a lot sense. I do not see any attempt to excuse them or minimize what they did. But to analyze and hypothesize about some pieces of the puzzle can lead to recognition of any warning signals — and be able to head off trouble before it explodes affecting others.

    I was an isolated new mother, living in a mostly unfriendly area that was new to me. Clutching my hard cover Dr Spok manual I tried as hard as I could but always felt behind, wrong and just plain exhausted. Vomiting was rare but colic crying was not. He didn’t give up the 2 am feed till the 8th month.

    Eventually I got really depressed. Skipping many details I’ll just say my Suicide plans varied from shooting up an insurance company office to killing my child before myself — to save him pain.

    Fortuitously my husband was not friendly enough for us to form a murderous team.

    One of the victims was a born again Christian Messianic Jew who repeatedly tried to get Sayed to agree that Islam was a violent

  167. 167.

    Sam Dobermann

    December 6, 2015 at 4:08 am

    Effing I pad, … religion. Messianic Jews are neither Jews nor nice. They are not all loathsome.

    Again, not an excuse, but a fact.

  168. 168.

    Tehanu

    December 6, 2015 at 9:06 pm

    @Gretchen:

    You have to understand why people do things to keep them from doing it again. Understanding is not the same thing as agreement or sympathy. [My emphasis]. It’s the first damn step to protecting ourselves!

    Finally, somebody with some sense. Thank you. Also, I don’t see anything wrong with speculating as long as none of us promptly decides that our speculation has to be the ultimate truth and then refuses to accept any new evidence or ideas. If you don’t like speculation, why waste time reading a blog, which is meant to be a place where you can share ideas, not an Encyclopedia of Truth?

    FWIW, I didn’t much like the description of the baby as a screaming piss/vomit machine, or whatever, either.

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