Kyle Rittenhouse is the Killer in Us All
That’s right, I said it.
I know you think you’re above him. How could you not? Look at him, blubbering away on the witness stand — he’s either the world’s biggest baby or its worst actor. It’s almost impossible to resist, the schadenfreude, when offered such low hanging fruit, especially when the target is the equivalent of a human pinata. We mirror the meanness in others so easily these days. Except, it’s always been “these days.” Humans are what we are.
I’ll say it again: you are not above him. Any one of us, given the right circumstances, would take a human life using any means at our disposal. I’m not saying we’d go on a walking Call of Duty tour, driven there by our mommies as if to soccer practice. “Now, remember, Honey, don’t give away all your bullets. The other kids can share, too. Do you have enough snacks?” “Aw, c’mon, Mom! You’re gonna make me miss the riot!”
He looks a little like Ham Porter from “The Sandlot,” doesn’t he? Shlumpy, shirt untucked. He carries his new rifle like a book bag. Not at all the picture of the squared-away Marine he must imagine himself to be when he’s online with his pals, twiddling away at their joysticks. How smugly superior we get to feel, heading off to the gym after watching him twist in the wind on CNN while we howl for his guts. Trump may be out of reach, but we’ve got this kid dead to rights.
You are not better than him.
Most of us sat at home while the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world suited up and shipped out to Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Panama. Kyle hadn’t gotten to that stage yet — he was still in cosplay mode, a Gravy SEAL in training, scampering at the heels of the Proud Boys, soaking up tales of bloody minded, phony patriotism. Had he not been caught up in his current dilemma, he might well have ended up in uniform, and given that drill instructors are very good at what they do, one of them might have “made a man of him,” whipped him into some kind of shape, and sent him off to a real war instead of the one he chose for himself.
Arriving “in country,” young Private Rittenhouse, fit, squared away, shirt tucked in, would have “served his country.” Us. The taxpayers. On our behalf, and at the behest of Congress and their corporate masters, he would have been called upon to kill or be killed. He might have been wounded, permanently disabled, disfigured, or afflicted with PTSD to a degree that would make it impossible to ever live a normal life, the life lived by kids who merely play at war instead of fight in wars.
Upon his return, he might have been an object of pity in a wheelchair, or a hero, depending on his training, his comrades and pure, dumb luck. On occasions like Veterans Day he’d have been thanked for his service. His fellow vets would enfold him in a brotherhood that can only be earned by the few, the proud.
Who fights our wars for us? The Kyle Rittenhouses of the world, that’s who. Not this one — this one is pretty well screwed, far as I can tell. Unless an epic mistrial is declared, this Kyle Rittenhouse may well be doomed to wander the streets in sackcloth and ashes like George Zimmerman, a cautionary tale for those who aspire to create heroic myths for themselves that aren’t based on actual valor.
Maybe, instead of a jail sentence, he’ll be sent to the Real Army, given a chance to prove his mettle. Maybe some avuncular jurist or recruiter will see his potential, haul him up by his bootstraps and give him a shot at redemption. Armed with modern weapons, trained and licensed to kill, he could prove himself on an actual battlefield and return to set an example for boys who want to leave the virtual kill zone and enter the real one. Holden Caulfield with a rifle.
You are not better than him. You may be more accomplished, older, wiser, more fetching in the estimation of your Tinder conquests. You may be smarter, be of stronger character, a regular prince among men. But if you are sitting there congratulating yourself on not being Kyle Rittenhouse, you would do well to remember that Fate is one fickle bitch, and every one of us is an insurrection away from fighting in the streets over Spam and politics.
Young men like Kyle Rittenhouse grow up with a Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Unlike young women, who have their own trials to endure, boys are suckled on tales of war and valor, and the sure knowledge that, at any moment, the venal political class may send them off to fight and die for what amounts to pure bullshit.
Some of these young men grow up to be truly heroic figures worthy of emulation, fit to lead and deserving of our gratitude. They are ennobled by their service; the lessons learned in the military, sometimes at great peril, put them in a class by themselves, deserving of our greatest respect.
Others, not so much. The minimum IQ required to serve in the US Army is 83. If you listen to Jordan Peterson, the segment of society that falls in this range is in serious trouble, their place in the world anything but assured in our increasingly tech-oriented economy. The military has historically served in loco parentis for directionless young men in need of a little discipline and a swift kick to get their lives on track. For a young Kyle Rittenhouse, this sort of program at the right time in their lives could make all the difference. The lack of same, under the right conditions, can prove disastrous.
Our young men grow up on tales told by their fathers, uncles and brothers of heroism and camaraderie, of noble virtues learned in the martial realm. The media capitalize on young men’s longing to embark on the Hero’s Journey. Films like Top Gun, American Sniper and Lone Survivor tell tales of heroes both real and legendary. To adolescent boys, the lure of violent heroism, of killing our nation’s enemies in a righteous cause and coming home unscathed to a grateful nation, not to mention the sighs of the girl you left behind, is almost irresistible.
So what do you do when you’re not hero material? You can’t turn on the tv without having Spec Ops superheroes paraded in front of you as paragons of manhood. The same guys who got all the attention on the playing field in school are the ones who get to be Green Berets, like your sister’s boyfriend your mom won’t shut up about, or the guys your granddad admired when he was in the SeaBees, back in the Big War.
What is left for you when you’ve grown up on all those stories about BUDs and Hell Week, but the last time you ran a mile in PE you puked all over your shoes and had to go to the nurse’s office? If it’s 1951, you get drafted, go to Korea and muddle through as best you can. If it’s 2021, you can buy your very own AR-15 and hit the streets, hunting enemies of your own choosing, egged on by crackpots and demagogues, led by a cowardly psychopath who wouldn’t pick up a rifle if it was covered with eleven secret herbs and spices.
If you were Kyle Rittenhouse, what would you do? Where would you find your place in the world, your place among the men you’ve been taught to believe are worthy of emulation? Some place other than your mom’s basement with all the other incels?
The book “On Killing,” by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (Ret.), takes on the subject of how men are taught to kill in battle. The warrior class as a profession is one of our oldest, and those who are tasked with turning our young men from reluctant killers into instinctive ones have mastered that ancient art over thousands of years. Using techniques derived from Pavlovian classical conditioning and Skinnerian operant conditioning, the willingness of troops to fire their weapons at the enemy, as opposed to firing over their heads or not firing at all, has improved from around 20 percent during WWII, to nearly 95 percent in the Vietnam era.
How was this new willingness to kill on command accomplished? By replacing sterile, paper targets on shooting ranges with realistic, pop-up targets fired on from foxholes, wearing full gear. The shooter is rewarded for a rapid, on-target response to a threat when the “enemy” falls down, only to pop back up to get shot, “killed,” again. And again. And again.
Soon enough, even raw recruits are conditioned to fire instinctively at the enemy, aiming to kill. After centuries of effort to overcome our soldier’s natural reluctance to kill each other in battle, to the point where a rifleman would fail to fire on an exposed enemy soldier even to save his own or a comrades’ life, we now have the means to train nearly every civilian who shows up at his recruiting office to kill on command.
Had Kyle Rittenhouse made it to a modern training cadre at Ft. Bragg or another institution, he would have found one aspect of his training very familiar. A pastime that he and his friends had enjoyed since childhood would have been incorporated with great effect into the culture of professional killers: first person shooter games. These, and the dozens of instances of violence and murder seen per hour of television viewing from kid’s cartoons through to adult “entertainment,” mean that a whole generation now shows up at the recruiter’s office with a lifetime of instinctive killing prep already in place.
The horse has long ago fled the barn as far as stemming the violence in our media, but Grossman nonetheless makes a strong case for limiting kid’s exposure to violent video games. So effective are these, so similar to the scientifically designed methods employed by professionals to de-sensitize soldiers to the act of killing, that our troops now learn to kill at an alarmingly (or rewardingly, depending on your POV) consistent rate.
All this talk of our inherent reluctance to kill, and the history of our efforts to overcome that reluctance in those tasked with defending us, begs the question: what percentage of our fellows shows up at boot camp ready and willing to do as ordered? With no prior conditioning or training, what percentage of humanity will pull the trigger and kill on command, just because their commanding officer told them to?
The answer: Two percent.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that, with no training other than that provided to him by his upbringing in the popular culture, Kyle Rittenhouse managed to shoot and kill two attackers (looters/victims/Antifa members — go watch the trial and see if you can sort it out) and wound a third. Though to many of us he is a callow, deluded, misguided dupe sent on a fool’s errand by forces beyond his understanding, he nonetheless did what those who train armies have struggled for centuries to get soldiers to do: he killed the enemy. Killed him on his own initiative, having never, we assume, killed before. Killed him because some disembodied “commander” told him to.
The fate of Kyle Rittenhouse remains in limbo for the moment, though at this writing the epic clusterfuck that is his trial is in full roar, a truly wondrous thing to behold. I have no doubt that the Monday morning quarterbacking, once all is said and done, will go on interminably, providing rallying cries for blowhards all along the political spectrum.
I’m not here to talk about the Second Amendment. Guns and their availability is a topic that will have to wait for another day. Do I find it appalling that a 17 year old kid so easily armed himself and travelled to another city to exact vigilante justice on targets of his choosing? Of course. But the issue of our highly efficient weapons of war and who has access to them is too convoluted to take up in the context of this article. I promise I’ll get to it another time.
What I want you to know is this: you are not above the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world. He became a killer in the most banal way, for the most banal reasons, but each of us has a killer inside. That killer may not look like Kyle Rittenhouse, but he’s there.
You may disagree. You may think it couldn’t happen to you or, worse yet, be caused by you. “Not me!”, you say. “I have absolutely nothing in common with someone who would do what he did. I’m intelligent, educated, woke, sensitive. I know how to use my words! I can always negotiate my way out of a violent encounter. Besides, I am strongly anti-gun. I would never allow one in my home. I have faith in my fellow man. Things will always trend upward. Humankind is getting better, not worse. Our days of resorting to violence are coming to an end.”
OK. So, try this little thought exercise, and be honest: Imagine a scenario in which your whack job neighbors, the ones with the Q flags hanging on their houses and the Trump 2024 bumper stickers, finally feel empowered via whatever lunatic narrative they’re running in their heads to hit the streets, guns blazing, to enact the Ragnarok scenario they’ve been told was their birthright. Are they coming for you? Is this the day they finally get to “own the libs” in the most definitive way possible? Will they finally prove they are no better than the rioters they’ve been taught to condemn, railing from the comfort of their Lazy Boys — “See! It’s their own damn neighborhoods they’re burning!” — as they order up more ammo from Sportsman’s Guide, readying their prepper supplies and bug-out bags for the Great Race War?
How’s your prepping going? Are you even at the level of a Kyle Rittenhouse, with your basic Smith and Wesson M and P Sport model AR-15 and a few thousand rounds of .223 (or 5.56 for afficionados) on hand? How are your self defense pistol skills coming? Are Mike Glover and his cadre coming to a town near you to offer a weekend course in defensive hand gunning? Are you growing vegetables in pots, collecting rainwater in barrels? Have you declared Sovereign State status? Are your personal freedoms being whittled away on a daily basis? Well, what are you going to do about it?
Do you see where this is going? The Kyle Rittenhouses of the world are legion. Yes, they are more prevalent in the red, evangelical, less educated lunatic fringe, but they are there. If you think your high-mindedness will insulate you against them and their ilk, then have a gander at “The World of Yesterday,” by Stefan Zweig. His account of growing up in pre-WWI Austria and living through the rise of Hitler should give any “civilized” American reason to reconsider his positions on violence, gun control, Kyle Rittenhouse and many other topics.
Don’t think you’re above him. We are all killers. You’ve just been lucky.
