The Spirit of Dennis Rader

jnorth1000 6 months ago (edited)
It’s funny how he actually trusted the police to be “honest” with him when they said they couldn’t trace a computer disk to him- and that’s exactly how he was caught. They traced it to a computer at a church where he worked, and then he complained that they lied to him, as if they were the ones with no morals. He murders 10 people, 2 of them children, and thinks the cops were the “bad guys” for lying to him. What a jerk off!

MONSTROUS by Tommy Walker 2 months ago +jnorth1000
Rader had been coming from a spiritual place where the conscious and subconscious commingle, and had let Lieutenant Landwehr, the Highest Authority available, stand in for God. He figured that God would have given the Devil his due and been honest, because the Devil is God’s favorite son. All God’s children fight to stay whole, battle against socialization, elude the authorities until they accept their moral authority as being greater than their own. Parents stand in for God all the time, as do teachers in their turn, and usually they win but not always. Not if the child in the equation is the actual moral superior to who he is matched against. In this case, it is the herded social units in the process of losing their battles and who wish to drag down with them everyone they can, who become the next line of defense. This great rolling mass that picks up more mass as it rolls looks unbeatable, but it has one weakness– truth. That’s how Garry Kasparov could beat The World at chess, and how the likes of a Dennis Rader could beat all of society too. No one gives you a medal when you win the only race that gets all humans racing, but God can at least appreciate the accomplishment, even if He’s hellbent on catching his wayward son, dead or alive, in the end.
Properly understood on the highest plane, Rader did not murder ten people, but ten cells in the social body, standing in for God, who he deep down wanted to align with, if only God could win. He had shown God beyond all reason that he was a worthy adversary, worthy of this one small favor while he edged toward a conditional surrender, on his own terms. He did not actually want to kill people, any more than he wanted to kill God; he just wanted to be recognized as worthy of standing at God’s side. God will kill millions gleefully if it means killing a Devil in dictator form, if it should come to that, but Rader here is saying no more bloodshed please. Just let me surrender on my own terms, and I will join your side.
I have my doubts as to whether Landwehr played it cosmically correctly.

jnorth1000 3 hours ago +MONSTROUS by Tommy Walker
You act like you know God. How is that?

MONSTROUS by Tommy Walker 50 minutes ago +jnorth1000
Largely I am drawing from an imaginary network of friends I had in childhood that I see now as a kind of Olympus, now that I have effectively woken up from what had been a daydreaming state that lasted many years. I have written down everything I could remember from that dream, and been blown away while re-reading at how many details suggested metaphoric deeper meanings. One of my imaginary friends was a guy I have re-interpreted in adulthood as Satan (with the help of Faust) while I know now that my planet’s General (with the help of logic) had been my network’s God. My buddy Satan and respected boss God co-starred in several stories over the years, culminating in a scene that was almost a page out of Bind Torture Kill when Rader was communicating with Landwehr.

My Friend Dahmer

On page 30 of 224

I soaked Derf’s miniature “My Friend Dahmer” for free online years ago, and really REALLY loved it. So far, his long form version (in my physical hands) has me really REALLY annoyed.

The miniature was more like him taking dictation from God, consenting for his pencil to be led where it will, while the longie has him trying to force his subjective narrative into the minds of his readers.  I would need a brain transplant to conclude from what I can’t comprehend that a given point of view is nonsense, yet that is precisely how he dismisses perspectives on Jeffrey Dahmer as an anti-hero, a take on the guy that can easily be supported by a close reading of Derf’s earlier work.

He should really just shut up and draw.  Yes, to this point I’ve been treated to more words than pictures, and in fairness I had been warned.  I read an interview with the author a while back that put me off-balance, learning then that he wasn’t as sympathetic to Dahmer as it seemed his first book was.  Reminds me of Robin Williams talking about the ultra-sympathetic character he played in “One-Hour Photo”, or Ed Asner about his Lou Grant character’s famous line to Mary Richards: “You have spunk”; I hate spunk”.  Asner thought that his most beloved line was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.

“When I was a kid, I was just like anybody else.”

This quote from Jeff is immediately contradicted by a photograph of him being a freak in high school.  Nevermind that the greater experience of childhood is pre-adolescent (when freakiness is the norm); the thrust is to discredit what comes out of Jeff’s mouth.  Just as when in the action of this graphic novel, Jeff’s peers (represented by a single speaker) call Jeff a liar when he tells them he’s been dissolving roadkill in acid as any good young scientist would.  Jeff gets angry and acts like a freak, as any normal person would if the default position they met in life was for people to disbelieve them.

After Mom and Dad, the cartoonist was extremely high on the list of people responsible for the way that Dahmer turned out. It is interesting that Derf shifts blame by asking where all the adults were, when grown-ups are like those unseen voices in Peanuts cartoons talking gibberish when you’re a kid in a kid’s world.  You seriously think that ostracizing him was going to endear him to you?

 

Not Much to Say

But saying it anyway.

Only the Shadow Knows

Jagged Breathing and All

And those weren’t crickets– they were frogs!

Talking Cows

Colin Flaherty of ‘White Girl Bleed a Lot’

What the Heck to Call This Thing, and

I Can See Two Starbucks at the Same Time

Metaphorically.

I Love Trolls

Fake readers, not so much.