Christopher Dorner as a Rorschach Test for Racial and Political Attitudes

That might very well be the case, but with his background it might be a combination of crazy and smart. If he did a proper military style plan, every moment he is walking around is a moment of “execution” of that plan.

If he has set up caches of equipment and supplies, he can operate for a long time. And he can leave the state once the immediate heat has worn off for resupply.

My biggest fear is that he mentioned training in demolitions. A bomber can wreak havoc on a major metropolitan area, and if he is skilled, is extremely hard to catch and stop.

Christopher Dorner is racialized as an African American. He is gendered as a male.

Almost too much neurosis here to comment on. What the use of passive voice transitive verbs do here is to beg the question (precise use of that term) of who, or what, is doing this "racializing" and, heaven help us, "gendering".

But these are questions that cannot be skirted. "Gender" is not, of course, a verb, nor does it apply to human beings, who have sexes. Words have genders. Human beings are not words. That aside, clearly race and gender are to be considered here as something to be imposed on an individual from the outside, either by society as a whole or by the applicable class identifications of race and "gender". The author is not clear on that, and for a very good reason. Those, however, are also not human beings and do no actual imposing on their own.

Clearly the fellow is black, but that is neither a judgment of society nor of black people as a whole, it is not really a social construct at all. And clearly the fellow is a male, but it wasn't society who made him that way, nor if he suddenly declared himself to be a female and underwent surgery and hormone treatment, is that going to make every cell in his body one whit less male. That isn't really a social construct either despite the grim determination of the ideologically liberated.

Reduced of the asphyxiating strictures of Advanced Social Thought, he's a black guy. OK, fine.

Christopher Dorner represents authority, conformity, and State power, as a (former) police officer.

Again, to whom? This business of interpreting human beings as symbols or representations instead of individuals has become pathologically abused and, once again, the perpetrator is deftly ignored by the author's rhetoric. He represents bipeds to the four-footed, air-breathers to a fish, truck-drivers to the cyclically inclined. So what? This is intellectual fluff, fine for freshman dorm pot parties but of little use in the real world except to blame people other than the individual for the individual's actions. Which is clearly what is in play here.

In fact, the construction "He is a black/white/yellow/red man/woman going to war to defend the rights and virtue of all black/white/yellow/red men/women" is some of the silliest stuff ever to issue from a defense attorney's mouth. He is, or is alleged to be, an individual killing other individual people for a personal grudge, and neither he nor his victims should be regarded merely as a symbol or a representation of anything, because symbols don't bleed. Here the sort of Advanced Social Thought typified by the cringe-making quotations above shows its true colors as profoundly dehumanizing and ultimately degrading both to its objects and its True Believers.

“Too much effort trying to sound intellectual.”

You make a very good point. I was in a graduate class one day and one of the students gave a report on something. There were no words that could be put together to make sense and they were big words.

After he finished, the professior said immediately, “Did anyone understand anything he said?” I love that professor for telling the truth right then - I had to smile.

Some years later, I was in a session I had to take to keep my license as a professional counselor - I had many years of experience and more education in this field than the presenters did. These young men doing the presentation started talking in big words. Finally, I had enough. I said, “You have taken what we already do and given it new big words in order to write this and get your doctorate.” Then, I got up and left. My name was already marked as being present, and I wasn’t going to listen to more of this crap.

Your statement reminded me of those two instances.

There is no indication that he didn’t like his time at SUU. It certainly didn’t hurt his studies, if you consider how few college students even bother to graduate with a minor these days.

I find it hard to imagine a liberal trying to tough it out at a very conservative school, when he could take the easy path at some liberal school much closer to his home in LA. Even if his parents browbeat him into going to a *more* conservative school, because California is so terribly leftard, there is a multitude of choices for “more conservative”, in most of the West and South.

Heck, even most conservatives would not want to tough it out at SUU. I know I wouldn’t, though I have no animosity to Mormons, their lifestyle is duller than dishwater.

However, he might actually be politically conservative, maybe what could be called a “radical conservative”, like Alan Keyes, who was pushed so hard that he went on the warpath.

In that situation, I might follow a strategy of publicly embracing leftists, knowing I would be hideously unpopular, and throwing a wrench into the media machine.

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