Dear Dirty America

Relatives of the Washington DC Navy Yard shooter, Aaron Alexis, say the alleged killer was just a regular guy, even though he’d been estranged from the family. “Nobody expected this. No one saw it coming. No one knew anything. This is just shocking,” Alexis’ brother-in-law told the New York Post‘s article, which has the sensation headline, Alexis a Buddhist with a Bad Temper.

Are you tired of seeing this FBI portrait yet?

It’s not a shocking sentiment. Many Buddhists struggle with a sour outlook on life. That’s why they became Buddhists. To try to quell their anxiety, fear, or hatred of humans and society, or of a particular institution or ideology. Nobody wants to be pissed off all the time. A serene monk sitting atop a peaceful mountain seems to be what a person loaded with inner turmoil strives for.

Buddhist meditation techniques help restore mental peace and order. It can also lower blood pressure and increase concentration. More controversially, the idea of mastering the mind and body, also comes with the ability to light one’s self on fire and not flinch until death. That can be appealing to folks, also, if they’ve got a serious point they really want to hammer home. Self-immolation is an attention-grabber.

Alexis was serious about Buddhism, too. He was an adept chanter who had lived in Thailand for a year to immerse himself into the culture and learn the language. In Fort Worth, Texas, Alexis worked as a waiter in a Thai restaurant called The Happy Bowl. He was also a heavy drinker who could “weave a tapestry of invective” like nobody else, save IBM’s rogue supercomputer, Watson.

Either way, the sauced, cuss-happy Aaron Alexis should not have had a high level security clearing. He was not a regular guy, despite what his family says. If he is, indeed, the shooter in the Navy Yard massacre, there is nothing shocking about it. Let’s run through a few of Alexis’ incidents before yesterday’s melee.

• According to a police report, Aaron Alexis was either bonkers, or being harassed by superior government technology, like a microwave machine that was being used by bad guys to send vibrations through his body and pumping voices into his head in an attempt to keep him from sleeping. Worse yet, the people with the microwave machine were following him wherever he went. (it sounds outlandish, yet Jesse Ventura researched a similar topic)
• In 2004, Alexis had what is called a “black out” and shot out the wheels of another man’s vehicle in Seattle. I must be very mild on the spectrum of what is considered ‘regular’, because shooting a gun in a big city, especially to destroy personal property, seems alarmingly threatening.
• In 2010, in Fort Worth, the suspected Navy Yard shooter discharged his weapon into the roof of his apartment. The neighbor who lived above him admitted she was terrified of the man.
• In Dekalb, Georgia, Alexis was arrested for disorderly conduct.
• In July of this year, Alexis’ roommate accused him of putting an unknown substance into his vehicle’s gas tank in order to damage it.

While Senator Dianne Feinstein called for new gun legislation before the bodies of the slain in the Navy Yard massacre had even cooled (as Erick Erickson wrote), we ought to know what kinds of government or military officials or civilian contractors have secret security clearances, and what the policy is for removing those privileges when a person is clearly violent, insane, and unpredictable.

If the security clearance system run by The Experts didn’t throw up a red flag on this guy, then they are either incompetent, or their system of checking individual backgrounds is as oblivious as clearing a fresh cow pie for any signs of bullshit.

[media photo by Tim Evanson]