The killer has a gun pointed at her, yet she still can’t quit trying to service a man emotionally. As long as there is a pair of pants in sight, she will try to be useful and accommodating.
I thought nothing could make me any sadder about the tragedy of the Oregon shooting but then I read this story.
Clarissa, that is an awful (and frankly stupid opinion)
Perhaps she did truly feel sorry for him (her perogative), but its also not a bad strategy to hope you might get lucky and throw him off. It didn’t work. Tragically.
But to somehow make it like she is so subservient and pathetic is awful. If I am misinterpreting your comment (it is late here) then I apologize. Otherwise you are INSANELY off base on this one.
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Please control yourself. You know very well that this is not a place for hysterical outbursts.
The most productive strategy for you right now is to analyze why the issue is causing you such intense anxiety.
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You have many hysterical outbursts here.. but its your place so house rules 🙂 Fair enough.
But just insane opinion on this one. We all fuck up at times so its ok you are so wrong here 🙂
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I repeat, this is not a tone to take with me. Don’t forget your place and that I only allow you to chirp around here out of pity for your profound intellectual and personal limitations.
Now go wipe off your snot and stop pouring it all over my blog.
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Well, it’s not that late here in Arizona. The woman took one last chance at reasoning with a rapid dog — and when you have nothing to lose, who can blame you for rolling the dice?
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Words have meaning. Out of all the words she could have chosen, she chose these. The reasons for the choice deserve to be analyzed.
I highly recommend paying attention to the specific words people say and not to the motivations we assign to them. People very often look past the actual words of others and thus remain in a dialogue with themselves. And in my job, I learn to pay a very close attention to what people are saying and not what I assume they must want to say based on my own personal experiences.
And I think I just came up with an explanation of why studying literary criticism is important.
Are you really applying academic criticism to the last desperate words of a woman under extreme duress? Her words weren’t the clever scripting of a literally novel — how do you think William Faulkner would have responded with a gun shoved into his mouth?
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I can’t turn off my intellect out of pity. I would if I thought it would help but this woman is dead. There is no help to her.
Everything is a text that can and should be analyzed. Words, objects, landscape, physical appearance of people. The world is a text, begging to be read. But too many people hide from a chance to read it in the prison of their need to repeat the same words and the same thoughts that make up their own identity.
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“the specific words people say and not to the motivations we assign to them”
Well a quick reading suggests that we have no idea what the woman actually said.
We know what Matt Pearce wrote, which was what Randy Scroggins said his daughter heard someone else say. Considering that two of the links in that chain underwent severe trauma and that the final link was probably edited by person or persons unknown and we are very far from the exact words of what one of his victims did or didn’t say to him.
All we can really say is what was published under Matt Pearce’s name.
When I was reading a lot about this kind of thing many moons ago the conventional wisdom was that if you’re facing someone with a weapon the best survival strategy is to try to involve them in a conversation using personalized language. The goal is to stay alive until the professionals (negotiators or marksmen) can arrive.
If often (or almost always) wont’ work but anything else will surely fail.
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Of course, it’s a story about a story. Still, it’s worthy of noting that people have a need to tell these stories about women and, as we have seen with Matt (the one in this thread), might have very intense reactions when such stories are challenged.
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Ok, seems most pretty much agree with me. I know you are not shy talking about it, so I say this with as much politeness as possible: do you think this relates to your aspergers? Isn’t one of the main difficulties is reading emotions of others? That is why I am thinking you are so blatantly disregarding the situational context here. Also, as others have said I think most experts would commend what she did as the most likely for success.
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Correction: I just checked one source I didn’t have at home and it recommended trying to talk to the person in an abstract, unemotional way about violence (not the current situation) but violence in general. Showing extreme emotions (esp fear or loathing) is not recommended.
According to this a possible way to engage the shooter might start with: “Sometimes people get hurt and they want to lash out, but that doesn’t really solve anything. A person who’s angry and hurt maybe doesn’t know exactly how to get back at those who’ve hurt them….”
I’ve seen something elese that suggests using enough personal language so that the attacker might start seeing you as a human being rather than an abstract figure to be eliminated. For most people it’s harder to inflict random violence on a person they know a little about (it’s easier if they know nothing or if they know a lot about the person). But I can find it at the moment.
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[…] so remember how we discussed why words are important? And how no word is uttered accidentally? And how it’s my profession to analyze words? […]
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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