In an episode from South Park\u2019s <\/em>sixth season, Butters, embittered over his demotion from Kenny\u2019s replacement to supporting character, declares war on humanity. Forging a suit of armor out of tinfoil, he adopts an alter ego, Professor Chaos, and proceeds to bring what he calls \u201cdestruction and doom,\u201d to the community. Fortunately for the community (and for him) his idea of destruction and doom involves switching the orders at a local diner. Even the local paper won\u2019t cover it.<\/p>\n Some media self-critics wish they and their fellows could draw a similar veil over Friday\u2019s ghastly Aurora massacre, or at least over its perpetrator, James Holmes. In The National Review Online,<\/em> Seth Leibsohn writes of Holmes:<\/a> \u201cHe should not be glamorized or given any kind of proper-noun attention at all\u2026[Mass murderers] have alienated themselves from society, almost as if they have alienated themselves from being important enough to have a name like everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n Understandable, but unrealistic. Evil may prove itself consistently to be banal, but the public has never resisted the pull to stare it in the face. Probably, evil\u2019s very banality is part of the draw. At a level far beneath any civic-mindedness or human sympathy, it\u2019s thrilling to imagine that the boy \u2014 or in rare cases like Casey Anthony\u2019s and Susan Smith\u2019s, the girl \u2014 next door could be a ticking time bomb. Not to satisfy that demand by witholding a killer\u2019s name and dysfunctional history would take more self-restraint than any private enterprise has ever shown, at any time, anywhere. <\/p>\n In The Atlantic,<\/em> Brendan McCarthy suggests a very different de-glamorization procedure.<\/a> \u201cJust employ the qualifier \u2018LOSER\u2019 every time [murderers\u2019] names are mentioned,\u201d he writes. \u201cMaybe news media should also include an apology alongside each picture, like, \u201cWe are sorry to have to show you this LOSER picture, but \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n At least when it comes to leaving potential copycat maniacs uninspired, this, I believe, could be the ticket. Among other things, it would have the ring of truth. If you take the high-school definition and add bad credit, so many celebrated killers and would-be killers are<\/em> losers. The spottily employed John Hinckley, Jr. was reduced to inventing his girlfriends. Jared Lee Loughner was a pothead and army reject. Even Holmes, reportedly a neuroscience whiz, played junior varsity soccer. <\/p>\n Highlight these facts \u2014 quote weird chatroom exchanges, list embarassing tics in clinical detail \u2014 and you\u2019ll fire a warning shot across the bow of loser America. Step outside the line, and all your loser laundry will go on display. It is better to be peaceable and thought a loser than act out and remove all doubt.<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m attempting to speak here as a slightly senior member of the demographic group that stories like Aurora get people twitching over. You know my type \u2014 bright, underachieving male with a regular Library of Congress of social and sexual humiliations clogging his neurons. As the crime reporter\u2019s cliche goes, I\u2019m generally quiet and keep to myself. Though I may wrap myself in the title LOSER as though it were an emotional cilice, it\u2019s about the last thing I could stand for anyone else to call me.<\/p>\n This grim self-knowledge colors how I receive the stories of other losers who gained the spotlight for the wrong reasons. It\u2019s been over a decade since I read The Executioner\u2019s Song,<\/em> Norman Mailer\u2019s recounting of Gary Gilmore\u2019s spree-killings and subsequent death by firing squad. Only one scene remains with me: Gilmore, newly released from prison, engages in an arm-wrestle with Vern, the goold old boy he\u2019s living with. Each contestant holds a fistful of toothpicks over the spot on the table where the other\u2019s hand is sure to come crashing in the event of a loss. It\u2019s Gilmore who loses, and badly, with Mailer-as-narrator reporting, \u201cVern said he didn\u2019t guess Gary was much of a man.\u201d I\u2019m convinced my memories of the book end here because the episode killed my interest in Gary. If he can\u2019t win a simple arm-wrestle, then really, who cares who he kills? <\/p>\n A few weeks ago, in comparing my workout regimen to the agenda of an ultra-nationalist dictator,<\/a> I chose Mussolini as my model. Since Il Duce,<\/em> having seen his army driven from Greece and his navy bombed to scrap at Taranto, openly envied Hitler his military might, it was an awkward choice. I insisted on it for the sole reason that Mussolini was a ladies man; the partisans who executed him cemented this image by hanging his body alongside that of his last mistress, the lovely Claretta Petacci.<\/a> His transalpine partner, on the other hand, never even got it up for the even lovelier Unity Mitford,<\/a> at least not that anyone\u2019s been able to prove. Not even in darkest jest would I identify with such a pathetic little worm.<\/p>\n Loser-shaming might be a no-sale among the truly delusional, people who see themselves as the sole surviving innocents in, or the saviors of, a corrupt world. In Slate<\/em>, Daniel Engber suggests<\/a> that the sword, with all its grandiosity and theatricality, could have special appeal for these lost-beyond-recall types. \u201cThe sword,\u201d he writes, \u201cis the weapon of nerds. It\u2019s also the weapon of schizophrenics. And, most of all, it\u2019s the weapon of schizophrenic nerds.\u201d As an example, he offers former Ugly Betty<\/em> actor Michael Brea who hewed up his mother with a three-foot Masonic blade in order to kill a demon he believed was living in her. There\u2019s no room in that worldview for the agony of self-conscious loserdom. <\/p>\n But invoking the voice of the schoolyard chorus might win some traction among the merely maladjusted, who are also capable of committing antisocial acts. James Ellroy, author of the most sensuously violent crime novels in the English language, began life as a sad, attention-seeking weirdo. He marched through middle school wearing a swastika armband. Throughout high school and beyond, he broke into the houses of the popular girls and stole their lingerie. His writing about this earlier self fairly drips with shame at the silliness, the sheer unmanliness, of it all. The title of one such autobiographical essay, \u201cMy Life as A Creep,\u201d tells the story in a nutshell. This is the view of the loser redeemed.<\/p>\n