Serial Killing in America After 9/11

In the war on terror, the handwnngers see all sorts of difficulties with an attack on Iraq. But -when a psychologist studies Saddam Hussein, he or she sees something very different. The very definition of terror is to have weapons of mass destruction in the hands of this sociopathic serial killer. (Curtis Schmidt, "The Psychopathology of Saddam" B7) What business do your governments have to ally themselves with the gang of criminality in the White House against Muslims? Don't your governments know that the White House gang is the biggest serial killers [sic] in this age? (From a November 2002 audiotape purporting to feature the voice of Osama bin Laden) And so, if -we are to be judged by the wishes in our unconscious, we are, like primitive man, simply a gang of murderers. (Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" 314) It has become the ultimate truism to say that everything changed on September 11, 2001. Without wanting to minimize the impact of the awful events that took place on that day, it is possible to overestimate the extent to which the United States has changed since 9/11. To claim, for example, that the country was profoundly altered by the eruption of an act of violence the likes of which had never been seen in the United States before is simultaneously to be accurate and not to tell the whole story. The mainland United States had certainly never been subjected to violent attacks of such magnitude before 9/11, and yet to imply that prior to the attacks America existed in a state of unsullied innocence is to ignore both the participation of the United States in similar acts of violence in other countries (either by sponsoring such acts or committing them outright) and the defining role that violence has played in the foundation and continued development of the country. Despite the temptation to treat 9/11 as some kind of epistemic break, in other words, it is important to insist on the continuities that exist between "before" and "after"; only by studying the continuities can we understand fully the impact of 9/11 on American culture. One such continuity is the status of serial murder, but one must acknowledge that serial murder also seems to provide another tempting opportunity to draw a clear line of demarcation between pre- and post-9/11 America. Despite the long-standing iconic status of the serial killer in American culture before 9/11, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, it seemed reasonable to suppose that the serial killer would be quickly replaced by the terrorist as the personification of criminal evil. What actually happened, however, turns out to be considerably more complicated. In this article, I argue that the figure of the serial killer plays an even more central role in post-9/11 America than it did before the attacks. Its omnipresence as an icon of evil enabled the serial killer to become the lingua franca of both sides of the "war against terrorism." Consequently, rather than the terrorist neatly replacing the serial killer, the two categories overlapped. The serial killer provided a way to present the figure of the terrorist to the American public in a way that was both familiar enough to keep public fear and paranoia at manageable levels, and deviant enough to mobilize the necessary level of public support for the systematic dismantling of civil liberties in the United States, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, and quite paradoxically, the reassertion of the quintessential "Amencanness" of the serial killer facilitated the reinforcement of the terrorist as a foreign "other," and in doing so, allowed the majority of Americans to maintain an image of both themselves and their country as paragons of innocence who had been violated by terrorism. Business as Usual Although I will demonstrate how intimately the serial killer and the terrorist have become entwined with each other in the aftermath of 9/11, I also want to emphasize that the serial killer industry that existed in the United States before the attacks has continued to flourish and has done so in many instances without any reference to terrorism at all. …