A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Four days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
Heartthrob maybe going a bit too far considering this guy might be a total loon whether or not you agree with what he did.
But then there are people who propose marriage to serial killers after they’ve already been incarcerated.
If the disaffected lunatic fringe can be redirected from shooting up schools to targeting CEOs instead, simply by the promise of becoming folk heroes as opposed to villains, that would be a massive improvement.
Sure, but I don’t think people should be falling in love with lunatics even if the lunatic does something they like.
And for all we know, this guy is a lunatic. Or has done some horrible thing that has nothing to do with this. He could be a rapist or a pedophile or batters his kids… or he could be a nice guy who couldn’t take it anymore.
And until he’s caught, we probably won’t know.
But apparently people love jumping to conclusions. If this guy turns out to be some sort of horrible person for other reasons, I will not be surprised. Hero-worship of anonymous people is not very smart.
If an awful person ends their life doing something heroic rather than villainous, maybe they can be remembered for that instead. Maybe not. Probably the circumstances will be complicated in how they are weighed.
As for this fellow, I feel somewhat confident that the public will not accept whatever person they pin the blame upon as The Adjuster or Spartacus or whatever we call him, alive or dead. They cannot be trusted, so he cannot be caught. He’s well on his way to myth.
I’m just talking about the heartthrob part. Don’t fall in love with someone you know next to nothing about.
Ah but we’ll never know for certain who he is! If they can’t find the real guy, they’ll likely pin it on some nobody with a problematic past. So we can’t fall in love with the real guy, but only a hero archetype instead. And that’s perfectly fine.
That makes no sense. If they don’t catch the real guy, he’ll be free to do it again. If he does it again, it will be clear that the nobody they pinned it on was the wrong person.
We do not trust the oligarchs and their police to actually catch the real guy. There’s a good chance that, whoever they kill and claim to have “got him!” the public will not accept that they really did. We already think they’re going to just murder someone in order to close the case. Maybe they’ll get him for real. Maybe they won’t. We will never know and the conspiracy theory machine will just keep churning out maybes.
If another CEO bites the dust, it will probably be a copycat. This guy is getting away, if not in actual truth, at least in folklore. He’d be a fool to strike again.
Again, that makes no sense. We know what he looks like and surveillance cameras are everywhere. Are you suggesting the copycat would somehow do some sort of Face/Off thing with the killer?