Gary Alan Fine is a Guggenheim Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and teaches at Northwestern University. He is the author of Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial.  He considers here a very difficult example of what has been one of his ongoing research concerns.  Jeff

Although I feel abashed admitting it, I find my sympathy for Jared Lee Loughner is swelling. Mr. Loughner is, as every sentient American is aware, the young man who pulled the trigger – again and again – killing six, wounding others, including his local Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords in a mall in Tucson, Arizona.

Note that I do not say that he is an accused assassin, killer, or murderer, which legally he certainly is under our rule of law. I am entirely prepared to accept that Mr. Loughner was, last Saturday, a violent man, who deserves whatever a jury or set of juries (both federal and state) will eventually determine. I will not call for parole in 2061. I am also prepared to admit that a court may determine – although it probably will not, given American attitudes – that this young is not fully culpable for his violence because of mental illness.

What I am not prepared to accept is how from the moments after the attack, Mr. Loughner’s identity has been taken from him to be used as a political football by smart people who are willing to be ignorant. Again and again we see that we do not truly care about the self-imagined identity of this 22-year old, but only about what we need for him to be. Perhaps we need him to be a tea party manqué boisterously inspired by Sarah and Rush, perhaps an out-of-control, drug-crazed Goth worshipping at the altar of a skull, perhaps a follower of Hitler or Marx, or perhaps we just need for him to be, as is often stated, “a nut job.” But these are what we need for Mr. Loughner to be, and not what he is. The truth is that Jared, we hardly know you.

So we search through the shards and debris of a life to find those oddities that make our case. We scrape away complexity to build a reputation. We forget that to know someone is to know contradictions, moods, and ambivalence. Perhaps when the dust settles we will discover that Mr. Loughner was a boy scout, volunteered at a soup kitchen, or fed pigeons (not poisoning, following Tom Lehrer). Perhaps he was in pain. Or perhaps not. But only with time, justice, and fairness will the self of Jared Loughner appear. Selves are multiple, not singular. As Louis Zurcher pointed out selves are mutable and multiple.

Jared Loughner is neither the first nor surely the last “unintended celebrity” that the public maw transforms according to their need. In my book, Difficult Reputations, a study of a set of public figures with evil, inept, or controversial reputations – and few today have a more difficult reputation – I found that when poorly known figures splash onto the public scene a set of reputational entrepreneurs will see it as being in their interest, using resources at hand, to construct a meaningful self for this stranger, however much it strays from what we eventually come to know. In the days in which Americans cared about the treason of Benedict Arnold, the claim was that as a child he spread broken glass on the sidewalk to harm innocent children. Surely it was more myth than reality, but myth becomes reality.

I offer no brief for Jared Lee Loughner. His killing spree was repellant and might, no matter how idiosyncratic, prove to be another step by which elected officials separate themselves from their voters. But I also see that actions that might otherwise be considered odd and harmless – a sense of creepiness without any particular threat – have been made into markers of madness. We claim that angry words are taken as inspiration for violence, even though these words occur in a Civilizing Society where there is less public anger, rather than more – and in which the tools of violence are held by the state as social theorist Norbert Elias pointed out. Strange acts and hot words might or might not be linked to the violence in Tucson, but we treat them as persuasive while we scurry for a past that makes sense of the present. In the case of Mr. Loughner and in the case of all challenging reputations, we read history backwards. We search for clues that perhaps have different meanings, but that now can serve to support what we knew all along. Even if we show no mercy, we owe it to ourselves to let Jared be Jared.