Snap judgment

"Something snapped in him," is the mantra that USian media are using as the all-purpose explanation for Robert Bales' act of extinguishing 16 Afghan civilians.

This sort of empty linguistic nonsense passes for interpretive thinking at The New York Times, at the Diane Rehm Show, at NPR.

It assumes there is a place in a human's head where something can happen. It has nothing to do with military operations or ideology, it's a psyche thing.

What if human psychology were merely a negotiated protocol? A way to not understand anything?

What if there is no inside in Mr. Bales's head or in anyone else's? Where then might "something" snap?

What is a snap? What is "something?" We really do not want to understand, we just want to make verbal noises? The Times utters a meaningless noise and our cognitive intelligences all sit, like dogs?

What if the something that snapped was not in him? What if it had something rather than nothing to do with ideology, with a history of violence, with a hatred that began 4 million years ago. The heart of war lies in ideology, in stiffness, in the cohesion of wills crushed into refined cocaine, fusing blood and lies, and explanations a la The New York Times.