SWOONING OVER THE UNSPEAKABLE

I was appalled yesterday when I read a Slate article about the "Holmies" -- young women who've been blogging about their hero-worship of James Holmes, the movie theater shooter (or I should say the Colorado movie theater shooter, because, as I'm sure you know, we have a new theater shooter in Louisiana). The Holmies are disturbing:

He was the most loathed man in America, but on Tumblr, a small group of women felt something more like attraction. “I need to feel his lips pressed against mine,” one woman wrote. “His eyes are penetrating the fuck out of my soul,” wrote another. And “I know people are going to think I’m fucked up, but I bet he looked really hot in that ballistic gear.”

They called themselves “Holmies,” and as they awaited the next glimpse of Holmes in court, they constructed a digital daydream of who he might be. They soaked up his tiniest biographical details (his car smelled like strawberry air freshener!), swooned over a surfaced photo of Holmes squinting and shirtless by the pool, Photoshopped his face onto pornographic GIFs, and used a photo-morphing app to conjure baby pics of the future children they would have with him. They weaved friendship bracelets out of orange string and dressed up in plaid homages to Holmes’ arrest outfit

They're reminiscent of the "Free Jahar" crowd -- the fans who swooned over Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and insisted he was innocent of the Boston Marathon bombing.

What gets into these young women? Is it decadent twenty-first-century culture? Is it the Internet? Is it youth? Is it rampaging adolescent female hormones?

I think all that -- and then I read about a grown man who drove five hours to replace a tiny divot in a Memphis park next to the grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan:

Some people are calling a religious group vandals and claim they broke the law when they dug up a patch of grass next to a Confederate general’s grave in a Memphis park Wednesday.

Thursday, a man drove hundreds of miles to plant new grass.

“When I saw this last night, my wife couldn’t understand why I was shaking so badly,” Scott Hudson of Lincoln County, Tennessee, said....

“I’m going to repair the blatant disregard for this cemetery,” Hudson said.

He was so outraged that he cut a piece of his own lawn, drove five hours and laid the patch down.

“It just upset me to my core, because my great-grandfather R.C. Hudson fought in the Confederate Army,” he said.

Yes -- this guy drove five hours to repair what a local reporter called "a small divot in the grass," dug by a group of elderly black Christians:



And he was choked up:



Do you see much difference between this guy and the young women who built fan pages to Holmes and Tsarnaev? I don't. They all get weak in the knees thinking about an evil monster. They put an absurd amount of effort into that worship.

This isn't a problem of youth or estrogen or the Net. Some people are just messed up.