FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2002 — In an op-ed piece in this morning’s Boston Globe, Scot Lehigh poses a question that has been gnawing at all of us for some time: how could a couple of kids like James Parker and Robert Tulloch — the killers of Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop — have committed such a vile act? "[A] rejection of societal morality is far more disturbing in someone raised ... in relatively normal circumstances in our own country," Lehigh writes, "someone who could count among their advantages a loving family, an obvious intelligence, and opportunity three-fourths of the world long for."

The sad fact is, a society like ours is tailor-made for the likes of Robert Tulloch and James Parker, precisely because of its emphasis on opportunity and personal accomplishment. Let me explain.

When I was a teenager in England, back in the early ’80s, I joined the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Every week for more than two years I stood in line at my local dole office, where I and a crowd of grimy teens, bed-headed mothers, and dull-eyed fortysomething males would sign on for our weekly ration of money. The entire affair seemed designed to inflict the maximum amount of humiliation. And yet there was something of an all-in-the-same-boat mentality about it. A sense that there was an inevitability to our situation. In the end, we could blame The System for our lot. Paradoxically, our very hopelessness was the thing that rescued our self-esteem.

In today’s America, there is no such out. America, as we are told time and time again, is a Land of Opportunity, a place where anyone can be president, the CEO of General Electric, or the proprietor of a T-shirt cart at Downtown Crossing. All you need is the gumption, the smarts, the internal resources, and you can do it. The truism that anybody can make it in America, however, overlooks one important point: not everybody can. There are only so many General Electrics and T-shirt carts to go around. The flip side of opportunity is that those who fail to take advantage of it are forced to ask themselves an excruciating question: what’s wrong with me? Humiliation is yours and yours alone.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat

Or crust and sugar over —

Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Of course, when Langston Hughes wrote "Harlem," he was referring to those who live under real hardship, not a couple of privileged kids from Vermont. Tulloch and Parker, as Lehigh points out, were not doing too badly. They were solidly middle class. They were intelligent. They weren’t humiliated by poverty. And yet their crime ostensibly had its roots in money. Tulloch and Parker, after all, murdered the Zantops during a robbery. But this is misleading. In the end, Tulloch and Parker saw their crime as a sort of coup de théâtre. They wanted to do something Big.

Look at the smug expression on Robert Tulloch’s face. That is the look of accomplishment that drives every perpetrator of the showcase killing. You can see the same thing in Michael McDermott’s arrogant courtroom demeanor, in Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’s maniacal self-aggrandizement in the days preceding the Columbine massacre. The motives behind their killings may have been different, but these guys all shared one thing in common: they wanted more than they had — money, fame, respect — and they felt twisted up inside for not having gotten what should have been theirs for the taking.

It’s telling that the majority of showcase killings are perpetrated by relatively educated white males — the very group for whom opportunity would seem to be most readily available. But it’s precisely this sense of opportunity that leads to overwhelming feelings of dissatisfaction when success fails to materialize. Which is not, of course, to say that every dissatisfied middle-class male feels compelled to go out and kill somebody, only that such a widespread sense of personal failure festers under the skin of a society, occasionally erupting in the kind of violence that took the lives of Half and Susanne Zantop.

It’s telling, too, that showcase killings became more prevalent in the 1990s, a period that saw all manner of Internet millionaires, stock-market whiz kids, and snot-nosed media moguls. Opportunities were at a premium, and so too, inevitably, was what’s-wrong-with-me? syndrome. Showcase killings are a way of making a name for oneself, a way of shrugging off a dreadful sense of failure. They are acts rooted in humiliation and defiance, a twisted manifestation of the American Dream.