JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

Like many people, I’ve been thinking a lot about Stephen Paddock and where and why he might have gone so far astray from the general human track of wanting to live a good life and be a good person.

Today, with the benefit of an insightful sermon at my church, Country Club Christian (tee times available dawn to late afternoon), I closed in on a theory.

The sermon, delivered by guest preacher Dr. Miroslav Volf, a theology professor at Yale Divinity School, was about the importance of physical touch. “We are hungry for human touch…” Dr. Volf said. “Redeeming touch…A touch of mutual delight.”

Dr. Volf’s springboard to that topic was a New Testament story about a woman, a sinner, who, after learning Jesus was having dinner at the nearby home of a Pharisee, went there to seek him out. Luke’s gospel continues…

So, she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

When Dr. Volf began talking about the power of touch and the innate human yearning for it, my mind jumped immediately to Paddock.

The most prominent thing we know about Paddock is that he spent hour after hour, day after day, sometimes week after week, sitting silently in front of video poker machines, often winning because of his methodical style and skill level.

A New York Times story said: “The way he played — instinctually, decisively, calculatingly, silently, with little movement beyond his shifting eyes and nimble fingers — meant he could play several hundred hands an hour.”

Although he had plenty of money, he didn’t have much of a life outside the casinos. We know he was unfriendly and uncommunicative with neighbors. Yes, he had a girlfriend, Marilou Danley, who apparently left what had been a solid marriage of about 25 years to take up with the high-rolling Paddock, who had been a customer at a casino where she formerly worked. Danley has told the FBI that in recent months Paddock seemed to be deteriorating both physically and mentally.

…Well, if you don’t like people and your life has revolved for years around machines with blinking lights and electronic playing cards, what else would you expect?

He probably was disposed this way, but my theory is that over time those machines gradually drained and consumed whatever traces of human feeling and innate goodness he ever had. Just sucked it out of him, as steadily as pigs slurp water from a trough.

Again, he had the girlfriend, but I can see how, trapped in the vortex of the blinking machines, he could easily have withdrawn even from her. Very likely, at the start of their relationship they had significant physical contact, perhaps even genuine warmth, but I would be curious to know the last time there was “a touch of mutual delight.”

The fact that he sent her off to the Philippines and sent her, or her family, $100,000 to buy a house certainly indicates a desire to push her away.

Stephen Paddock, in short, had descended into nihilism. Nothing meant anything to him — not family, not money, not his girlfriend, maybe not even the blinking machines. Either that, or the machines’ insidious allure had erased all semblance of emotion and human meaningfulness in him and all he saw when he looked in the mirror was a black void.

Of course, that doesn’t explain how he catapulted to the next step — raining automatic gunfire on thousands of people a week ago today in Las Vegas. All I can think is that, from the recesses of his dimming mind, he decided not only his life was meaningless but so was everybody else’s. And so, in his final, nihilistic gesture, he tapped the only other skill he had kept up with — gun manipulation and usage.

Those people meant nothing to him. They were like those millions of electronic cards that had passed before his eyes on those screens; they were merely images to be manipulated — mowed down, in his demented perspective — to suit his will. His sense of physical touch, of human connection, was long gone.