Ecological poisoning has been a fashionable bogeyman ever since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) appeared. Over the intervening years, the environmental pollutant that has attracted public attention has shifted around from DDT to mercury, arsenic, lead, and asbestos. At one time, it was fashionable to attribute the low-test scores of black children to lead additives in gasoline and paint. Countless studies drew a connection between the two, but the theory lost favor as successive generations of black children continued to underperform long after lead was removed from their environment.
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Recently, Caroline Fraser, the author of the New York Times bestseller book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, has decided to repurpose the concept. This time instead of focusing on underperforming black children, she attempts to explain the late ‘60s increase in white serial killers as a consequence of neurological damage associated with high levels of environmental pollutants in their blood. One might think that Ms. Fraser would also apply her theory to the massive spike in black violent crime over the same period, but she does not seem interested in examining that aspect. I assume she thinks systemic racism is the culprit in the case of blacks. Instead, she felt comfortable in rehashing the lurid details of serial killers like Ted Bundy and positing that lead, copper, and arsenic was the root cause of their behavior, specifically citing lead, copper, and arsenic smelters operating in Ted’s hometown of Tacoma, Washington.
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She makes no mention of the permissive culture that sprang up in the ‘60s providing a wellspring of unchaperoned young women for killers to prey upon. She makes no reference to the new age psychobabble common among conniving drifters that enticed gullible young women into compromising positions. In her perspective, the ‘60s counterculture had nothing to do with it. It was all because of some smelter spewing airborne pollutants. It is all so convenient and stupid, but this is what passes for wisdom amongst our esteemed literary class.
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