The Bonfire of the Vanity

[Valin]

The American Spectator:

Christopher Dorner picked a bad way to reach out to his celebrity friends.

Daniel J. Flynn

2.15.13

 

 

Fire a narcissist at the risk of firing up his imagination. Pride remains one of the seven deadly sins, as much as we try to cast the ancient vice as a modern virtue.

 

The Los Angeles Police Department didn’t fire Christopher Dorner for falsifying a report against a fellow officer or for being an all-around fruit loop. A grandiose figure always sees something enormously sinister in his fall. So Dorner wrote in his manifesto — merely penning one signifies egomania —of his fight to “reclaim my name” and “the conspiracy to have me terminated.” That conspiracy, ultimately ensnaring Los Angeles policemen, San Bernardino County sheriffs, California Fish and Game wardens, and other law enforcement agents, ended with Dorner’s termination in the mountains on Tuesday.

 

There are worse fates than getting fired. Getting set on fire surely ranks as one of them.

 

Pride comes before the fall. It did here in the form of Dorner’s lengthy screed ironically extolling gun control and bestowing affirmation upon celebrities who needed it, and wanted it, the least. One gleans from reading the manifesto that Dorner worshipped the idiots on the idiot box and yearned to become one of them.

 

(Snip)