A loser who thinks he’s a winner but is merely a whiner.
Deanne Stillman@Lit Hub (7/21/16): “Laurel Harper, the mother of the Oregon school shooter, the man who shot and killed nine people last October at Umpqua Community College … had read The Art of the Deal to her son, she said, before he was born, as the New York Times reported shortly after the incident last year … Was she sitting in a comfortable and favorite armchair, under an oft-used reading light? Did she read to him or actually to herself out loud and therefore her son at the same time, in bed as she drifted off to sleep? … What happens to someone when he soaks up the idea that the world is comprised of winners and losers before he is even born? That losers are people who stand in his way? What happens when this imprinting is later loaded with guns (trips to the shooting range with his mother) and the prospect of fame (numerous shooters who preceded him) along with a kind of spiritual affliction (Asperger’s Syndrome), a parade of personal failures and a myriad of misread cues? After he was born, Christopher Harper-Mercer did indeed follow the urgings of his mother, for she boasted of her son making hay with investments—behold! a king!—and then, somehow, over time it seems, this path could no longer keep him and nor could the many forks he traveled and one day, he went to school and decided to cash in his chips. ‘I’m a good boy,’ he may have thought. ‘I am moving quickly and decisively when the time is right. I have kept my options open.'”
