You and Me and VT
After a week of wall-to-wall Imus, we get wall-to-wall Virginia Tech Massacre. All of the mainline news outlets parrot each other. You can imagine what goes on in some of their meetings/phone calls: "I don't care what you say. Just say something!" And so they do. And so we learn more about the psyches of the reporters than we do about the shooter's, as everybody is busy blaming somebody else. Immediately we hear calls for gun control and blaming Charlton Heston. We hear Presidential candidate Barack Obama attempting to sound profound by likening the bloody murder of 32 to the "violence" of Don Imus's use of black slang while stubbornly remaining white. Rush Limbaugh blamed politically correct thinking for keeping people from demanding more action against a minority (referring to the shooter's mental illness, not his ethnicity). We hear blame of school officials for not recognizing that somebody capable of writing such disturbing things would inevitably act on them.
What about this last charge? Can we really assume that writers of grisly fiction will carry out mass-murders? Well, then we had better round up Thomas Harris before he starts washing down human liver with a nice chianti, Bret Easton Ellis before he goes on a killing spree, and Stephen King before he puts on clown make-up and starts luring children into the sewer. But instead of locking these people up for our own protection, we watch their movies and buy their books and DVD's; we throw our money and adulation at them. We take them into our collective unconsciousness so that we can't even mention fava beans or chianti without thinking of cannibalism.
Yes, Cho Seung-Hui was very sick. But do we see that we are too? Do we realize that by harboring, even nursing evil in our hearts we all bear some responsibility for the sickness in our culture, and ultimately for the eruption of evil in Blacksburg, Virginia? What are we going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?
Lord, have mercy.
For a more cogent post on this subject, check out Second Terrace. Even better, read The Brothers Karamosov.
What about this last charge? Can we really assume that writers of grisly fiction will carry out mass-murders? Well, then we had better round up Thomas Harris before he starts washing down human liver with a nice chianti, Bret Easton Ellis before he goes on a killing spree, and Stephen King before he puts on clown make-up and starts luring children into the sewer. But instead of locking these people up for our own protection, we watch their movies and buy their books and DVD's; we throw our money and adulation at them. We take them into our collective unconsciousness so that we can't even mention fava beans or chianti without thinking of cannibalism.
Yes, Cho Seung-Hui was very sick. But do we see that we are too? Do we realize that by harboring, even nursing evil in our hearts we all bear some responsibility for the sickness in our culture, and ultimately for the eruption of evil in Blacksburg, Virginia? What are we going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?
Lord, have mercy.
For a more cogent post on this subject, check out Second Terrace. Even better, read The Brothers Karamosov.
posted by Rich @ 07:44
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