"A culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre—one that doesn't implicate it in the crime."
I've been struggling these past few days with how to deal with the fact that A. 33 are dead in Virginia and B. we publish a book that deals with why these things happen.
For the first few days (during which I was on London at the London Intl Book Fair), I decided to lay low. But when I got back, and started to hear the US media, rather than the UK media, I got progressively more pissed off, and decided that, since this book is a necessary polemical and astringent corrective amidst the sanctimonious pabulum of what passes for analysis, I'm drawing to try to draw people's attention to it, and damn the torpedoes.
Jan Frel at Alternet just had the author in question, Mark Ames, do a piece on the shootings. When I checked it out at 10:10am it has 63 comments; when I went back 15 minutes later to get the URL for this post, it had 77, a few seconds ago I refreshed as I was writing this, there were 86...so some folks out there care to have this perspective.
Media: "Cho Seung-Hui did it because he was crazy and evil." History: "Schoolyard massacres are rebellions against oppressive and bullying environments by students who can't take it anymore."Another rampage massacre, this time the worst ever. Which means another fake attempt at trying to understand this uniquely American crime—these interminable rage killing sprees in our workplaces and our schoolyards.
What makes the Virginia Tech massacre more horrifying isn't just the body count but the reaction of the living: The official fake soul-searching is more idiotic than ever, revealing, if anything, a culture that is so insanely delusional and incapable of self-reflection that it almost makes these rampage massacres seem relatively natural.
The footage from Seung-Hui's "media manifesto" has played on cable news on an endless loop for days now, and no one has considered the merits of his grievances—except to cast them as proof positive that Cho Seung-Hui was one sick guy.
Of all the idiotic reactions, so far none tops an article posted on MSNBC.com, written by an "investigative reporter" with the ill-begotten name of "Bill Dedman." His investigation allegedly revealed that Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter, displayed alleged classic warning signs of a rampage shooting. Citing a landmark Secret Service study of schoolyard rampage massacre, Dedman observed, "In more than three out of four school shootings, the attacker had made no threat against the schoolteachers or students. But most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. The attackers posed a threat even though they hadn't made a threat."
In other words, if you think someone's weird, but he hasn't threatened anyone, he's a threat.
There are two very serious flaws in Dedman's investigation. First, if the profile of a schoolyard rampager is someone who doesn't threaten anyone but who raises suspicions, then America will have to open up a new GULAG archipelago to hold all of the millions of kids who fit this description. But the second flaw is even more serious: the Secret Service study Dedman cites draws exactly the opposite conclusion: There is no way to profile a potential schoolyard killer. That was what was so shocking about the report. Everyone who has studied these rage massacres knows it. Everyone but journalists like Dedman, that is.
What Dedman's article reveals isn't just the sloppy work of a typical mainstream hack but, rather, of a culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre—one that doesn't implicate it in the crime.