The shattered light of Virginia Tech

[elfs]

Like everyone else I've been following the news at VA Tech. Probably the single most reliable summary of the incident is the Wikipedia page, VA Tech Massacre, and it's doubtless the best place to go if you don't want to wade through the low-bandwidth nonsense of Fox or CNN.

It took me a while to process the tragedy. I tend not to automatically "get" things like this, and my initial reaction was that we were in for another round of grief pimping by the media and finger pointing at gun owners. It wasn't until a day or two later that I started to process just how horrific this must be for the survivors: classmates, parents, and children of the victims. The Lebrescu shooting was particularly painful to read. The grief is real now.

Everyone is now processing this event through their broken prisms. What disappoints me is that the prisms seem to be even more fractured than usual. I mean, sure, there's the usual pimping: Jack Thompson blamed video games, the psuedonazi wankers at Stormfront blamed multiculturalism (no link; I'm sure their roboposter will get me eventually) (why yes, I did just put Jack Thompsons and white supremacists on the same level). Barack Obama misstepped badly when he tried to claim the violence was bad but the violence visited upon families by outsourcing was even worse. Fred Phelps announced he would picket the funerals. The Huffington Post blames Iraq; the creationists blame Darwin.

This morning while flipping through the AM dial I stopped on Kirby Wilbur's show. Wilbur is a local conservative talk show host. He's pretty firmly in the FOX camp but in all the years I've been hearing him he's never been viciously stupid; he may have been shallow but he never struck me as the sort of man who turned his brain over to Karl Rove's machine.

This morning as he was talking to a caller he said that Sueng-Hi's suicide note was filled with "complaints about rich kids and debauchery, just full of typical liberal things."

I always thought complaining about debauchery was a conservative pasttime. Isn't it liberals and the left who supposedly have no morals or family values?

I was disappointed to hear this tripe this morning because I realized just how far apart this country has been driven: normally sensible conservative (and liberals) will now say absolutely anything they can to vilify and demonize the other side of the aisle. I could understand if it was members of the meritocracy of the mediocre, but to want to join that group willingly just disappoints me: even in the age of the Internet, we abandon our American principles for tribalism and strong man politics, and this incident has made it clear that this has become even more acceptable than usual.

(Oh, yeah, Kirby also called this "The worst mass murder in American history." Uh, no, that happened on September 11th, 2001. History is another weak point in our collective knowledge.)

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Not even the worst school killing either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_school_bombing

Just the most recent.

Yeah, the media reactions have been rather tiresome. What bothers me the most is that I can't even turn on npr without the same school-shooting-non-update being spat out at me every ten minutes. I expect that from the really crappy news sources, they have nothing better to do than hype sensationalist crap. There's other news out there, though, and i'm getting tired of hearing "BREAKING NEWS! NOTHING NEW HAS BEEN FOUND IN THE SCHOOL SHOOTING CASE, HERE IS SOMEONE ELSE TO TELL YOU WHAT YOU'VE ALREADY HEARD A DOZEN TIMES THIS HOUR. COMING UP NEXT, A PSYCHOLOGIST INTERPRETS THE SHOOTER'S FINGERPAINTINGS FROM KINDERGARTEN FOR POSSIBLE CLUES."

It makes me want to find a cave on a mountain somewhere, where i can be a hermit, and take up the hobby of lobbing the occasional pebble at people turning this incident into their pet cause before all the facts are even known.

A few centuries back, something like this would have been blamed on demonic possession. Three decades ago, rock music. last decade, rap, now video games. The overwhelming societal need to find something to blame for any tragedy is kind of appalling. People sometimes snap and do horrible things. I guess that people aren't comfortable with the idea that there's not so much different between somebody who does snap, and somebody who doesn't.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's an unhelpful implementation of a natural strategy: When introduced to something dangerous, an animal tries to make a search image of the dangerous thing to avoid it in the future. There's no relevant thing of which to make a search image, so people fill in the blank with their favorite demon.