"From the horror and heroism of Monday's campus massacre, stories emerge of 32 extraordinary lives ended on a spring day at Virginia Tech. .... families, friends, colleagues and classmates share poignant memories of the victims of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. The people these stories speak of were characterized by great promise and outstanding achievement."
That's a quote from CNN.com, 8:50 am, April 19th, 2007. I, like some significant chunk of the western world, have been mulling over this horrific event since the first shots cracked out of a student's gun, down the endless wire into my various computers. Endless wire, just for the record, is Pete Townshend's term of art for the internet. Pete Townshend invented the internet, of course when in 1970 he wrote, "from tree to tree, from you to me; traveling just as fast as any freeway. Every single dream, backed up in the scheme - we all get carried on the Relay."
Anyhow, back to 2007 where 150 can get mowed down or have their throats systematically slit in a suburb of Baghdad in one single day. That story by the way, will hit the front page for about 15 seconds and then I'll take a sip of hot coffee and think about a good shit I took a few minutes earlier. But this thing in Virginia, where a pathological, probably abused, flatlining, sugar-brain with too much access to ammunition, with nobody interested in "managing his case" from the outset, goes and shoots up a quiet eastern university; and we're rightly obsessed. The story is everywhere. It's unthinkable that a civilized society wouldn't be shocked into picking the event apart in the same way a ninth grader carefully dissects the innards of a grasshopper with grotesque fascination. If I were the parent of a victim, I would descend into an abyss of grief for a decade. If I were a friend of a victim, I would weep quietly in the morning and drown my sorrows at night.
Right now I am a citizen of this country and I have the physical, emotional and intellectual detachment which lends me the privilege to comment, using this web log without more than 20 minutes of my morning lost to tapping out some thoughts for whomever wishes to peruse them. My observations are clouded by a blissful if not totally deluded sense that this cannot happen to me. But having been immersed, albeit filtered through a flat screen for nearly 12 years, in the happenings of the second World War I cannot fathom some sort of picture that doesn't include mobile killing squads, gas vans, slave-labored populations, hangings, and systematic starvation, just to name a few. And as I have been typing away, some reporters for CNN have busily done their jobs, cranking out copy, assembling photos or combing through the murderer's vitriolic, scattered diatribe which he placed in the form of Quicktime movies. Isn't it interesting that we know what brand of video he used? If he had saved his messages using Windows Media Player, would we know that too? I have to say that the reason Mr. Cho's final messages to the world are being coined by the press as Quicktime movies is only because the computer of the first person to play these movies had Quicktime set as the preferred application for playing media files. Quicktime is such a nice and neat little term. It would be a shame if it were to do any harm to Apple Computers to have their video player forever tied to a massacre.
There's so much with this thing and I want to focus on the irony that I see. This series of shootings at Virginia Tech is being called the deadliest, or worst, depending on who reports it, shooting in U.S. history. Given the specific context, I suppose there's some accuracy to that. Shootings with a gun, on American soil, not related to any war; the drug war included; well I just don't know enough to know. Regardless of how that notion was crafted, one thing for certain is that we all have the distinction to live in an age in which the deadliest shooting in U.S. history has occurred. Just like that. I suppose it's like when some really big movie comes out and everyone can say that he remembers seeing it for the first time when he was 9 or something. How special that was. I remember holding my baby daughter in the Spring of 2003 when the first shots were fired into Baghdad, precipitating the war in which the U.S. is currently embroiled.
A student, like the one described in a rock song by the Boomtown Rats, "I Don't Like Mondays," lost all sense rational thinking, now takes the cake for being the biggest offender to all our decency, morality, white bread goodness and shiny post-9/11 "just shop and travel" happiness. Deadlier and different than Kent State. Bloodier than the Manson killings and worse than the Tuskegee Experiments. I quote here from President Bill Clinton regarding the latter: "The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist. —President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997" If you want to learn more about that by the way, you'll find that 399 black, mostly illiterate men suffering from syphilis were used as unwitting guinea pigs for a cruel and frankly Joseph Mengele-like form of medical treatment between 1932 and 1972. In all the intervening years the U.S. government, its agents, foreign and domestic never did anything quite as bad, bloody, deadly or "mean," as one of Cho's professor's puts it, on Monday April 16th, 2007.
I can punctuate with words like "senseless violence" as the press does too. But all violence is senseless. Violent is missiles, planes used as missiles, small missiles fired out of guns, as is violent cold science, or that done in the name of national security. War isn't senseless? I do get it by the way. There's clear distinction between U.S. soldiers defending themselves against improvised explosive devices and that perpetrated by a weirdo, crazed student on a Spring morning in Virginia. But it gets foggy when a police department firebombs a whole neighborhood in Pennsylvania, doesn't it. It loses its punch when U.S. soldiers or contractors are ordered to keep driving their massive trucks through war zones, even when little kids are under their wheels - and that happens too. But yes, I do get it. Don't you?
