Any thoughts on yesterday’s massacre?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Other than the way it has become the leading story on practically every blog in the country, no matter how otherwise restricted their topics are? It even made Slashdot yesterday.
Communist revolutionaries in Latin America used to take a dim view of sporting events because they diverted popular energy from political change. In America, that role is played by disaster news. Whether it’s tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, air crashes, massacres, or abductions, there’s always a random disaster available to fill all that time on the news that might be devoted to uncovering corruption, highlighting injustice, and just generally keeping the public informed about things they can (and arguably should) actually do something about.
Several thousand people died in the US yesterday, just as they do every day, most of them from preventable medical causes related to alcohol, tobacco, diet, and lifestyle, next to which relatively minor events like the Virginia Tech massacre or even the Iraq war are insignificant by comparison.
Aside from raising some questions about the mental health care system and gun control, yesterday’s blip on the mortality radar is just spectacle.
I can’t go that far. The biggest lone gunman massacre in US history is certainly a national tragedy worthy of coverage.
It occurs to me that may have sounded a bit harsher than I meant it to be.
My point was mostly that there are much bigger tragedies unfolding all around us going unheralded simply because it doesn’t kill as many people all at once in the same place, and unlike random acts of violence, we could actually do something about those bigger problems if people weren’t so absorbed in more dramatic but statistically insignificant events.
I would argue, though, that this is a local tragedy, not a national one, and that virtually all of the media coverage it receives will contain little or no accurate or useful information, and that most of that coverage is essentially entertainment that cheapens the real human cost of events like these.
I think that’s not the most useful distinction. A big university touches a lot of lives over the years. And people can feel themselves connected in other ways than geographic proximity. I haven’t talked to a single academic yesterday and today who hasn’t been affected by this massacre on a university campus. There are different kinds of “local” b/c there are different kinds of community. Significance is not limited to statistics — if it were, even 9/11 would have changed nothing in our culture.
But I think the distinction you’re really trying to explain is that between systemic normalized violence (from poverty, discrimination, poor health care — I would add violence against women) and incidents like yesterday’s massacre that are more readily perceived as shocking, horrific, and just plain wrong. And you are quite right about that. Just as, after the 2005 tsunami that killed so many tens of thousands, we heard for a while about “invisible tsunamis of child poverty” and so on that kill the same number every month and yet go unnoticed.
“The biggest lone gunman massacre in US history is certainly a national tragedy worthy of coverage.”
And yet, as Larry Johnson points out, 32 deaths in one day is common in New Iraq.
Juan Cole, today:
“The profound sorrow and alarm produced in the American public by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day. Virginia Tech will be gone from the headlines and the air waves by next week this time in the US, though the families of the victims will grieve for a lifetime. But next Tuesday I will come out here and report to you that 64 Iraqis have been killed in political violence. And those will mainly be the ones killed by bombs and mortars. They are only 13% of the total; most Iraqis killed violently, perhaps 500 a day throughout the country if you count criminal and tribal violence, are just shot down. Shot down, like the college students and professors at Blacksburg. We Americans can so easily, with a shudder, imagine the college student trying to barricade himself behind a door against the armed madman without. But can we put ourselves in the place of Iraqi students?”
And the answer to that question is “probably not.”
Tonight I’ll tell you what my housemate, who grew up in a Sandinista family during the war in Nicaragua, saw as a five year old.
I so disagree with you Booman. You are caught up in the punditocracy, racing from supposed event to supposed event, you are losing perspective on humanity. So what, the biggest slaughter by what, a few innocent lives? What about the 500,000+ innocent lives lost in Iraq due to the neocons’ incompetent occupation?
So what? Numbers dude, they ain’t so powerful when you value each life with the same value, SANS newsworthyness (which means “it’ll sell ad time”). Great. News Event. Sell Ad Time/Space. Whoopee as I cash the checks and buy a Gulfstream.
From the BBC this morning (4/18):
More than 80 dead in Iraq blast
The violence appears to be growing despite a US troops “surge”
At least 82 people have been killed in a car bomb blast in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, security officials say.
The attack, on a food market in the Sadriya area of the city, left scores of people injured.
Now, will the US Media report upon this tragedy for the next 2 weeks? Every news show, progressive or regressive? Every day, every evening, for 2 weeks? NO of course not.
Point being, Why should we care any more about a slaughter in the US than in Iraq or anywhere else? All the spin-off issues to discuss are just as important in Iraq as in the US. And Virginia Tech doesn’t touch most Americans just as much as Baghdad is isolated from most American lives.
I don’t say don’t cover it, but the Media will distract every American who tunes in, radio, TV, and now, Internet, with a saturation that’s just DISTRACTING. That’s part of what P-R-R-O-P-A-G-A-N-D-A is all about!
What happened yesterday kind of demonstrates the true paradox in human beings. You have the consummate representation of humanity’s evil possibilities in the actions of the shooter. Such callous disregard for innocent human life. How can such a level of hatred ever be conceived and how much energy must be expended to nurture and maintain it until it can be unleashed in such an explosion of blind rage?
And on the opposite side of this human paradox, you have the reported actions of a professor, staying behind in the classroom, working to prevent the shooter from pushing open the classroom door. Blockading it as long as he could to try and insure as many of his students as possible could jump out through a shattered window. Ultimately giving up his life in the effort.
How do we grow such polar opposites in this common pool
of humanity? The question will be asked thousands upon thousands of times, “Why?”. But the question that is foremost in my mind is not “Why?” but “How?”. How in the world can the same society generate such a perverse contradiction? I know there are undoubtedly an untold number of possible explanations?
What do you think?
Is it evil we’re actually talking about here? The initial reports seem to suggest that the shooter was suffering from an organic mental illness, in which case at least some of the “callous disregard for innocent life” might be laid at the feet of a society that refuses to address public mental health needs on the one hand and stigmatizes mental health problems on the other.
Not to mention a society that makes what this disaster shows to be weapons of mass destruction—pistols with quickly reloadable high capacity magazines—readily available to anyone, even people with significant mental health problems.
There are always going to be mentally ill people. What is stunning about this massacre is that they so often go untreated in this country, as you note, and that they are given the opportunity to let their madness run wild.
You think a college-aged male really wants to admit to himself and his circle of friends and faimly he’s “mentally ill”? Don’t think so. Sorry, but you are towing an old liberal line from way back when the rich paid taxes in the US, and there was not only money but society to superficially address such “illness.”
Naive.
Yes, you are quite correct. There are reports that the shooter had been on some type of medication for depression. From information given by his Creative Writing professor, he had become increasingly erratic with some violent overtones in his writing and behaviors.
My family has spent over twenty years working to come to grips and deal with the effects of schizophrenia in my younger brother, so I have to agree with you on the ramifications of how our society treats the subject of mental illness. Anyone who has ever been through the emotional grist mill of any mental illness can tell you that it is a labyrinth of confusing advice, well meaning but often misguided doctors and a tangle of confusing legalities on what can and cannot be done in the quest to help your loved one. I am sure as time passes we will find out much more about the possible mental issues of the shooter.
I agree wholeheartedly with your statement that we as a society have long given short shrift to the issues of mental health, as anyone having dealt with it can attest. Our family never dreamed in a million years that so much of our lives would be wrapped up that world. But no one ever expects it “to happen to them”.
That is, until it does.
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In every genocide or large scale massacre, I always wonder about the dead, the victims whose lives have been snubbed at the whim of a dictator, king, gang leader or whatever. The young persons with ideals, plans and loved ones, their lives so abruptly ended. Only close relatives and friends carry the burden of the loss and are able to remember and give witness to the personality of their loved ones now passed away.
The burden of the loss of life in the Iraq massacre by U.S. forces since 2003 is still carried by relatively speaking just a few. May all rest in peace and may loved ones find the strength in picking up their lives. In a large campus community of 25,000+ students, the impact of the shooting incident will be brief as soon as classes and exams resume and students carry on with their lives.
This world is for the living, there is no room for the dead. They have no voice and do not vote.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The burden of the loss of life in the Iraq massacre by U.S. forces since 2003 is still carried by relatively speaking just a few. May all rest in peace and may loved ones find the strength in picking up their lives.
I don’t understand your point. You must be speaking about Americans in Iraq and their families?
You can’t mean the Iraqis themselves, because how can they pick up their lives when their country has been destroyed, so long as they are still under occupation by the country that destroyed it?
I’ll disagree with you a bit. They may not walk but sometimes the dead do speak.
That’s what happens at the Viet Nam Memorial, and at the national cemetery at Arlington. Back in the late 1950’s I took the train from Texas to Illinois, and we changed in (I think) St. Louis. I spent a couple of hours as a young teenager in the large memorial to the dead from the Great War that was across the street from the train station.
Graveyards are also such places where the dead speak. I live in Fort Worth about 5 miles west of where Lee Harvey Oswald is buried. His is a mixed set of messages, as I am sure is also true of Charles Whitman who died at the University of Texas tower in 1966. Sadly, I hear less from his victims. But that is my fault, not theirs.
Every shuttle that goes up speaks for the dead astronauts, both the ones who died on the ramp and those who died in the two Shuttle disasters.
They’re not speaking very loud normally, but sometimes they can be heard. You are correct that life is for the living. Sometimes we have to have our attention brought to the quiet speech of dead. It’s not so much that the dead do not speak as it is that we sometimes just don’t listen.
The MSM is too quick to analyze the event with the intent of fixing blame, IMO. We didn’t even know how many had been killed when the pundits began to criticize Va. Tech police and administration. Now, it could very well be that those folks messed up, perhaps big time, but we didn’t know that at 3PM yesterday afternoon. Yesterday was a time for reporting to the nation what had happened. There is time enough for figuring out who, if anybody, “messed up”. Too often in the past, the media’s rush to judgment has…um missed the mark. When will the media learn that doing a good job of reporting what has happened should be their focus. We have more than enough folks who will affix blame to feel compelled to do this while the basic story is still unfolding.
I feel for the victims and their families and friends. Peace!
Which one, in Iraq or in the US? There was another one the day before yesterday , & the day before that also, in Iraq. I think there`s another one going on right now, & they`re predicting many more in the days to come, but I think they`re mostly scheduled for Iraq ,so far. Things might change though. Who knows?
Maybe I’m cynical, but I’m so glad that it’s kicked the Punditocracy away from their own — Imus. What was a 2 or 3 day controversy has gone on in SUCH VOLUME when Iraq is hemorrhaging and the US wants to bomb Iran, starting a all-consuming Mid-East if not West Asian war.
At least some people have the guts, people like Larry Johnson, to remind us all that the slaughter of 32 innocents by a suicide idealist happens every day in Iraq — multiple times.
And every day in Darfur — and now, Chad.
And every day all across Africa because governments won’t violate trade treaties and buy cheap AIDS drugs from Brazil or India.
And in the prisons of China who kill prisoners for their organs.
And in the never-ending slaughter in Sri Lanka.
And in the plains, mountains and jungles of Columbia as warring paramilitary forces battle it out with US-supported government troops for the last 25 years.
And in the slums of Sao Paulo and Rio De Janiero where the life of crime has become the workforce economy since the upper classes there have denied any wealth to the poor.
And in the turmoil of East Timor, with its tiny oil wealth that has caused so much bloodshed year after year after year.
Oh yes, I feel for all those persons, slaughtered innocents, every day, every year of my 46 years, no more and no less for my fellow Americans affected by the slaughter in Virginia.
We are all citizens of the world. My heart bleeds and goes out to all the innocents slaughtered, not just the few.
I certainly hope this stupid shooting incidence leaves Big Media quick, because it’s no more important than the other slaughters in the news and not; and I hope Big Media focuses on the Real Criminals, the Real slaughterers — Blair, Cheney, Putin, Chirac, Jin Tao, Olmert, Saud, Bush, Feith, Wolfowitz, Cambone, Rumsfeld, Addington, Rove, the list goes on.
Be real folks, stop the gossipping. Get real. Arrest the real criminals, leave the innocent alone.