It’s easy to be disgusted by the so-called national response to the shootings at Virginia Tech. There is a so-called national response only because the media has told us there is a national response. George Bush, waxing mundanely, reminds the families of victims and students that the nation mourns for them.
I’m not sure which is more grotesque — an anthropomorphic (and conceptually artificial) nation capable of tears or yet another in a string of crystal-meth hyperboles and other baseless proclamations from print press, radio, and that void of sensibility, TV.
Let’s be honest. In a country of 300,000,000 people, the terrible killing of 30 or so of them is not big news. It does not shed light on campus life, nor should it. It does not provide any meaningful fodder for the gun-rights debate. It tells us nothing about mental illness as a cultural phenomenon. It’s a local crime in a pedestrian setting perpetrated by a mentally ill loser. Why that’s front-page news in San Francisco (or New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Dubuque) perplexes me.
A country that is technically but not emotionally at war with a country it has utterly destabilized — that’s worthy of a national response. People are killed constantly and horribly in Darfur, Iraq, and Palestine, but we don’t much care if it doesn’t take place on our soil.
Pompous religiosity and preening talking heads do not a tragedy make. Life goes on. Take your thin blanket of concern — national responders — and stick it up your ass.