Speak No Evil

I swore I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to write about the killings at Virginia Tech.

But this morning I decided to go for it after all, just to show it could be done without contributing to making a folk hero of a mass murderer.

Actually, I’m not writing about the killings at all. I’m not shoving a microphone into grieving relatives’ faces, demanding to know “how they feel.” I’m not gonna put up photos of the killer posing like the cover shot of an import-only snuff flick.

And I for sure as goddamn hell am not going to give any ink, or web space, to the name of the sick, insignificant bastard who killed all those people in order to get his name and image splashed all over the media.

I’m going to write about the media.

I’ve been sitting on my irritation all week, not wanting to participate in any way in helping achieve the murderer’s dream of infamy for him. But in private emails, I’ve been encouraging my fellow bloggers to exercise similar restraint. And now, by the end of the week, a lot of the MSM has come to the same conclusion that I came to upon first hearing about the bloodbath, which is that the saturation coverage of the killings isn’t a by-product of the event, it is indeed its very purpose. And by fulfilling the shooter’s purpose, we validate the killer’s intentions, and by validating them, we become complicit.

The proof is in the killer’s manifesto itself, where he references the Columbine killers by name and mentions what cool cats he considered them.

As soon as the multimedia hate package surfaced at NBC, I couldn’t go to a single news web page or TV channel for days without having this asshole’s sullen visage snarling back at me. “Look at me, look at my sexy guns. Look at me hate you while craving your approbation. Mourn my victims for a little while, but remember my name forever!”

I was stunned at the ignorance of the media outlets making hay of the alleged “manifesto” and the images it contained.

When I was single, I used to say that the last part of the sex act wasn’t climaxing, it was telling your friends the next day about how you got laid last night. This is the same thing. The rampage didn’t end when the last bullet was fired, and it wasn’t meant to. All those horrible, unnecessary deaths were only the means to an end, which end was realized a couple days later with the saturation coverage of the killer’s name, face and story.

Finally, after a day or two, the MSM somehow got a fucking clue and pulled the offending images, but the damage was done. The next time some disaffected, loner, loser wretch arms himself to the teeth and goes big game hunting at his school or office, you’d better believe he’s gonna be thinking about this guy and the fame he achieved, just like this guy was thinking about the Columbine cunts when he embarked on his own desperate adventure.

At this point, I must give better-late-then-never props to cnn.com. After they came to their collective senses regarding helping make this guy an inspiration to future spree-killers, in place of the murderer’s self-portraits they began to run individual photos of the victims as their main art. I still wish they had relegated the story off the top of their home page, but at least they were giving coverage where coverage was due – the extraordinary young lives cut brutally short, and not promoting their killer’s sick agenda.

I produce several rural community newspapers for a living, and this week I ran a story about the mental health concerns raised in the wake of this latest school shooting. It took me about 90 seconds to edit out and write around the miscreant’s name, and you know what? My readers will know what I’m talking about, and will be able to take from the story what they need to without my having added to the killer’s desired infamy.

As a society, there’s not much we can do about spree killings except sit back in horror as the body count mounts. The gun genie is out of the bottle and isn’t going back in. Even the President of the United States’ first comments on the tragedy included a preemptory endorsement of the Second Amendment, compassionate conservative that he is.

And society will continue to produce disaffected, hate-filled losers. From Cain and Abel to ripped-from-this-morning’s-headlines, we like killing each other. As a species, it’s one of the things that really gets our rocks off.

But as individuals, and for myself as a junior member of the MSM, we can commit to not moving the problem forward by lionizing these creeps in the aftermath of their evil deeds.

The ancient Egyptians did a pretty cool thing with people who fell out of favor in their society – they erased his (or her) name from anywhere it appeared (which in ancient Egypt was pretty much everywhere). After a generation or two, the memory of the offending party was expunged, lost to history.

Obviously, that option is no longer available to us, nor is it necessarily even advisable. You can’t undo history by ignoring it (see Operation Iraqi ad Infinitum), but we can put events in a context that doesn’t encourage the next generation of gun-toting wackos to think killing innocents is their ticket to a place in the history books.

We can shun them. We can join in a conspiracy of silence to never speak their name. We can’t erase their evil acts, but we can deny them the notoriety their evil acts were committed to perpetuate. And if we can get the goddamned media to play by the same set of rules, I personally believe we can help avert future such tragedies.