Saturday, April 21, 2007

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.

4 Comments:

Blogger Mark Dowdy said...

You know, Fang, when I first read your comments on Heather's blog, I thought your comparison between what's his name and those other dudes was overstated. I figured what's his name was just plain off his rockers, but that he wasn't necessarily a media whore. Then we found out about his "multimedia manifesto" sent to NBC. Boy was I wrong ...

What I hate most about tragic events is that 1) they're tragic because they suck big time bad and 2) douchebags of all stripes will attempt to explain said tragedy in terms of said douchebag's particular world view. Hence, Newt Gingrich's incoherent attempt to blame "liberalism" (which, for wingers, is a vague category subject to continual revision when opportunity strikes). There's probably a left-wing analogy just as insipid, though. I just haven't heard it yet.

Obviously talking about guns and the NRA is relevant, regardless of where you stand on the 2nd amendment. But it's when the douchebag pundits -- witless opportunistic fucks -- attempt to mould tragic events into exemplary tales that we have to watch out.

Myself, I'm with you when you say such mindless events are nothing new. That the V-Tech massacre occured on a Monday is somewhat ironic, given the Boomtown Rats song "I Don't Like Mondays," which was about a 1980 schoolyard shooting in San Diego (strangely enough, comitted by a woman). Before guns, people stabbed, bludgeoned, garroted, smothered, drowned, defenestrated, etc. one another. Some people are simply anti-social and bad news. And usually no one figures out until it's too late. Sucks, but so does the fact that we don't get to be immortal.

But the douchebags will see such tragic events as an indication that everybody needs to get on board with douchebag's pet cause for if everyone were on board with douchebag's pet cause, this whole terrible thing wouldn't have happened.

In any event, I'm glad the students have ordered the media off their campus. Good for them.

2:39 PM

 
Blogger Mark Dowdy said...

Harry Shearer wrote: "[W]hat is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing Cho's self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker? Cho's pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from--in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read/see and parse them Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time. A society in which it's easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live."

link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/a-mediasavvy-murderer_b_46240.html

6:55 PM

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I do worry that these "go out in a blaze of glory" nuts will now do some copycat things, and try to move the body count up to even more impressive levels.

The one thing that I don't get about this particular deal is that everyone (or at least all the media) seem to be making such a big deal about it. Isn't this just Columbine on steroids? What is so different? The larger body count? And why, in heavens name, aren't more major media honchos, the Hollywood trend-setters, or someone with a loud voice, taking up the obvious gun-control cudgel? I understand why the Dems or anyone else with political aspirations don't want to commit suicide with the NRA and all the rural gun-nuts out there. But there must be some group with sufficient visibility who could make this a real public issue. Where are they? I appreciated your thought on this, and those others I have seen - mostly wafting in from overseas. Since our individual voices aren't working, I wonder if we can't find a way to get this concept into the mainstream. Can we find some credible voice that can raise it loud and wide?

I don't know if I'm just getting old, or what. The thing is, I don't think I'm a particularly brilliant specimen of the human race. When I compare myself to the folks I meet through work, or in any other context, I come out - honestly - as sort of middling mind. I'm not being modest, just honest. I do OK. I'm not one of the average proles out there who can barely balance a check-book. But I'm not going to set the world on fire with my beautiful mind. But, from the get-go, it was obvious to me that Iraq was a set-up job. It didn't take the best work of the CIA, even from this Midwestern distance, to figure out that Saddam was at best a third-rate bully without any WDM or anything else in the bank. And the parallels to Vietnam were patently obvious. It was clearly another morass waiting to happen. In some ways, I can forgive our dim-wit of a President. He clearly can't think his way out of church. But surely there must be enough other folks running the show who have enough of a sense of reality and history to have not allowed us to blunder into this mess. It wasn't like it took a rocket scientist to see this. So I don't get it. Here I am, a middlin' mind, and its clear as hell what we should do. But somehow Dumblefuck manages to lead all the other lemmings in a completely other direction? And all the lemmings think its great that we allow some among us to possess fire-sticks, which some of the less-endowed lemmings are (also obviously) sooner or later going to use to waste some of the innocent lemmings among us in places that lemmings are prone/forced to gather? I mean, to your 19-month-old son the answer has to be obvious. Take the big stick away from the kid who uses it to hit other kids. So why in the name of all that makes sense do we go on lurching down a road that obviously leads right off a cliff?

Lastly, a little lawyer trick. You might be interested to know that, re Gonzalez, the deal is that when cross-examining a witness, "I don't remember" is the trick that stops the cross examination cold. There is no way to impeach it. You can contradict (i.e. "impeach") a witness six ways from Sunday when they give any other answer. But when they give the "I can't remember" answer, you are stuck. That is why you see that lame answer so many times, and why even a dimwitted AG knows that is the necessary lie to tell.

~Mr. T

10:57 PM

 
Blogger Fang Bastardson said...

The MSM just goes from tragedy to tragedy, without ever putting anything into context. Seriously, you have to turn to Jon Stewart or Bill Maher’s excellent HBO program to get any non-talking-point analysis. Like one day last week while the MSM had its collective head up the VT shooting’s ass a few days before, W’s surge produced bombings in Baghdad that killed almost 200 people in a single day. In what alternate universe is this not the Big News Of The Day? In the alternate universe of the MSM where the Iraq War is now the Fallback Tragedy – if a blonde teenager goes missing in Aruba or a celebrity junkie ODs in the Bahamas, it receives saturation coverage till the next tragedy occurs. And the VT shootings hits the pleasure center of the MSM dead-center: Large body count; domestic incident so anchors can be there overnight; toothsome, all-American victims (at least at first blush); toothsome, all-American witnesses and survivors to tell-all to the camera; best of all the killer’s obsession with recognition for his efforts mirrors the media’s own. In short, this story was tailor-made for the 24-hour news cycle.

It’s the Nancy Grace-ification of mainstream news, and it’s why ‘the kids’ are turning away from it in droves, and toward places like the internet and late-night comedy shows for their news and analysis.

As for a credible spokesman to sway the masses on gun control, dude, there’s no way. Guns have been part of American culture and folklore since Day One. Here’s my ‘homicidal ideation’: Goofball A exploits every loophole in his local gun laws the gun lobby has put there, purchases his assault weapons perfectly legally, and goes to an NRA convention to amass his impressive body count, starting with the assholes on the dais. I can close my eyes right now and see that red laser site drifting across Wayne LaPierre’s forehead... But seriously, if the assassination attempt on Reagan’s life didn’t sway the right from their support of the Second Amendment, I think you could execute Jesus Christ in the town square and these blockheads wouldn’t blink.

Gun control is deader than the VT shooter.

Regarding the Left’s wobbly knees on Iraq, it comes down to simple political cover-your-assitude. Dumblefuck (I like that!) has boxed them, and us, into a corner where there is no good exit strategy. None at all. It’s not just that the Dems are as craven as the GOP is vicious and short-sighted, it’s that W has left us literally no good options. Iraq is fucked while we’re there, and it’ll probably get even more fucked if/when we leave. I don’t think King Solomon on his best day could puzzle his way out of the mess in Iraq we’ve allowed ourselves to be dragged into.

11:26 PM

 

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