eye of the storm

the quest for an explanation of cho has really reached stunning and amazing proportions, calling forth the most intense intellectual inquiry by the world's greatest scientists. their conclusion? he ran amok.

forensic psychiatrist Manuel L. Saint Martin . . . has tracked about 50 cases.  Cho's rampage had the classic signs," said Saint Martin: "It is very likely this was a case of amok."

but i would like more specific information. what exactly is the probability, expressed as a percentage, that cho ran amok? and in the name of science, we also must consider the rival theory that cho went berserk.

what i think is an interesting question about events like vatech: to what extent do we, should we, can we (or: do i should i can i) feel connected? well, i do feel more connected than to a bunch of bodies in baghdad. why? sheer physical proximity? class or national solidarity? is it because i'm soaked in coverage? i do feel like there's a slight element of simulation in the "we are all vatech" moments all over the country, a bit of emotional forcedness, a bit of ethical theatricality that is about establishing our own goodness, to ourselves among others. but surely we ought to respond, ought to feel something? should it be something deep, and if it isn't are we defective? a friend of my wife's spoke very movingly about the whole thing, choking up a little, and she asked him whether he had a connection to the people. his response? "my daughter almost went there." that's pretty thin: but yet we are eager to make some kind of emotional claim. should we shut down the campus, the state, the nation, the world? i'm not purporting to answer these questions but to raise them raises a series of fundamental ethical questions about the extent of empathy, the principles of connection, our claim on one another and the processes by which these claims and connections are mediated.

unaccountably, i haven't heard anybody blaming vatech on hip hop. you might start by searching lyrics for "glock." i'm thinking about the connections of hip hop to global warming, alberto gonzales, and darfur. i have it on good authority that just before he started torturing people, dick cheney was soaked in wu-tang clan. late middle-aged assholes are so...impressionable.

let me hit you with some  atheism in the face of vatech (and let me remind you: something like four times as many people were killed by a bomb in baghdad today (only they don't count, or they count, say, 100,000/1). really, the monotheisms (=judaism+christianity+islam), according to whom god is all-powerful and perfectly good, are incompatible with this event. it's not that, once you write a book developing an amazing rationalization, it might not turn out that they are strictly logically inconsistent, but that you've just got a dishonest, and i want to say, more or less obviously false vision of the universe as you embark on this project. you don't look at the world and say: how might a world like this have come about? you look at some dogma that was enforced upon your person, and ask: how can i make this compatible with a breathtakingly anomalous situation? when your faith ceases to be directed at the world, you are subject to any delusion. blame it on sin or free will, but then you're going to have to make every single poor fucking asshole ridden with bullets deserve what she got.

the religious response is not an honest response: it is self-delusion. but it is poignant: surely none of us can squarely face this world - its horror. we must evade or escape by some means, and the religious means is no worse than the alcohol means, the emotional deadness means, the cho means of i'm just going to kill everyone; i commit myself to destroying this world. actually, the religious means is better than that, anyway.

one thing about us. when something like vatech happens, we mourn for three seconds. then we try to figure out who to blame, and go to 24-hour coverage of that question. obviously, after the first shooting these cops and officials had a chaotic situation and a plausible theory. they didn't move that slowly, and i don't think we can know whether their decisions were reasonable; probably, they were, more or less. it's funny about powerful people like college presidents or presidents of the united states: one of their basic functions is to be scapegoats, even in unaccountable insane disasters. you'd have to say the gov response to katrina was pathetic and idiotic. but on the other hand people started blaming bush before the rain stopped: for the state of the levees, for global warming that caused the hurricane etc. this may be why anarchism is actually impossible: because then we won't have the sacrificial victim by which we make sense of our senseless world. we want an agent we can identify and spit-roast, even if we have to generate an extremely strained story to do it, even if we have to hold them to standards that we ourselves could not possibly meet. a related sort of example: without hitler to fantastically absorb the responsibility of millions of germans for the holocaust, they'd never have been able to look themselves in the mirror after 1945. it's as though one person or a little cabal executed millions.