Sometime on Monday evening, I found myself in a position that Americans aren't often put in: I was checking for my friends' names on lists of the civilian dead. I worked at Virginia Tech for a while. Left, moved somewhere else that suits me much better. But there are still many people I know there that I like very much and sporadically keep in touch with.
I sent an e-mail to several of them. One by one they all responded, with notes sad and touching. Some were also feeling the loss from one remove. But others had lost students, collaborators, close family friends. My graduate student came to work Tuesday in tears over Dr. Librescu, who had been on her husband's Ph.D. committee and a friend to both of them. The girls in the belly dance club that I once taught beginner lessons to cancelled their spring show because they'd lost their friend Reema Samaha.
So it's very easy for me to imagine being there. It's easy to imagine because I know the Tech campus very well. It's also easy to imagine because I visited my New York friends and walked by ground zero on Sept. 28, 2001. Right now, they are devastated by unexpected and undeserved disaster, and there is a great echoing hole that seems it will never close.
I have no problem believing that a university might not keep their eye on a disturb(ed)(ing) student, or that they might not take the complaints of women who'd thought him menacing particularly seriously. I have no problem believing that gun-happy Virginia couldn't have cared less that he was mentally unstable when he went to get his guns. But whatever else you might say about what could have, should have, would have been, you can not say this and expect to escape without consequences:
At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.
Oh yes. If only they'd "fought back". THAT'S what the problem was.
I can imagine how it would have been to be there, in Norris Hall, with its high old windows and run-down ambiance. I would have been in the classroom, fiddling with an overhead projector or perhaps expounding on the ins and outs of molecular sequence analysis to my enraptured class. A crazy-eyed kid would have burst in the door and shot me in the head maybe before I even turned to look. And my students would have been shocked, horrified, frozen in their seats, because it's just so unexpected. So unreal. It doesn't happen daily or weekly or ever. Blacksburg isn't Jerusalem, it's not Baghdad, no one is prepared to react to gunshots. And so they'd have been slaughtered. If I hadn't been the first person shot I might have tried to protect them, or maybe they'd have tried to protect me. And maybe some of us would have survived. Maybe not.
Since the shooting, the National Review has been host to some of the most repulsive electronic opinions I've heard. That somehow, engineering and German students should be able to switch into Rambo mode and take down a killer with their bare hands within seconds of seeing their professors and friends shot in front of them. That somehow, it's their fault for not being macho enough.
I thought to myself, they got advertisers to drop Ann Coulter like a hot potato.
Hmm.
Who advertises at the National Review, I wondered? McDonald's? Wellpoint? Blackwater? Satan?
No, it turns out that any number of "reasonable" corporate citizens advertise there. Verizon. Hewlett Packard, CNBC. PBS. Encounter Books. Would any one of them want to publicly be associated with right-wing columnists blaming college kids for not being Rambo?
Could the National Review be made to hurt a little for publishing this tripe on The Corner? In that little corner of their spirit wallet where they feel it most? Because they've published what I thought to be the most mean-spirited, crazy-thinking, death-culture views on the Virginia Tech shootings. If public pressure can get NBC to stop featuring Cho's hateful videos, maybe public pressure can deprive ideas like these of their megaphone. The right to freedom of speech does not mean a right to get paid for that speech, or to amplify it through the massive megaphone of the news establishment.
I was going to compile a list of advertisers to write to and links to the articles in question but first I thought I'd see what happened to this diary, before sticking my whole foot into the morass of the Corner to see who regularly advertises there.