The Media and 21st Century Suicide:
America’s Hyper-Attentive Media and lax gun culture inspired and encourage a toxic new way to die.
Remember when people who wanted to get attention made bombs? Crazy people like the Unabomber, or the Oklahoma City bombers. They were evil, and they had agendas that they wanted to get out to the population. But they were crazy. And their ideas were crazy. And so no one would listen to them, and they didn’t get the publicity they thought they deserved.
So they got the idea to kill some people. And the more people they killed, the more the media seemed to take notice. Who was this person? WHY did he do these things? WHAT was in his head? HOW can we “understand” why he would do this sort of thing?
It turned out that a crazy manifesto and a few corpses got these guys a lot more attention than just the crazy manifesto itself ever could. Their faces were plastered on the front page of the paper. Their name and their “ideas” were discussed by serious people on the morning shows.
And somewhere along the way, this obscene path from violence to publicity started to become almost routine. Don’t think people are listening to you? Blow something up! Then they will take notice. Then you will be famous.
Luckily, there are only so many madmen with manifestos. Moreover, one of the few violence-reducing concepts that we have been able to agree on as a country is that the making and ownership of bombs is a bad practice. So we have laws against this sort of thing, which makes finding these people before they do damage at least a bit easier. Plus, as you can’t just buy them, making bombs actually takes some effort and risk of being found out.
Unfortunately, though, even as bombings became less common, the path from violence to media stardom was still visible to anyone interested in that sort of thing. And now a new group began to discover it. This group was far larger, and in many ways far more dangerous. There is always an element in society that feels left out, alienated and ignored. People who run the gamut from disillusioned to mentally ill, who feel invisible in our modern culture. Folks who don’t necessarily actually have any personally-profound ideas or agendas, but who are maybe just desperate to be “somebody.”
It turns out that to be “somebody” in modern America means fame. And fame is tough to achieve in a country of 300 million people. You have to be really talented to get famous in a good way. Be a top athlete. Be a great singer or performer. Have a really cool idea. Increasingly, either being really attractive or really rich may circumvent this time and talent requirement, but most of us don’t have that shortcut to fall back on either. So to get famous you have to work, study and become really good at something that a lot of people admire.
Or you could just kill people, and settle for being famous for being bad. That works too.
Plus, that is something even the lowest common denominator of our society can accomplish. Our country makes firearm weaponry available to pretty much anyone, and those seeking attention don’t even have to be skilled or dedicated enough to make a bomb!
You see, the key thing is that the media LOVE you when you murder people. They pretend to be horrified by you, but they really do love you. Just watch how they talk about how the shooter was “intelligent but withdrawn” or “a good student.” They find those pictures he took in his camo outfit or his trenchcoat. They make him look menacing, and sort of cool. They find the eeriest, freakiest picture of him that they can, and force it into the eyeballs of the entire nation for a week.
Now the killer doesn’t get to see any of this, of course. Because part of the bargain they seem to make with the media is that they are going to kill themselves as part of the game. That lets the talking heads tell the story the way they like, filled with flashbacks, and stories of a sad, tortured past. Sure, the shooter is dead. But he’s FAMOUS now. He got his picture on the front page of every newspaper and news website in America. And he didn’t even have to study or practice or have any talent at anything! What a deal!! As a note, if the killer fails the media on this last point, they really do turn on him. Because then that sad, pasty, pathetic little kid is sitting wild eyed in the courtroom, its obvious to everyone what a loser he really is. And no amount of menacing and cool framing can fix that.
So while it seems to me that the logic of banning assault rifles and massive ammunition clips is easily apparent, another element to the sort of violence we are seeing in modern America is that the media in this country encourage this behavior. This sort of rampage has become a new form of ritualized public suicide in American culture, and there are two simple reasons why.
1. The easy availability of guns makes it possible for even a relatively untrained lone actor to prepare for and to inflict catastrophic loss on a community.
2. The media response to each action is to publicize the attack, the suffering and the killer. Reporters examine his life and his perceived slights, empowering him through their attention and in effect using each tragedy as an amplifier, promising similar publicity to any disturbed viewers willing to provide them with additional tragedies to fill their upcoming 24/7 news cycles.
This of course means that the media gets what they need, and the killers get what they want. And the rest of us just stumble from tragedy to tragedy hoping we don’t get caught up in it. But no one who is suicidal seems to just kill themself anymore.
That is so Twentieth Century.
No, Twenty-First Century suicide seems to require that you take others with you. Suicidal individuals increasingly prefer to kill themselves and others in the most horrific, pointless and public manner possible. Because the more innocent the victims, the more pointless the carnage, the more they incent the networks and the newspapers to talk about them. The more they can drone on about how the killer was lonely, or misunderstood. The more they can search for answers in events that are at their core devoid of any reason. Except that there is a reason. And the longer the networks search for the reason, the more that they talk about these killers and their petty minds and problems, the more they BECOME the reason that the next distant loner does the exact damn same thing.
Even now, out on Huffington Post, we are learning that “New Details On Netwown Shooter’s Family Life” are emerging! How exciting for the Media!! And his classmates are suddenly thinking about him it seems, although they say “We Never Really Knew Much About Him.” CNN is excited to tell us that the killer’s computers were smashed! I’m sure they can’t wait to tell us exactly what was on them when the drives are recovered. USA Today even has his picture on the front page! What a lucky kid. Most Americans never make the front page of a major newspaper. He must really be something!
Reporters from all over the country will sift through every website, every contact, every photo they can find. And they will present them all to us. And then they will say “We have examined his every known action, thought and motive…and it just doesn’t make sense. Why would he do this? What could have been the reason?”
But somewhere out there in the audience is a kid with issues who understands. He now knows EXACTLY the reason why someone would do something so horrible. And the cycle starts again, as another 21st Century suicide begins to take shape, this one perhaps even just a bit more horrific than the last.
After all, to keep the networks happy you’ve got to top the last guy. Otherwise they might not pay proper attention.