At this point in American history, we're all pretty well accustomed to lone nut gunmen (and to some extent, lone nut gunmen with buddies): Charles Whitman, Kip Kinkel, Harris/Klebold, Charles Unruh, "Big Jim" Huberty and others have seen to that. And every time one of them cuts loose in a school or a cafeteria or a factory or a post office or an office complex, the news reports sound sickeningly the same: the crimes and their perpetrators have come to seem so much "of a type" as to seem scripted.
Which is perfectly convenient for the parasites in the broadcast and print media: The stories practically write themselves! And overnight ratings and newsstand sales both soar through the roof! Ah, the profits to be made from blood-drenched human tragedy. ("BLOODBATH!" screams the headline on today's Detroit "News," which makes itself look even more pathetic than its usual norm by desperately seeking out a "survivor" of the attack with Michigan roots to interview. They manage to find one: A woman who happened to be in the basement of a different building. Nothing like going for the relevant eyewitness account, eh...?).
And so from the first breathless "this just in" radio reports, the die was cast as to the nature of the media coverage of the demented carnage at Virginia Tech. And with that, so was the popular response, including on this blog. Some scream for more gun control; some scream that other students should've been armed; others argue that the cops or the college were negligent in allowing classes to be in session following the first set of shootings. But regardless of an individual's point of view, the same basic assumption seems to underpin all positions: That this shooting is an isolated incident, an incomprehensible rupture in the normally smooth social fabric, an unpredictable act of madness undertaken by a hopelessly aberrant individual.
That same basic assumption, if I recall correctly, was the predominant line of thinking after San Ysidro. After Austin. After Killeen. After Columbine. It seems to me that a pattern emerges, yes?
It's not that they are all gun crimes - the sort of trite, superficial answer that not only misses the point, but which ultimately obscures the actual, ugly truth of the matter. I mean that ours is a society which mass manufactures hopelessly aberrant individuals.
I mean that Cho Seung-Hui, like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Kip Kinkel and Charles Whitman and Jim Huberty and Charles Unruh and Lt. William Calley and Gen. Douglas MacArthur and countless others before him, is a distinctly American breed of human being, the consumer-sociopath. Far from being the waste byproduct of American society, he is one of its key product offerings - Insensate Dehumanized Sociopathic Man, groomed by the media and the social machine to feel forever lacking, forever hollow, forever hungry. To always crave control. To always Want More, and to feel like he Deserves It. To be suspicious, to trust no one, to demand satisfaction and to strike out violently when left unsatisfied.
The perfect consumer. The perfect boss. The perfect cop. At home interrogating prisoners at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib, or engineering a leveraged buyout resulting in thousands of layoffs, or beating a speeding suspect with his mag light, or abusing one of his students. A Charles Graner, a Lynndie England, a Kirk Kerkorian, a Blackwater contractor, a star quarterback. A Donald Rumsfeld. A Dick Cheney. A George W. Bush. A herd animal who functions flawlessly in his appointed setting - a position in which he can experience a steady increase in his own personal power over his environment and over others, and sense a steady increase in the amount of wealth he controls and items he possesses. Deprived of these things? A rabid dog.
In his sadly-neglected book To Have Or To Be?, Erich Fromm posits two primary possible modes of existence, Having and Being, as the title would suggest. The former would be defined as the American ideal, as marked by huge cars and expansive lawns and fat paychecks and television commercials which convince one that only through the purchase of Product X will you truly attain contentment, with "Winning isn't everything - it's the only thing" as its credo. In such a culture, a person's worth is determined by what they own or control: One HAS a job, a spouse, children, a house, a car, a title, authority; the person's relationship to those things is determined by the quality of having, of ownership - the ability to direct, control, limit, manipulate, influence, and to successfully compete others who similarly wish to direct, control, limit, and so forth. Fromm's Being mode, on the other hand, is experiential: A person living a being existence derives self-concept and self-worth from internal rather than external factors; ownership and control are inessential, and relationships with others, with objects, and with the external environment are measured by the quality and nature of interactions and experiences rather than the degree of control, ownership or influence wielded.
All of this might seem esoteric in relation to yesterday's events, and in no way am I doing Fromm justice with this brief summation; nor can I satisfactorily detail the characteristics of the Chos and Hubertys and Cheneys in the space of this diary. What I wish to do is suggest here that what we really have to look at is the type of people we (collectively, as a nation) are, and the type of people we are breeding and grooming our children to be. I posit that the sociopathic killers we fear and despise are not some monstrous "other" - they are just at an extreme end of an all-American bell curve, and that their "monstrous" characteristics are merely distorted magnifications of beliefs which most of us have, to some degree or another, assimilated and promulgated. And I'd suggest that if we truly want to keep more Columbines and Virginia Techs from happening over the long term, we'd best look beyond simpleminded feel-good answers like "better security" and "gun control" and look instead at what sort of human beings are produced by hypercompetitive, image-obsessed, consumption-driven, sensation-seeking cultures.
Yesterday's sick slaughter wasn't the first of its type, and it won't be the last. I wouldn't say that my partially formed ideas on this subject constitute complete answers, but I think that they could be part of a starting point for a different kind of dialogue on this subject. The "lone gunman" is a symptom of a pervasive American sickness. Let's start correctly apprehending it as such; then we might stand a chance of arriving at a cure.