Infinite MonkeysSomething about Deb Saunders' column today resonates. "In this short attention-span nation, people know how to opine, speculate and second-guess. We take other people's agony and irreparable loss, and turn their pain into a soap opera." So it seems.
I've consciously avoided much of the coverage of the Virginia Tech mass-murder, although it's impossible to avoid it all. The network news' exploitation of the killer's psychotic rantings is, of course, perverse and obscene. Cho sought notoriety and fame in his actions and, in its wisdom, NBC gave it to him. In an older, less enlightened era, we might have desecrated Cho's corpse and scattered his limbs to the four corners of the realm. Let this be a lesson to the copy-cats, to the "generations of the weak and the defenseless people" he wished to inspire. Why not? We're sinking rapidly into barbarism anyway.
I operate in a realm in which everything is grounded in "solutions." Every day the question I'm asked to answer is: Who do we want to see do what? But there is no solution to the problem of evil.
Update: In addition to amending two short sentences above, I commend readers to Peggy Noonan's rambling but occasionally illuminating ruminations today. A sample: "With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate -- we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy -- but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself."
Posted by H.L. Monkey at April 19, 2007 10:24 PM