Take This News Cycle & Shove It
Apr. 18th, 2007 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraWho decides this news cycle thing anyway?
We are now at the T minus 48 hours point of the Virginia Tech incident and the thing is still dominating airwaves and print media, assholes on both sides of the liberal-conservative divide using the opportunity to shill their personal ideologies – "Guns – bad!" "No, guns – good! If more people had had guns they could have shot the sucker down!"
And I am starting to get into that itchy fretting mood that signals media overload.
Ben tries to explain the difference to me between Virginia Tech (death toll = 33) and Waco (death toll = 76.)
"Why, there's no comparison at all!" he scoffs. "The Virginia Tech massacre was an irrational act by a lone, insane gunman. Waco was a siege that took place over time and was organized around a political goal –"
"So-o a political goal makes slaughter more defensible?"
"Well-l-l-l-l. Yeah. Sure."
See, I would say just the opposite. My guess is that Cho Seung Hui was a delusional paranoid schizophrenic whose training as a resident alien impressed upon him the need to maintain at all cost and maintain at all times.
We can easily infer he was a huge disappointment to his family. Korean families are organized around strictly patriarchal lines: the sons get everything; the daughters, zilch. (Iljin Cho was not Robin's best friend for two years for nothing!) Yet it was Cho Seung Hui's sister who got into the Ivy League school (Princeton) while Cho Seung Hui only made it as far as the perfectly serviceable – go, Hokies! – but (let's face it) not upper tier university. An enormous reversal of the natural order, this.
Having already disgraced himself and his family, I suspect Cho made a decision not to humiliate himself further by revealing even darker flaws. Like for instance, the imaginary friend who sat next to him in Nikki Giovanni's poetry class in the fall of 2005, urging him to spy and plot against his classmates.
"There was something mean about this boy," Giovanni recollected for the cameras yesterday. (In the interest of full disclosure here, may I just say how much I fucking hate her poetry.)
"I know we're talking about a troubled youngster and crap like that, but troubled youngsters get drunk and jump off buildings; troubled youngsters drink and drive. I've taught troubled youngsters. I've taught crazy people. It was the meanness that bothered me. It was a, really, mean streak."
And crap like that… See, I would say her analysis is incredibly ethnocentric: troubled white kids might get drunk and jump off buildings; troubled African American kids might get drunk and jump off buildings.
Troubled Southeast Asian kids are more likely to turn inward. The control will get tighter and tighter and tighter. Like a steel cable. That finally breaks.
I'm fairly certain Cho Seung Hui was insane which absolves him from personal responsibility, at least in my eyes.
Can't say the same for Janet Reno.
And then this whole gun control brouhaha – enough! Dammit. You could just as easily blame it on lax immigration standards – too many green card South East Asians! close the fucking borders! – Or lax industrial standards in the dry-cleaning industry. (Parents either worked in one or owned one; killer was almost certainly exposed to toxic chemicals.)
But the real one-two punch is this:
This morning while CNN was interviewing the mother of a cousin of a roommate of a VICTIM, they were forced to cut to a ten-second clip: Meanwhile, back in Iraq…
Ho-hum. That news cycle jumped the shark so long ago!
… one hundred and nineteen people – most of them civilians – died in the aftermath of a car bombing.
Top Ten Differences Between the Virginia Tech Massacre and This Morning's Iraqi incident:
1. Glock less efficient than car bomb
2. Death count higher in Sadriya market
3. Sadriya market incident organized around a political goal, therefore defensible
4. No Americans involved in Sadriya market incident, just guys with funny head scarves
I'll leave the other six to David Letterman.
We are now at the T minus 48 hours point of the Virginia Tech incident and the thing is still dominating airwaves and print media, assholes on both sides of the liberal-conservative divide using the opportunity to shill their personal ideologies – "Guns – bad!" "No, guns – good! If more people had had guns they could have shot the sucker down!"
And I am starting to get into that itchy fretting mood that signals media overload.
Ben tries to explain the difference to me between Virginia Tech (death toll = 33) and Waco (death toll = 76.)
"Why, there's no comparison at all!" he scoffs. "The Virginia Tech massacre was an irrational act by a lone, insane gunman. Waco was a siege that took place over time and was organized around a political goal –"
"So-o a political goal makes slaughter more defensible?"
"Well-l-l-l-l. Yeah. Sure."
See, I would say just the opposite. My guess is that Cho Seung Hui was a delusional paranoid schizophrenic whose training as a resident alien impressed upon him the need to maintain at all cost and maintain at all times.
We can easily infer he was a huge disappointment to his family. Korean families are organized around strictly patriarchal lines: the sons get everything; the daughters, zilch. (Iljin Cho was not Robin's best friend for two years for nothing!) Yet it was Cho Seung Hui's sister who got into the Ivy League school (Princeton) while Cho Seung Hui only made it as far as the perfectly serviceable – go, Hokies! – but (let's face it) not upper tier university. An enormous reversal of the natural order, this.
Having already disgraced himself and his family, I suspect Cho made a decision not to humiliate himself further by revealing even darker flaws. Like for instance, the imaginary friend who sat next to him in Nikki Giovanni's poetry class in the fall of 2005, urging him to spy and plot against his classmates.
"There was something mean about this boy," Giovanni recollected for the cameras yesterday. (In the interest of full disclosure here, may I just say how much I fucking hate her poetry.)
"I know we're talking about a troubled youngster and crap like that, but troubled youngsters get drunk and jump off buildings; troubled youngsters drink and drive. I've taught troubled youngsters. I've taught crazy people. It was the meanness that bothered me. It was a, really, mean streak."
And crap like that… See, I would say her analysis is incredibly ethnocentric: troubled white kids might get drunk and jump off buildings; troubled African American kids might get drunk and jump off buildings.
Troubled Southeast Asian kids are more likely to turn inward. The control will get tighter and tighter and tighter. Like a steel cable. That finally breaks.
I'm fairly certain Cho Seung Hui was insane which absolves him from personal responsibility, at least in my eyes.
Can't say the same for Janet Reno.
And then this whole gun control brouhaha – enough! Dammit. You could just as easily blame it on lax immigration standards – too many green card South East Asians! close the fucking borders! – Or lax industrial standards in the dry-cleaning industry. (Parents either worked in one or owned one; killer was almost certainly exposed to toxic chemicals.)
But the real one-two punch is this:
This morning while CNN was interviewing the mother of a cousin of a roommate of a VICTIM, they were forced to cut to a ten-second clip: Meanwhile, back in Iraq…
Ho-hum. That news cycle jumped the shark so long ago!
… one hundred and nineteen people – most of them civilians – died in the aftermath of a car bombing.
Top Ten Differences Between the Virginia Tech Massacre and This Morning's Iraqi incident:
1. Glock less efficient than car bomb
2. Death count higher in Sadriya market
3. Sadriya market incident organized around a political goal, therefore defensible
4. No Americans involved in Sadriya market incident, just guys with funny head scarves
I'll leave the other six to David Letterman.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-18 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-18 06:12 pm (UTC)"Mom, these people, are they still dead?"
"What?
"The people, are they still dead?"
"Yeah."
"So what do you need the news for?"
no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-18 09:05 pm (UTC)Good point. We need to stop the perpetrators of killings of college-age (and military-age) Americans in the US and prevent future killings. We also need to stop the perpetrators of killings of college-age (and military-age) Americans in Iraq and prevent future killings.
Unfortunately for Iraq, and places like Darfur, and fortunately for us here, homicidal-suicidal, death-obsessed crazies like Cho Seung Hui seem much more abundant in that part of the world than in the US.
It's an orders of magnitude tougher task to stop the crazies in Iraq, but the responsibility remains to stop them from killing our people, as well as the Iraqi people. Cho Seung Hui at Va Tech and today's bombings show how hard that is to do, even under seemingly stable conditions involving only one crazy.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-18 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 06:22 pm (UTC)Gotcha. I'm not sure why I have such a black sense of humor -- a defense mechanism, obviously. The brutality, the senselessness of what happened is so stunning that I suppose the only way I can deal with it is to minimize it.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-19 04:48 pm (UTC)