Going Out in Style

In his post about Mark Ames’s repugnant polemic Going Postal, Michael Weiss made the observation, with respect to the Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui, that “snapped” is a “quaint characterization of a very deliberate process.” This quaint characterization appears prominently in the suicide note of Robert A. Hawkins, the Westroads Mall shooter: “I’ve just snapped I can’t take this meaningless existence anymore I’ve been a constant disappointment and that trend would have only continued.”

This calls to mind what James Bowman, The New Criterion’s media critic, has called the “aristocracy of feelings.” He might as well call it the tyranny of feelings. The person reading the note is meant to applaud or at least comprehend the emotional hardship that led to Hawkins’s decision to kill. The line “I’ve been a constant disappointment and that trend would have only continued” ought to be the stuff of mediocre satire. Surely even a homicidal youth could see that nothing would “disappoint” his family, friends, are the general public more than a shopping-mall massacre? Maybe not, and there’s the rub—and, in this case, the rubbing out of many innocent people. As Bowman notes here, Hawkins made one part of his motivation painfully clear:

“Now I’ll be famous,” wrote 19-year-old Robert Hawkins the other day before murdering eight people at the Westroads shopping mall in Omaha and then killing himself. Now that, two days later, The New York Times is reporting on those who are “searching for clues to a young killer’s motivations,” you’ve got to wonder why anyone would need more “clues” than that? . . .

Yet isn’t it strange that the Times reporters don’t even mention the motivation cited by the boy himself? What about the desire to be famous? What about the belief that by killing a bunch of his neighbors at random before killing himself he was going to “go out in style”? Are these not worth a moment’s consideration? Don’t they sound plausible “motivations” when we see every day what people—particularly young people—are willing to do for fame? Didn’t the Virginia Tech shooter last April have a similar motivation? What about the “YouTube killer” in Finland only last month?

As I wrote earlier this month, “It’s time we decided not to celebrate this kind of atrocity.” I should clarify that I don’t think the celebration is deliberate (Mark Ames’s book being a notable exception), but it’s celebration nonetheless. Stanley Crouch agrees:

[T]his adds up to a considerable challenge for the media, but not one beyond its capability. If the media had the courage and developed the narrative skills to make the lives of the victims more important and more compelling in their humanity than the crabbed and tortured lives of their murderers, the attention would give the killers far less space than the victims.

Imagine if it saved lives beyond the killer himself. He might then only do away with one person. We would then be spared the body bags filled with those whom he had planned to sacrifice on the altar of television.

Speaking of “narrative skills,” the media should take some of the blame for propagating the narrative arc that Hawkins used so disingenuously in his suicide note. Does anybody believe that he shot up a shopping mall because he was tired of being a disappointment? Or is his confessed craving for fame all the explanation that this crime admits? Of course the media can’t dwell on the one aspect of the crime in which the media is itself complicit.

This made the media’s hyperventilations about the Virginia Tech Halloween costumes a little hard to stomach. The costumes were in poor taste, but the incredulity wasn’t warranted. We have modern life—from the art world to Quentin Tarantino—to thank for the interminable arms race of outrage. It’s no surprise that people sometimes cross a line they didn’t know was there in the first place. Far more shocking than the costumes was the backlash to the backlash:

[O]ne of the Penn State students was disgusted that a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group called “People Against This Costume” in response to the tasteless choice of attire.

This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed . . . The thing is, everybody’s making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26 thousand that happen in America everyday. That’s the problem with college students. They all live in an ivory tower of privilege.

I don’t think people need the help of trends to be upset about their friends being killed. I don’t think the desire to be safe from random acts of violence makes one a of white-bread “son of privilege.” But in the killers’ maudlin self-justifications, in the media’s responses, and in tougher-than-thou nonsense like the above-quoted, we can see these supposedly “random” crimes following an ever-stricter pattern. Is there any good reason to expect that they’ll stop?