The
Virginia Tech Massacre: Social Roots Of Another American Tragedy
By David Walsh
19 April, 2007
World
Socialist Web
A day
after the mass killing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, along
with grief and dismay, some reflections on life in the US are clearly
in order. The event was horrifying, but no one who has followed the
evolution of American society over the past quarter-century will be
entirely shocked. Such psychopathic episodes, including dozens of multiple
killings or attempted killings in workplaces and schools, have occurred
with disturbing regularity, particularly since the mid-1980s. A timeline
assembled by the Associated Press and the School Violence Resource Center
lists some 30 school and college shootings alone since 1991.
Official reaction to the
Blacksburg deaths, one feels safe in predicting, will be as superficial
and irrelevant as it has been in every previous case.
The appearance of George
W. Bush at the convocation held on the Virginia Tech campus Tuesday
afternoon was especially inappropriate. Here is a man who embodies the
worst in America, its wealthy and corrupt ruling elite. As governor
of Texas, Bush presided over the executions of 152 human beings; as
president, he has the blood of thousands of Americans, tens of thousands
of Afghans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands. His administration
has made unrelenting violence the foundation of its global policies,
justifying assassination, secret imprisonment and torture.
Speaking of the Blacksburg
killings, Bush commented: “Those whose lives were taken did nothing
to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Now they’re gone—and they leave behind grieving families,
and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.” If he and his
cronies were not entirely immune to the consequences of their own policies,
it might strike them that they could be speaking about the masses of
the dead in Iraq, who have also done “nothing to deserve their
fate.”
The president, in his perfunctory
remarks, appeared anxious, above all, to put the events behind him.
Bush’s comment that “It’s impossible to make sense
of such violence and suffering” comes as no surprise. He recognizes
instinctively, or his speechwriters do, that considering the “violence
and suffering” in a serious manner would raise troubling questions,
and even more troubling answers. When the president concluded, “And
on this terrible day of mourning, it’s hard to imagine that a
time will come when life at Virginia Tech will return to normal,”
he said more than he perhaps wanted to. This is an admission that something
has gone terribly wrong at Virginia Tech—and in this regard the
university is a microcosm of the larger social reality—and will
not easily be put right.
In general, those speaking
at the gathering—school officials, politicians and clergy—seemed
in haste to get past the event. In some cases, this may stem from a
sincere desire to console and to lift the community’s collective
spirits. However, a major tragedy, with broad social implications, has
taken place and it needs to be considered.
The events at Virginia Tech
follow almost eight years to the day the mass killing at Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado, in which 15 people died. At the time,
the media and politicians performed a ritual breast-beating, with Bill
Clinton in the lead. Much was made of the need for new gun controls,
increased security in the schools and the need to counsel troubled students.
Then, as now, official American public opinion refused to recognize
the killings as a social disorder.
What has occurred in the
intervening years? Can anyone argue that American society has developed
since 1999 in such a manner as to make tragedies similar to Columbine
less likely?
Everyday life in America
has continued to have a violent, remorseless backdrop. In April 1999
US and NATO forces were launching cruise missile after cruise missile
against the former Yugoslavia and inflicting lethal sanctions and periodic
bombing raids on Iraq. Somalia and Afghanistan had also already come
in for punishment from the Clinton administration.
American militarism, however,
has truly flourished in the present decade. The US has been occupying
portions of Central Asia or the Middle East for most of the eight years
since Columbine. Following a hijacked election and making use of the
terrorist attacks on September 11, the Bush-Cheney regime launched a
war based on lies. The lesson taught by the ruling elite is clear: in
achieving one’s aims, any sort of ruthlessness is legitimate.
At the same time, the social
gap in America has widened in the past decade. By 2005 the top one-tenth
of 1 percent of the US population earned nearly as much income as the
bottom 150 million Americans. Those 300,000 wealthy individuals each
received 440 times as much income as the average person in the poorest
half of the population, nearly doubling the divide from 1980. The rich
lord it over everyone else, piling up fortunes that come directly at
the expense of wide layers of working people. Society is divided starkly
into “winners” and “losers.” For the latter,
the future is bleak.
The decay of social solidarity,
the domination of the political process by cash, the erosion of democratic
rights, the transformation of the media into more or less a propaganda
arm of the government and the Pentagon—all of these processes,
under way in 1999, have now attained a far more finished state.
More generally, the past
twenty-five years have witnessed a sharp lurch to the right by the American
political and media establishment, driven by its relative economic decline,
and an accompanying coarsening and degeneration of the social atmosphere.
Brutality in language and action is now the preferred policy of the
powers that be.
The proliferation of violence,
the continuous appeals to fear, the incitement of paranoia—all
of this has consequences, it creates a certain type of climate. American
society has for so long tried to cover up or ignore its most pressing
problems. What are the official responses? Punishment first, then the
invocation of the deity. The suppression of contradictions, however,
doesn’t make them disappear.
The culture as a whole has
suffered. Without giving any ground to the right-wing morality police,
the prevalence of video games, popular music and films that celebrate
rape and killing can hardly be taken as a sign of social well-being.
Every effort has been made to atomize people, to render them callous
and inured to the suffering of others. Human life has been devalued
and often held in contempt.
Clearly, there have been
consequences. The ability to kill one’s fellow students methodically
in cold blood reveals a terrible level of social anomie. A doctor at
Montgomery Regional Hospital, where the injured were treated, commented:
“The injuries were amazing. This man was brutal. There wasn’t
a shooting victim that didn’t have less than three bullet wounds
in him.”
The gunman in Blacksburg,
a 23-year-old Korean-American, Cho Seung-Hui, is one of those forlorn
individuals who inevitably figure in such tragedies. He was a “loner,”
says one college official. His roommates describe him as “weird,”
a young man who ate by himself, refused to engage in conversation, appeared
to have no friends or girl-friends and who sat at his computer for hours
or simply sat “staring at his desk, just staring at nothing.”
Cho’s English professor
indicated that there “were signs he was troubled,” based
on his work in a creative writing course and directed him to counseling.
One of his fellow students in a playwriting class described his work
as “really morbid and grotesque.” She remembered one of
his plays: “It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the
play the boy threw a chainsaw around, and hammers at him. But the play
ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy
treat.” It’s unpleasant to have to acknowledge, but would
such a scenario be unthinkable in the contemporary American film industry?
Cho, who came to the US as
a child and attended high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, in suburban
Washington, DC, left behind a note, in which he reportedly ranted against
“rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful
charlatans.” He also wrote, “You caused me to do this.”
According to school authorities, the young man posted a warning on a
school online forum, “im going to kill people at vtech today.”
This was a troubled person,
but nothing was done. He fell through the cracks, like so many. There
are plenty of well-meaning individuals in America, more than willing
to lend a hand, but as a society it is uncaring. Many obstacles—institutional,
financial—block the way of truly helping people, and all of this
takes place in unyieldingly competitive conditions.
The incident in Blacksburg,
dreadful as it is, is not unique or isolated. One day after the mass
shooting in Virginia, university administrators in Texas, Oklahoma and
Tennessee locked down or evacuated campuses, along with officials at
two public schools in Louisiana. In Hollywood Hills, Florida, a high
school was closed after a student sent a picture of a gun over his cell
phone and threatened to kill himself. In Iowa, Rapid City’s Central
High School was also locked down after a report of someone on the school
grounds carrying a gun.
What has been learned since
Columbine about the source of this social alienation? A perusal of the
editorials in the nation’s major newspapers would inevitably draw
one to the conclusion ... essentially nothing.
The editors of the New York
Times lament the fact that Americans face some of the gravest dangers
“from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy
to obtain.” They also remind their readers that after Columbine
“public school administrators focused heavily on spotting warning
signs early enough to head off tragedy.”
Hundreds of millions of guns
circulate in the US, and they are no doubt too easy to get one’s
hands on. However, this is largely beside the point. Such arguments
do nothing to explain the regularity with which sociopathic behavior
manifests itself in American life. As for keeping one’s eyes open
for “warning signs,” this may well be good advice, but it
is hardly an answer either.
Editorials in the Washington
Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, USA Today and Detroit Free Press
do no more to shed light on the situation. Respectively, they raise
questions (“Should metal detectors be ubiquitous in American classrooms
and universities?”), abstain from commenting (“We should
remember that there are times when silence is the best response”),
express astonishment (“It is hard to imagine how anyone could
annihilate so many fellow humans, so senselessly”) and anger (“Today,
however, the focus should properly be on revulsion at what the gunman
wrought and heartache for his victims”) or moralize (perhaps the
violence is “a symptom of a society with loose moral footing”).
In the absence of serious
discussion or commentary, the 24-hour coverage of a tragedy like this
one on the cable television networks begins to take on the character
of exploitation.
Virtually no portion of the
media coverage is devoted to the social causes of the events. The political
and media establishment responds to the Virginia Tech massacre as it
does to every significant indication of social malaise, with a combination
of denial and self-delusion. In deluding themselves that the epidemic
of shootings can be treated by increased vigilance or the transformation
of campuses into fortresses, the politicians and editorialists demonstrate
how far from reality they are.
Such events bring home how
necessary it is for another way to be found, for more sensitive answers,
real answers to problems. This, in turn, raises the need for a different
social orientation, which calls into question the present foundations
of American society. And such searching critiques should not be reserved
only for moments of national calamity.
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