“This is really bad.”
Thomas Fleming
The shootings at Virginia Tech have aroused, once again, a national discussion, not only of campus security and gun control, but of the more fundamental questions of who we think we are as American and who we would like to be. The debate, as much as the killings, gives testimony (though not “eloquent testimony”) to our degeneracy. We should find the grandiloquent statements of public officials particularly disturbing.
The president of the university, fumbling for the right cliché, described this as a tragedy of monumental proportions. Setting aside the misleading metaphorical use of “monumental,” it would be interesting to learn what he thought he was saying other than “This is really bad.” These incidents are inevitably called tragedies, but that is precisely what they are not. In a tragedy like Oedipus or Macbeth, a basically great man, trusting in his own abilities, deludes himself into making self-destructive decisions. Flaws in his character lead him first to arrogance and then down the path of folly and ruin. Tragedies make sense of the human world, while these pointless murders seem to reveal a world that makes no sense. In calling them tragedies, we are essentially saying that human existence is pointless.This is not just a “semantic point.” It is all too true that most Americans are like most people everywhere in all periods of history: They speak without thinking. But unreflective peasants relied on proverbs and clichés that were deeply rooted in historical experience. Our clichés and mental tics are almost always bits of propaganda invented by liberals ignorant of human nature and human history. In our mythology, children are smarter than adults, racial minorities smarter than whites, women stronger and braver than men. We believe that we really do care about people killing each other in Nigeria, even though we do nothing about the murders taking place on the other side of town, and we insist on calling every pointless misfortune a tragedy. We can only talk this way because we have tossed away our moral compasses.
The President of the United States arrived in Blacksburg with his wife, saying their hearts were “full of sorrow.” I know we have come to expect this sort of talk from politicians, but it cannot be true. The President knew none of these people and had no particular connection to the university. If he had such sorrow in his heart every time a baby was aborted or a drunk driver wiped out a family, he could not get through the day. If shaking your head and saying, those poor kids, constitutes a heart full of sorrow, then I suppose my heart is just as filled as the President’s, but I have managed to eat a good dinner every day, do my job, joke with friends, and rejoice in the birth of a grandchild. When Simon Cowell rolled his eyes in impatience over an American Idol contestant who tried to manipulate the audience by expressing his heartfelt condolences, he was given the Don Imus treatment. I am not a fan of Mr. Cowell or the nauseating music he promotes, but his manifest disgust revealed a residual sense of shame I should have thought he had jettisoned long ago.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/hardright.cgi/2007/04/18/Sense_and_Sensibili