Madness In Our Method

In his usual measured and even tempered way, Hugh Hewitt rhetorically asks if NBC’s decision to air portions of the video sent by Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui is “the single worst editorial decision in the history of broadcast news.”

I’d still give the nod to the decision to hire Katie Couric for the Today Show chair formerly held by J. Fred Muggs, but reasonable people can disagree about such things.

I’m being flippant because, frankly, much of the commentary that has exploded in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy is worthy of, nay, begs for ridicule. I have already commented on the alleged causal connection between such tragedies and video game violence by America’s child psychologist for children of all ages, Dr. Phil.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko at Reason has nailed Barack Obama’s ludicrous comparison of the shootings to outsourcing as “ignorant,... exploitative and offensive.” And, of course, the finger pointing and ax grinding over everything from justifying more or less gun control to whether campus police and administrative officials acted properly or quickly enough and what about the early warning signs that Cho might have been mentally ill (you think?) and on and on and on continue to inundate the media and the internet and force their way into our collective consciousness.

Here’s a thought. It’s all garbage. The Virginia Tech massacre is the responsibility of one man and one man, alone. Cho Seung-Hui. He was a sick man, a deranged man and a tragic and pathetic man. None of the rest of the 20/20 hindsight pop psychology, ax grinding and blame spreading is worth a rodent’s hindquarters.

Yes, including my own ax grinding right here and now. None of us writing about this tragedy, when we attempt to say anything more at this point than what a tragedy it was and is and will remain, are contributing anything worthwhile to that terrible truth. Unforeseen, unforeseeable and unavoidable tragedies occur to innocent people every day, sometimes because madmen walk the earth, and innocent lives are lost as a result. The urge to make sense or to find something, anything redeeming from such events is understandable. So, even, are the baser urges to exploit those events to our own advantages. We are only human. But unlike madmen, we are supposed to be able to resist our urges.

Or at least to try.