There are some sick f*cks in this world, and I'm not talking about the war criminal currently sitting in the Oval Office. What sort of loser motherf*cker takes schoolchildren hostage to enact "revenge" for something he himself did twenty years ago? If only I believed in hell I could take comfort knowing there's a special corner for child killers. Unfortunately, all we get is a shithead piled under six feet of dirt or scattered to the winds.
We've had a rash of school shootings recently and the similarities between this one in Pennsylvania and the recent one in Colorado are too eerie for words. In both cases, the killers were not fellow students, but rather older men choosing a school as a target. In both cases the killers took female hostages and in both cases attempted to or did molest the hostages.
I would submit that these sick fucks are symptoms of a culture that on the one hand sexualizes children and on the other hand values purity or virginity; a culture that still maintains on many levels (although not officially) the primacy of the male and a patriarchal structure that inherently treats women as objects for male consumption. I am reminded very much of the movie American Beauty, in which Kevin Spacey's character sexualizes and seduces his daughter's friend (played by Mena Suvari) up until the point at which he's going to consummate the seduction -- and then he realizes that she's actually innocent whereas he had believed she was active sexually.
Spacey's character, Lester Burnham, stops at that moment. He pulls back from the situation and of course later meets his death at the hands of a closeted military careerist neighbor, but the point is that Burnham had been consumed with the popular imagination of teenagers in general and the teenage female in particular (see for example MTV...) and it was not until he encountered the Other in her specificity that he understood the difference between the stereotype of the whole and the specificity of the one. He is to that extent a success story (as are most people), whereas the school hostage takers are not. They are failures. It's just terribly unfortunate that they couldn't have made the decisions to kill themselves before they had to inflict so much pain on their victims and their victims' families.
6 comments:
Be careful with sociological cause-and-effect scenarios. I won't try to offer an explanation, but sometimes order can't be conjured up from something as orderless as what's happened recently.
But as always, I appreciate and look forward to your reasoned insight.
;-)
LB
I wanted to write about this, but I couldn't figure out what to say. Thanks for taking time out to address all of this, Cuff.
LB: I agree. I offer it only partially, because there are lots of other factors out there.
MA: I couldn't figure it out either. I'm still trying.
American Beauty is one of my favorite films. It's nearly perfect.
Nationalized mental health care would be a really good idea in the U.S. It's the end of the empire, and at the end of empires, people really go off.
I haven't come up with any good thoughts about this situation. It's just such a tragedy. You can tell how big a coward a man is by the places he chooses to attack-- I would say that you couldn't find people less able to fight back than 6-13 year old Amish girls.
And what takes the cake is that the Amish are actually raising money for the family he left behind! Talk about grace.
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