18 April 2007

The endless loop until it disappears under the waves.

The media machine has now encapsulated the Virginia Tech massacre and those of us with cable tv can sit in voyeuristic thrall as the 24 hour cable news channels, forever deprived of 24 hours worth of marketable news, heap interpretation, speculation, and plain old blather on top of the event, turning it truly into a non-event in the Baudrillardian sense. They will pick this tragedy clean of skin, meat, and gristle, leaving only a few scattered bones, and congratulate themselves on their accomplishments. Perhaps they've already developed signature theme songs for their coverage, much like they did for their war boosterism coverage in 2003. I don't know; I don't have cable, thankfully.

It's all a joke, really, and a cruel one at that. In about two weeks we'll have a new distraction, maybe another pseudo-celebrity overdose, and the television cameras will retrain their focus, and the Virginia Tech shootings will be stored away, to be pulled off the shelf the next time it happens. Because it will happen again.

Despite the repetition of these mass killings, we live in a state of complacency and relative security. We are not, after all, Baghdad under US occupation, where universities and markets and clinics are routinely bombed or shot up. Nor are we Uribe's Colombia, where the nation's President convenes and/or facilitates death squad meetings at his home. These are only our proxies, our US dollar funded interventions into other nations' peoples' deaths. Outsourced violence, if you will.

These are systemic, structural connections I doubt Anderson Cooper will ever entertain.

3 comments:

Wicketywack said...

Cuff:

One incident is a war while the other is a school massacre. The two are in solidly different categories, despite the left wanting to conflate the two for their own political purposes.

While they're both horrendous affairs, people deal with them and grieve over them very differently -- both publically and privately. We have to recognize that.

To dismiss that as a trite media spectacle in a Baudrillardian sense is not accurate or appropriate right now.

I choose how I digest these types of events (I did so on 9/11): only check the news twice a day, and keep happy shows on TV. But we can't blame the media for how it reacts to this. It IS newsworthy, after all.

But as you know, I respect your opinion and always look forward to it. Thanks.

- Damon

cs said...

Lonnie:
Which war are we talking about? I am actually talking about the relative level of security we feel in our day to day lives that is utterly alien to the way much of the world's population lives. For instance, I don't board the L2 with a very high level of anxiety that it might get torn to shreds by a suicide bomber, or attend university classes in one of several countries -- take your pick -- where some faction, individual who believed himself to be a faction, etc., decided it was a "soft target." I am disgusted by the incident at Virginia Tech, but it would be fairly shortsighted and utterly self-absorbed to ignore the fact that our government makes conditions of desperation and brutality part of many populations' daily lives. To not have that understanding is a political decision in and of itself. As for Baudrillard, it's precisely the situation that Baudrillard analyzes in "The Gulf War Did Not Happen," which is to say that the event becomes a commodity. It's not whether it's "newsworthy" or not -- of course we should expect coverage -- but it takes only about half an hour of watching CNN (which I had to do yesterday for example -- trapped in a room with it on) to realize that it's simply another spectacle for the media. Incidentally, as I suspected, CNN has developed theme music for its VTech coverage -- soft melancholy piano music. It's really a travesty.

And it's quite obvious that the killer knew the media couldn't resist an "exclusive," such as he mailed to NBC.

Wicketywack said...

Cuff:

We probably agree on more than we disagree.