The Virginia Tech massacre—social roots of another American tragedy

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/tech-a18.shtml

By David Walsh

18 April 2007


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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