Banging Your Head Against a Wall

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It is said that insanity is defined as repeating the same failure over and over again. Like banging your head against a wall to cure a headache because some "expert" recommended it…and then continuing on and on and on, not realising that the remedy may contribute to the problem.

We now have the results of a report of a panel convened by The Commonwealth of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine on the shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI). And BEHOLD!!! More of the same nonsense that created the atmosphere that directly contributed to the massacre. It blamed all the usual suspects for doing exactly what we expected them (not) to do.

It blamed the University for not letting people know of the earlier shooting where two people were killed. It blamed the Virginia Tech Police Department (VTPD) for incompetence in following the wrong leads. It blamed the cops for not notifying the university of the mental health of the gunman. The report said: "No one knew all the information and no one connected the dots." It blamed, "….various and complicated laws concerning sharing of information." And "The system failed for lack of resources, incorrect interpretation of privacy laws and passivity." In short, privacy laws are too lax and need to be more rigorously enforced and federalized.

According to the Reuters Wire Service story, "It recommended the state's law be changed to clearly require information on persons such as Cho – who had been ordered into out-patient treatment but not committed to an institution – be entered into a federal database for background checks on would be gun purchasers." So the answer, according to predictable officialdom, is to involve an ever-widening circle of unrelated, uninvolved bureaucrats, including the Federal Government. Talk about banging your head!

What NO ONE talks about is involving the people at the actual scene – people who are actually there and in danger and have the most at stake.

Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal came close. She asked, "Where are the grownups?" That question hits it right on the head… dead on. Unfortunately Miss Noonan, answers it with the usual bromides, to wit; "Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and take him away." There is the flaw, "…like a person in authority…." Yes, an adult should have stepped in, but not some pencil-pushing bureaucrat. Miss Noonan asks where the grownups were, but the real question is, where were the men? I mean the men in the classroom. I mean men who defend themselves. In all of this hand wringing on TV, they refer to college students like they were helpless children.

Right after the VPI shootings I was with family for Easter, and we were talking about this. My father related an e-mail he got from his brother who went to VPI after World War Two on the G.I. Bill. My uncle served in the Pacific as a naval aviation officer. He asked where the men were. My father agreed. There is one shooter and a whole classroom of victims. Why not rush the guy with desks, or throw books at the guy and disorient him, and disarm him. That's the question my father and uncle asked.

Imagine if this incident had happened in the late 1940's or early 1950's with classrooms peopled by returning vets – guys who had seen really hairy combat. First of all, in those days it was quite common for students to have guns in their dorm. There is good hunting in Virginia, and students into the outdoors would have had a gun in their closet. VPI's roots were as a military school, and there was campus drilling, and organized rifle practice. Many of the returning vets had army issue weapons, and some even had enemy weapons taken off dead soldiers. Having a realistic understanding of guns allows you to know when and how to disarm an armed man. One of the stories of World War Two is that the Germans fighting in the hedgerows after the Normandy invasion knew when to expose themselves to shoot an American soldier. He waited until he heard the clip ejected from the US M-1 Garand and knew the soldier was temporarily out of rounds. The modern student unfamiliar with guns doesn't know what the telltale signs are that a gunman's clip or magazine has run out. After all, the gunman is very much outnumbered, but ignorance is on his side.

But more importantly, people of that generation had not yet been turned into helpless infants by the establishment. If anything, the policies of the government caused this generation to mature quickly by forcing them to help support their families in the depression, and then drafting them when war broke out. Does anyone think that a shooter; having shot two people in a dorm room, and then left campus to mail a letter, and then returned sometime much later, would have gotten away with this? Would he have even made it out the dorm hall alive? And what if he did start shooting the engineering building? Would that generation, or previous generations of young men have allowed themselves to be victims – not to mention the fact that some of the students were ladies, and that men of that generation felt it was their duty to protect them?

What we are seeing in the post-war, post baby boom age is the infantilisation of America. I used to think that college kids look younger than they used to because I am getting older. But look again. The people in college in old yearbooks looked older, and they certainly acted more mature, had more poise, and didn't dress like children. The very phenomenon of the shooter himself with his pathological narcissism is a product of our modern culture's infantile preoccupation with unearned fame – Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes. Just look at the childish tape Cho made that he mailed to NBC. This was his own reality TV episode for a national audience.

We have this endless psychobabble of rationalisations trying to "understand" some kid's self-delusion of importance. This is not to denigrate legitimate psychiatrists trying to treat patients. My beef is with the endless TV talking heads interviewing pop psychologists "so we can find out how to solve this problem for the future." Poppycock!!! They are interested in ratings. And by over-analyzing this psychopath and then playing it on national television, they rewarded him postmortem with his fantasy. They send a message to others who are off their nut that the way to be taken seriously is to copy Cho.

Then there is the endless self-serving TV coverage of the students grief, and media types spewing endless platitudes about the "grieving process" and "closure." It is voyeuristic, intrusive and downright low class. It reminds me of the death of Princess Diana exactly ten years ago. It was treated in last year's film THE QUEEN. It juxtaposed the two generations; the infantile narcissistic generation versus Queen Elizabeth II who represented the stoic stiff-upper lipped formal Brit – the type played by Greer Garson in MRS. MINIVER. The standard pabulum is that the Queen is old-fashioned and out of touch with the modern advanced touchy-feely Brit. She probably is. And she was right to bar TV close-ups on the Royal Family's "grieving process." Good for her!! Could the average Englishman have survived the depression, the London Blitz, and the fifteen years of war-caused poverty and rations in post-war Britain if they had indulged in the endless self-pity and demonstrations of helplessness that people of today are expected to show? The old-fashioned reserve and poise is a manifestation of someone trying to be strong – even if it's only a pretense. It is an attempt at dignity.

We have had fifty years of the nanny state trying to solve everyone's problems. We've had the media and the intelligencia and the schools advising people to trust "experts," i.e. – the officials, our surrogate parents; cops, the Government, the various government mental health agencies; trust everyone but one's own experience. "Don't try this at home"…."let the professionals handle it," screams the voice of Official America.

We see the result of this at VPI. We have young men and women who think of themselves as helpless infants because the establishment – the Parent State – taught them so. And so they cower, believing themselves to be helpless. When the next mle occurs, we will see more helpless victims screaming for officialdom to "do something" and more officials blaming other officials who will blame still more officials. They will then announce that they will commission a "STUDY."

Allelujah!! Hosanna in excelsis Amen!

The next time you see these scenes of helplessness on TV, think back to the Dunkirk Boatlift when 700 private craft: tugboats, pilot boats, private yachts, small craft, sailboats, merchant vessels, fishermen, clam draggers, and oystermen; all raced across the English Channel to pick up soldiers at Dunkirk. These were the sort of men who knew what to do.

September 1, 2007