Commenting on tragedies more than likely makes you a bad
person. Let’s face it – you’ve more than likely never met or encountered any of
the individuals involved, more than likely never been to the place where it
happened, and more than likely never experienced anything even remotely similar
to the ‘tragedy’ event itself. In other words, commenting on tragedies is more
than likely a form of appropriation. Seeing as how I’m a bad person who already knows he’s a bad person, let’s go ahead and make a comment on a tragedy.
It’s interesting that the 24-hour news machines’ behavior
with respect to tragedies is akin to an episode of CSI: Albuquerque (or
whatever). Actually it’s not interesting at all—this has always been the case. I
don’t think we really expect our media institutions to simply provide a report
that an event occurred, and then move on to report other events that are also
occurring. Fetishizing a single instance of violence is the bread-and-butter of
the United States, maybe even the apple pie—we fixate on an event, twist and
contort it into a ‘tragedy’ and squeeze every last drop of blood out of the
victims until we know all the excruciating details of their deaths. In fact, their
deaths are all that really matter to us—they are worth so much more as
bullet-strewn corpses than they ever were as breathing, working people. What
characterizes the media’s reporting on these events is an obsession with
details: what was the layout of the room, what was the perpetrator wearing,
what weapons did he wield, and so on. To make it even worse, we have to become
intimate with the victims; we have to know how they felt. We attempt to discern this by listening to interviews of
people who were there and listen as they tell us what was going through their
mind: did they think about their spouse or their children, their mothers and
fathers; did they see people as they died; did they try to help others? Our
thirst for a fully-painted picture of violence is a vicarious living of that
event; in a way, we yearn to be on the front lines, to be in the middle of a bloodbath
and named a victim. We pine for the nearness of death so that its reality can
be confirmed to us, a people hopelessly detached from a real and authentic
world. Why was there a market—literally, a
market—for the crime scene photos from the Columbine school shooting in
1999? Because we want to know what happened so that it can be made real. What’s a
tragedy without the intimate horror of dead bodies and pools of blood? Just an
event, somewhere else far-removed from our living room couches.
Why do Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have to alter their
campaign schedules so they can issue remarks about a ‘tragedy’? What about an
isolated instance of psychotic violence makes it a national event? Granted,
mass shootings seemed to be a distinctly American ‘thing’ (just like serial
killers and movies about anthropomorphic prehistoric animals) up until Anders
Breivik murdered 69 people in Norway almost a year ago from today. However,
what makes Breivik’s rampage different is that he targeted the kids of prominent
Norse political figures; he had a white nationalist agenda with a clear
political purpose for his violence—a collective denouncement on behalf of the
world seemed appropriate. Now today, we have our political candidates
denouncing…well…something. I for one
am glad our presidential contenders can agree that dressing up like a batman
villain and killing people is wrong, but what other than the event itself is at
stake? I wish I knew. Even the lame (but somehow effective) politicizing news
machines are having a hard time making their tired ‘it’s about gun control’
talking points stick. I think it’s the emptiness of the event itself that
brings it to our attention, its very senselessness. But even as this
senselessness piques our hunger for knowledge, it reveals our own obsession for
novelty. What makes each act of psychotic and unknowable violence so alluring
is precisely because it resists incorporation into our ready-made rules of
thumb for understanding the world. Structural violence and poverty? Boring. We
already ‘know’ about that—it’s nothing new. Massacres of women and children in
Syria? State-sponsored, so nothing interesting. Man slaughters people in a
theater? Now that’s new AND interesting. And each event of senseless mass
murder might as well be the first we’ve encountered because it’s this very senselessness that grants it the status of being eternally novel. This helps explain why we become so
enamored with the details—in lieu of some broader reason for the violence, we
must study the violence itself, make it into an object of scrutiny in order to,
ironically, bring it to life. Little do we know that we are engaged in the
performance of the emptiness that mirrors everything else we do as a society;
we obsess over the body and forget that it ever died.
Because events like today’s are so senseless, it renders
them visible just like the parade of other empty, unknowable images on
television that we encounter every day. Emptiness and visibility have a strange
symbiosis in our society; they feed into one another and sustain an entire
ecosystem of emptiness and senselessness. It’s no wonder Obama and Romney were
obligated to speak out today—if they want to win in November, they’ve got to
pay homage to our favorite national pastime.
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