ruminate, gloominate

As far as the normal blog postings go I don't have much to update. The Language War readings are going well, mostly, I think, because it's written by someone who understands what kind of language is effective and what kind is masturbatory (that's right, Ramage, I'm talking to you). I also have a solid bead on my final paper. Something about credibility filtered through the text of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book I'm in the middle of rereading anyway. It's gonna be two birds, or, some rocks and a stone...I mean...I'm gonna kill a bunch of birds and get stoned.

But what's really important today is the revelations about the Virginia Tech tragedy. We learned that Cho Seung-Hui planned the whole thing. He bought the guns from a pawn shop across from campus weeks ago, took several dozen pictures of himself holding them, wrote an 1800 word "manifesto" and filmed himself delivering a deranged monologue where he equates himself to Jesus and blames this impending tragedy on everyone he's about to kill. But the coup de grace was that after the first spree—in the two hour interval between—Cho mailed the manifesto, video and pictures to NBC news. He did it for fame. Why? Well, he may have been deranged, but even a crazy person in this country today can't help but want to be famous. Paula Abdul ought to be relieved that Cho didn't mail her a demo tape.

What was Cho thinking, anyway? It's better to be feared than loved? They must be punished? Fuck it, I'm taking a few with me? No. Maybe we'll never know how much of his ranting was an act, but one thing's for sure, he lost sight of the green light. He gave up on Horatio Alger.

Sweet Jesus! The bad vibes coming off this one are truly awful and far reaching. They'll be felt generations from now. Maybe not in any literal sense, but what will happen on campuses across the country is a very subtle mood shift. Suspicion will be the prevailing reaction for the next few weeks, hanging just behind our conscious thoughts until it fades to a sour memory that only makes us wince when it comes up in conversation. Months from now the only residue that'll remain in our everyday lives will be the new half-assed gun regulations and maybe a few donation boxes next to cash registers that somebody forgot to pick up. But our children's grandchildren will walk onto KU's campus or U Penn's campus or any campus other than VT (that's a whole different story) and be in a different world. No college will ever be like it was before Monday, just like no high school was the same after 4/20/1999.

VT will be like Kent State—a freak to be gawked at. Not like Ground Zero or the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building where memorials now stand. There won't be a museum on the grassy quad in Virginia like there is on the field in Shanksville, though there will be—must be—some kind of memorial built. Classes will eventually start again, just like they did at Kent State. Tests will be taken. Kids will drink and screw and do all the college kid things. But we'll find out soon enough that no amount of history rolling into the pages will dissolve this heavy phantom. The Great Spirit keeps all things in order. It may let a defining moment in history fade practically into obscurity, but will never let it totally dissipate from the ether. Indeed, Monday is now scarred onto history's side, just below the collective subconscious.

A place like the VT campus will always have a different feel to it. It's something that seeps from the human soul when it knows it's about to die. You feel it at battlefields. That sombre sensation that makes jokes unfunny. I felt it when I visited Ford's Theatre in DC on my tenth birthday. As I walked down the aisle on that day, through the the orchestra level, my parents flanking me, I could tell immediately that the building itself was affected. There was the stage, practically breathing in the dusty light. Above stage left was the balcony where John Wilkes Boothe shot Lincoln. A very old looking painting of George Washington hung with an American flag draped behind it on the front of the balcony. That's it? I thought. That's where the President was shot, right there. A loud bang came from backstage that jerked me out of awe. We were there early and when we took our seats in the third row, a historian in a gray tweed coat started recounting those famous events of April 14, 1865. I stood up and walked to the end of the aisle as he spoke. A few steps and I was bellied up to the corner of the orchestra pit and only two or three feet from the stage. I looked up. Right under the balcony. There was a chip in the picture frame, and I imagined, as Boothe leapt through the pistol smoke that night, his spur catching the corner. In mid-air his arms windmilled wildly because he was thrown off balance. Then THUD! He landed in front of me and shouted either "The South is avenged!" or "Sic semper tyrannis!" I couldn't tell because the wooden pop of his boots hitting the stage still resonated in my chest cavity. My heart felt it. I smelled gun smoke and looked up. Blood red curtains on both sides of the balcony rustled as Mrs. Lincoln scurried on the floor around the body of her dying husband. I breathed deep. There was the stage again. So close. I leaned out over the orchestra pit to touch it. Close to my fingers. Closer. Inches. "Nathan!" my mother yells. She's walking up the aisle with my father and a few other early arrivers following the gray coat. I catch up. "We're going up to the balcony," she says. Soon we're following the historian up a gently curving staircase that's got well-worn carpet tacked down into the corner of every step with rope lights. The walls are adorned with oil paintings that feel...warm. At the top is a Plexiglas panel that covers the whole doorway to the booth where it all happened. It's smudged with fingerprints. On the other side are plush looking high back chairs and I can see the red white and blue edge of the flag peeking over the railing. This was the crux. The axis. This is where the bullet went into Old Abe's brain. I could still feel the boots hitting the stage somewhere deep in my gut. Yes, I thought, the world changed when a man stood here and pulled a trigger. BANG! I heard the shot. My hand formed a pistol and my index finger touched the glass. Bang. That's it. Feel it now, two hundred years on. In this musty old theatre, where Lincoln knew he would die, on the floor right there. Bang. Those boots thud again. And again. And again. They thud and that shot rings out there every minute of every day. Something so tragic and jarring a place—a location—never forgets. And if you visit there, you can't avoid feeling it yourself.

Now the VT campus will be the same way.

Bad vibrations on this Wednesday night. It's approaching 3 a.m. and the coffee at the bottom of my mug is cold. CNN is cold. It's spring. Why is it so damn cold? Because no creature should have to receive a day like Monday on a beautiful spring morning. It's a way of keeping things in balance. Lowering the mood to accept this tragedy. But we don't see it right now, not the way we ought to. The loss of human life each day in Iraq is at least this bad, usually worse. On Monday, five U.S. soldiers died over there. Today, a bomb in a marketplace killed 150 Iraqis. Each of those dead—on both sides—had two parents, maybe brothers and sisters, maybe kids. Maybe they even were kids. We're in a climate of war and to cope we either dehumanize to create distance or hyper-humanize because we know we should feel some grief but all that dehumanizing has left us pretty fucking numb. We didn't know those kids in Virginia, but we're shaken. 3000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and we're only now starting to get upset. We went to school with them. They were our neighbors. We did know them.

But Iraq is far away. Virginia is just down there, below Maryland, and Monday's tragedy feels suspiciously like an attack on our own soil. It's impossible to draw conclusions now, so close to the event, or even predict where we'll go from here. Outside of tomorrow, nobody knows what will come next. And maybe that's for the best. In this age of global terrorism, pawn-shop terrorism, and the iLife empire, we ought to live our lives with the confidence that tomorrow is definitely coming, but at the same time, never worry about what it might bring.