Via Faux Real, Brownfemipower writes:
And once the private violence becomes public, we hear it on the news, we find out from a friend, we hear it in the car on the way to work, we all distance ourselves again. He was a loner, he was strange, he never talked, he was weird/scary/abnormal/depressed/mad/upset/hurt hurt hurt–he wasn’t one of us. His violence is not our violence because he wasn’t one of us. We’re not crazy, we’re not insane, we’re not odd, and we’re most certainly not on anti-depressants. At least not the crazy people kind of anti-depressants.
This has what’s been bothering me about the Virginia Tech shooting coverage. And I don’t really know why it should bother me, or how it would be covered in any other way, but … well, for some context, I’ve been content-analyzing some People magazines from 1996-now as part of my thesis. People is big on covering the senseless-tragedy types of stories. There was one I read about children who were randomly shot in a school house in Scotland, one about the murder of Bill Cosby’s son, and a few others I can’t remember at the moment. This was about 2 weeks ago, and what jumped out at me was what I’ve sort of termed the “bad egg” theory of violence coverage. In each case, the stories were heavy on emphasis about how the person who committed the violent act was a loner, an outsider, had a bad family life, was “born out of wedlock,” was raised by a single mom, didn’t have many close friends, was possibly on drugs or suffering from some sort of mental illness, etc. etc. The coverage I’ve seen so far about the VA Tech shooter is very similar: he was a loner, an outsider — I even heard one newscaster call him a “campus nobody.”
There’s a strange sort process going on here that works on two fronts, I think. First, it attempts to make sense of random and senseless violence by using a very individualizing frame. Now, not that the individual isn’t first and foremost to blame, obviously. I’m not making excuses for people who commit such atrocious acts by pulling a blame-society or they-were-misunderstood-and-nobody-was-nice-to-them card. But by focusing so much on the individualizing aspects of it, it totally pushes the bigger picture out of the picture, and leaves no room for any sort of societal examination at all. The system works … go on about your business … nothing to worry about here, it was just this one bad egg ….
On another level, I think there’s a total socialization factor here, too. There’s an ‘othering’ process. This is what is deviant. This is what is abnormal. Don’t be a loner. Don’t spend too much time alone. Get involved — don’t be a “campus nobody!” Have close friends. This is what normal people do. If you do this, you’ll be normal and won’t shoot a bunch of people. See, look at how normal people behave. See? This bad guy’s behavior was not normal. He is not us. He is something different. Something evil, something disturbed. But we — we are okay.
Not that people like the VA tech shooter weren’t disturbed, obviously. And I think it helps, it helps to sort of pinpoint a reason. We don’t like senseless violence. We don’t like sometimes-people-just-do-bad-things. We need reasons. We need patterns. We need bad childhoods and violent TV shows and Marilyn Manson. This is why this happened. This has nothing to do with society as a whole, and it certainly has nothing to do with us.
I don’t know; maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe its the sort of narrative people need. I’m not putting a value judgment on it — well, okay, yes, I am. In my head, my first reaction is that this sort of coverage is bad. But the more I think about it … maybe its not. Not all bad, at least. Just not good, either.
