rangerBlog - April 17th, 2007

07:02 pm - Sympathy for the Devil (Why I can't watch Television)

I don't normally watch television, there's a lot of reasons.

But tonight (April 17) I happened to catch the opening to Dateline NBC. It's the recap of the story tonight (the school shootings,) and somehow in the last 22 hours, they managed to find enough footage to hammer it into a neat little 3 act structure.

• The act


• The timeline


• Profile of the killer (full of all the newest revelations)


• New story of survivors, reflecting back on that long-ago yesterday


• An uplifting "we shall go on, but we shall never forget" speech by an empowered black woman.

All that... really isn't that bad... but they had MUSIC. Stock background music for each piece, including the 'creepy/sinister/foreboding' music for the criminal profile, the uplifting stanza, the sorrowful/moving piece...
They're telling me how I'm supposed to feel. Not just music cues appropriate to the story- they are actually telling me which, out of the myriad reactions I could have to this- which one I'm supposed to have.
Network News: Pre-digested to the point that you don't even have to think about how to react anymore.

In five years your local news is going to have music cues telling you how you're supposed to react to s story. They already do it with the sudden changes of behavior, attitude, tenor and interaction of the anchors- but that's not blatant enough. We will have music during live coverage.


I admit, freely, that it's the treatment of the killer that bothers me most. The cold merciless calculating serial killer music played over stock footage of a camera walking through a county jail is a way of de-humanizing Cho, of pushing him as far from 'us'-status as possible.

I remember once, in 2000, in a discussion n the nature of evil, the question of who embodies it came up, and I had a friend who said "Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold," (the perpetrators of 1999's Columbine High School shooting.) And I kinda ripped into him for two reasons;
1) These kids were scared, confused, bullied, unhappy, twisted up inside and unable to articulate what they were feeling. The people around them all knew this, but did nothing. They were in an environment (their high school) specifically designed to grind home and reinforce their pain every day. Are they responsible for their actions, of course! They were NOT WELL though. They're fucked-up kids who hurt inside like a bag of broken glass, looking for something, anything to do that would make that go away.
2) Seriously, you named them before Hitler?

So I admit that in reading about Cho Seung-Hui, my primary response is anger and frustration... at his classmates. Someone who can't even communicate with others produces work that desperately screams "please understand me," and everyone was too uncomfortable to even try to decipher this communique he's making- instead they call the cops. "You're trying to share these deep and disturbing feelings inside you, to get them outside of yourself so you can examine them and pull them apart, but your feelings make us uncomfortable, and if you show any hint of them in public we're going to punish you by calling the cops. Be normal."
Plus, you know, he was probably raped. 1 in 4 American children is sexually molested, but no one likes to talk about that.

But hey! He's a legal adult! And he's the first (?) non-white school shooter! Yay! Someone we can demonize as an inhuman monster without feeling queasy about doing that to a minor!

People scream and throw fits if you dare to try and empathize, or understand, or in any way try to make him a part of us- which in turn only further alienates anyone else in his situation.

Television, mass-media-culture, the shiny acceptable face of America- is Them, and they aren't Cho. Thye could never be Cho. They're happy, they're propular, they're social- and they are so not Cho that they will demonstrate their un-Choness by refusing to even think about what it'd be like to be him. After all- that could never be them. He's not them.

"It is not a true story, but it may as well be." - John Darnielle



It's probably fortunate Dylan Klebold killed himself after the Columbine shootings. September 11th was his birthday, and that might have warped him. ;-)