Bill's Notes

Russia wants to tunnel under the Bering Strait. Very cool idea.

Who'll be the first to hitchhike from New York to Paris?

Talk about long drives. You'd drive all the way to Nome, and then go through the tunnel, at which point you'd be in Siberia! Now what?!

Still, I love this idea. It gives me hope for the future. I'd love to see the first rest stop in Siberia, with the Siberia Stuckey's, and Pedro's fireworks shack, and the interchange with signs: Paris: 9,000 miles. Beijing: 3,000 miles.

I don't know what to say. Every fear I've had about the triviality of our celebrity- and media-driven culture, in which what you're famous for (or even infamous for) matters less than the fact you're famous, has been reified by Cho Seung-Hui's sending out a press kit between his murderous sprees. It seems our media culture turns everything — even mass murder — into entertainment. Cho obviously knew this and exploited it for his own psychopathic ends.

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To the question: Would I have run the video clips and the photos on television? Would I have posted the dramatic, self-glorifying movie-poster style photos Cho sent to NBC on Websites and in print? No and no, for the reasons implied above*.

Perhaps I would have posted or quoted from written materials he sent, perhaps with one photo.In several weeks, I would have posted or printed some of the other materials, with a low-key, serious presentation, and on a Website or other printed presentation. I would have waited at least a year or two to run any kind of video clips on the television airwaves.

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On a personal note, I tend not to watch television news, and haven't for at least 15 years. Television news is manipulative and deceptive, and specific designed to be so. I tune out on the "big stories," especially orgies of overcoverage.

Television news will make you stupid and angry. It is mind-boggingly repetitive, and they need pictures to keep it interesting.

For your own mental and cultural health, do not watch or limit your watching. Especially death porn.

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What's next in our celebrity-driven culture? I mean, why didn't Cho go all the way, and instead of creating his own press kit to send to NBC, hire a leading PR agency to be his spokesman after death? They could put together a professional quality multi-media presentation?

Bob Anchor: "Today we have with us Sara Jane Smith of Hill Knowlton in New York, spokesman for Cho Seung Hui."

Smith: "Glad to be hear, Bob. Mr. Seung put us on retainer prior to his newsmaking events so we could better explain them to the public."

Bob: "How thoughtful ..."

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Ugh. Sometimes I have culture shock in my own country.

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* Somewhere, Harry's head just exploded. (That's a reference to Harry's dissent on my opinions on the Marcotte and Danish cartoon affairs.)

The late Asa Baber once wrote that courage is more of a fluid concept than most like to think ... and I agree to an extent. Most men, I think, know that they may react in different ways to the same circumstances. That some days they'd have the courage, and others they might not. I also believe that there are some men who would rise to the occasion every time. They have a level of discipline that overcomes failures of courage.

This is all to say -- there are commenters out there judging the reactions of civilians to the Va Tech violence. I don't have a lot of use for that. At 9 o'clock on Monday morning, in the middle of engineering class, you're not exactly mentally prepared for combat. Especially when you're unarmed and a perpetrator is armed. Things are happening too quickly and you have practically no information (is there one shooter or many? how serious is this threat? what is the problem here?) and very little time to process what little you do.

If you even had a gun pointed at you, you know you're powerless to prevent someone from pulling the trigger and killing you. Yes, if a group of you rush the attacker, possibly you could get the attacker, but you don't have a lot of time to go from "mechanics of solid" to "let's team up and rush this guy because some of us may live."

YMMV.

When I quoted Walker Percy earlier, I forgot to note that his reference "action of a madman" was meant with irony, subtle and nuance. Namely, that such things will always occur, and that people will always will lapse into inevitable cliches trying to understand what is ultimately not understandable by sane people.

Percy's saying that evil is an unfathomable mystery, and no matter how hard you try to understand the details of this or any mass murderer, and get inside his head, you will not be able to connect the dots to the point where you understand his gunning down dozens of people. What's worse, you may become enthralled or entranced by evil in attempting to understand it. I had to stop reading Rise & Fall of the Third Reich about halfway through because I began to sense that exposure to inner workings of the Nazis was defiling my soul. We will not understand that kind of evil unless we go to that dark place in our soul ourselves -- and that way lies madness. Whether we could come back from understanding such evil is unknowable to most of us. It certainly can corrupt us trying to get it.

You will not understand this, except to say that evil exists, it's a real thing, and those who cooperate too much with the inscrutable logic of evil end up doing things the rest of us can't understand.

I knew a man who pursued terrorists' logic to a certain point -- far past a point the rest of us would go. Not to the point of acting on his beliefs, but to the point of believing in and justifying terrorism. His arguments had a compelling internal logic, but you realized that he'd simply drawn that small circle Chesterton describes so common to madman. It was a shame, because there was a lot more to him than that kind of madness, and he was usually an expansive thinker. But excessive exposure to the evil of terrorism left him, IMHO, emotionally and spiritually damaged.

FWIW.

After 34 years of trying, we pro-lifers finally win one. Thank God.

Fran Porretto has expanded the list of contributors to Eternity Road. Nine of his fellow bloggers have begun today to apply their prodigious intellects to commentary on Fran's Website. I wish Fran and the new bloggers the best of luck in the new format. Bring a dictionary, and enjoy!

Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins. "It's the act of a madman."

I never get the murder-suicide thing. If you're gonna kill yourself, why kill someone else first? I mean, you're gonna be dead anyway. Why not kill yourself first, and then complain to God or the great abyss about your mistreatment?

Are there people I've wanted to kill? I think the answer is no. I don't think I've ever, with true sincerity of heart, wanted to erase someone's real existence. I've wanted them "dead" in a fantasy world inside my head, but in the real, blood-and-sinew world that we actually inhabit, no, I can't say I've really wanted someone dead.

I don't mean to pretend this is some kind of insight -- but perhaps killers are those who can't distinguish between the two. We can probably all recall cases where we tried to impose the world on our head onto actual reality and call that reality. Maybe they do that in a really pathological way.

I'm sure some do, in fact. But others, I suspect, are just stone-cold killers. They know what they're doing, and do it anyway.

I pray God will have mercy on all those who appear before Him this day, especially those who were surprised by death.

Prayers for the victims and survivors of today's shootings at Virginia Tech.