Bill's Notes

That's the growth statistics in the United States in the 10 years between 1995 and 2005.

The Roman Catholic Church added 15% to its membership, which was already the largest Christian denomination, comprising 42% of the total number of Christians, at about 69M folks. But get this: The RCC is also the second fastest-growing denomination, just behind the Assemblies of God, which added 18% of its membership.

Note: The Mormons grew 21% in the same period, but I don't count them as an orthodox Christian denomination, as they don't accept the Nicene Creed.

Meanwhile, The Episcopal Church (TEC) lost more than 10% of its membership from 1995 to 2005.

In the course of moderating comments, I accidentally deleted two comments I wrote responding to others and I don't have time to rewrite them. Suffice to say, Rob2 and Paul both have interesting comments in some of the posts below. Thanks and have a nice day. The technical problems were entirely due to my lack of proper caffeination.

David Halberstam, RIP. Halberstam was a big inspiration. We all wanted to write The Big Book back then, like Halberstam's, along with Stanley Karnow and John McPhee.

The Washington Post does a fitting job here.

What's happening now is the last generation of writers who were educated in a print culture are passing away — people whose minds were formed by reading, not by watching television. A lot of the cultural distortions we see in our culture today are caused by precisely this process — the switch from word to image. For 500 years, from the invention of the printing press until the popularization of network television in the 1950s, writers' formative educational experience was with other writers and in interacting in the world (not passively watching TV). It meant a longer attention span, a willingness to delve deeper into issues, and, IMHO, a greater sophistication in the knowledge of what it means to be human. For one thing, they did a tremendous amount more reading than the post-television generations, and I believe that gave them greater ability to focus for long periods of time on issues, and gave them a more integrated view of the world. Television, IMHO, has an anesthetic effect on the intellect, disorients the soul and disintegrates our minds through constant discontinuity. Now this ... 34 people shot dead ... now this ... buy brillo ... up next: Anna Nicole Smith ... now this. Yes, it relieves pain, but the costs are high.

So when I say we may not see the likes of David Halberstam again, I mean it. The generation born in the 20s and the 30s are the last of the pure print culture generation, and what comes after is a very different way of thinking.

I've asked the wrong question. It's not, "Why does God let bad things happen?" It's, "What shall we do now that we have knowledge of good and evil." That is, knowledge of good and evil is in fact the fall, literally. All our questions about theodicy flow from that fall ...

And God is trying to tell us that we are in a dimension now that we cannot handle ... and that the way back is to trust Him, that is, to have faith. Whatever is going on in life, it must run its course. The Bible says as much, talking about the fullness of time, when the time is ripe, etc. The fall set in motion events that cannot be stopped.

Before, perhaps we could have had knowledge of God without knowledge of evil, but for some reason, we now have a more complex task, that of knowing both God and evil ... and discovering we have a terrible propensity to make the wrong choices, to want one yet choose the other.

I still haven't articulated this point. The other day, when I thought it, I felt it was an important insight into Genesis (that is, an insight for me, not for the whole world).

I think it has to do with the fact that with our minds the way they are, we cannot answer that question of theodicy to our satisfaction ... God knows that and simply must tell us, as though talking to a small child, that we must trust Him to set it right, that He can save us from what happened in the Fall, but He cannot explain to us the mystery of evil in this life.

The mystical body of Christ, so to speak, as a cast for a broken bone, and only dwelling within that body makes it possibly for us to know good and evil and yet remain with God (because once we are with God, we cannot unchoose God, for if we sin again, we will be cast out eternally, thus we must be in a state without sin and without the possibility of sin). And the mystical body of Christ is what enables us to do that ... that's the bridge between God and man.

Or something like that ....

The smart don't get any richer than the not-so-smart.

I'm glad we have a scientific study to confirm this piece of Solomon's wisdom (Ecclesiastes 9:11):

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Short answer: We don't.

The problem with events like the Virginia Tech shooting is we think, as a society, that we should have done more or at least something different. My response is, perhaps there's a lesson to be learned, but the horrors of life come in all sorts of different forms, and the warning signs pointing to any individual one are usually obvious only in retrospect.

Let's not be too hard on ourselves because a psychopath caught us off-guard. Part of what makes psychopaths so hard to predict is that they are psychopaths and we are not. And confusing us further: There are at least a million obsessive, troubled souls muttering to themselves and bitching about some grievance, real or imagined, for every true psychopath who picks up a gun and guns people down. If you go looking for the next Cho among your closest friends and associates, all you'll do is wrongly accuse someone and probably hurt someone's feelings by implying they are potentially homicidal maniac.

My point is not that people at VA Tech didn't make serious mistakes. My point is that they didn't act much different than you and me — that is, they gave a misfit the benefit of the doubt. And that's why these shootings are so horrific — because they encourage us to stop giving others the benefit of the doubt. People start to talk about "zero tolerance" and other such things, which usually defy common sense.

In a free society and in a fallen world, a small percentage of people will do monstrous things. They will be different things from what we expect, yet be familiar. History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, as someone wise once said. Will there be more school shootings? Yes. Do we know how they'll work: Only in the biggest generalities. Can we prevent them through rigorous security? Sure, but as Jack Dunphy said, you won't want to live in that world. So no.

Can we do more? Maybe. If it's common-sense stuff, stuff we already should have been doing all along.

But let's not over-react and go around pointing to the weird, the troubled, the lonely, the sad and the just plain different — and saying, "You are potentially the next Cho. You are a potential killer. I should have a place to report you to have you checked out."

I haven't been writing about the Iraq War lately ... I've been watching and hoping for the best ... I support the troops and their mission and want the Iraqi people to establish a functioning democracy. Like it or not, Iraq is the front line in the war with Al Qaeda, the people who brought us the worst attack on U.S. soil in U.S. history.

In one of my last posts, I mentioned that the Iraq War isn't over until we decide it is. A commenter snidely nitpicked that that was true unless the Iraqis ask us to leave. So, more correctly, the Iraq War isn't over until we decide it is — unless the democratically elected government asks us to leave, which is not on their agenda right now. Right now, the Iraqi government wants us to stay, and we should continue to try to complete the mission.

I know it's been a brutal war, and that what we're doing is a long shot. But I believe we need to gut it out, maybe for several more years. It may be our best shot. John McCain seems like the candidate who best understands the stakes. Right now, I'll be supporting him.

******

I should also note that while I've supported President Bush's actions, in the sense that he's the man who makes the call on how to handle our reaction to 9-11, I'd again like to point out that I think we needed a short, extremely violent reaction to 9-11, not this long, expensive, disconcerting slog. Still, there are reasons to hope, and sometimes the answer is to just stubbornly hold your ground.

******

This all said, I don't pretend to have the answers now. The U.S. has some pretty serious dilemmas. There's a role played by the media in this war — I don't mean, liberal bias. I mean, that Osama Bin Laden and Cho Seung-Hui both know something — that violence and horror create a Show in our media culture — 9-11 gave birth to "The Al Qaeda Show," and Cho's suicide created, "The Virginia Tech Massacre Show."

Both Bin Laden and Cho have hit the soft spot in our culture ... which is that television eventually turns EVERYTHING, no matter how serious, into entertainment. And one of the greatest contributions to evil America produces is just that — serious events are trivialized as entertainment by television. Serious ideas are trivialized as entertainment. People's lives become sources of entertainment. And the biggest source of this evil is not entertainment programming, but TV news. Yes, I said evil. Television news is, with few exceptions, evil.

What Bin Laden and Cho did was turn this evil against ourselves.

The War on Terror is essentially this: The U.S. is trying to cancel the Al Qaeda Show, and Al Qaeda keeps trying to find ways to get an extension for another season.

But I wonder if TV execs can't just ax the program.

*****

Of course, the Internet has a role here, too. So it's not a question of a few TV execs in smoke-filled rooms deciding not to report any mass murders.

********

Of course, I could be wrong.

*******

But at least, this started out as The Al Qaeda Show. What this means is that the killing is done largely with an eye toward generating attention and ratings. Sorta.

Why can't we predict this stuff? Because we can't. See the power curve in today's Opinion Journal. I may order the book, too.