Looked in the Mirror, Saw a Stranger

There are only so many times you can hear the phrase "unimaginable violence." Unimaginable is one of those odd negations, like unprecedented, that almost always means precisely the opposite of what it means. What about the "violence" was not already imagined in a thousand movies and a million video games and the trillions of scheming neurons of the expanding state police apparatus? Maybe the context of the academy and the relative youth of those involved--as victims and perpetrator--in the shootings at Virginia Tech oblige a certain blindness in commentary on this matter. In the end, though, it isn't difficult to find plenty of imagined instances of a dude with a gun walking into a building and killing a few dozen people.

I don't mean to author a screed against fictive violence. People who believe that Sin City and violent video games can be read as the proximate causes for real-life carnage are just the sort of facile, fatuous scolds who denigrate art in all its forms in our culture by so insistently decrying it as another quotidian factor in the lives of The People or the lives of The Children, with a remedial-Freudian causal relationship to the eventual disposition of those lives. More directly, they put the cart before the horse, such as it is. It's not the celebratory bloodshed of cultural artifacts that makes a terrifyingly violent culture, but a terrifyingly violent culture that ferments a liturgical, devotional propagation of bloodshed in cultural artifacts. I've always been skeptical of too-simple notions about art as mimesis, but clearly a correlation exists.

What you have to consider when you listen to all these accounts of supposedly unimaginable violence, of tragedies no person could ever possibly prepare himself for, because, again, how could anyone imagine that such terror would be wrought by one person on others, for any reason, at any time, is that it is the express policy of our government to engage in precisely such terrors through its military and its police agents. There, really, is the willful blindness and the dark shame of this moment. That a nation which regularly engages in aerial bombardments of urban centers, that invades and occupies other countries without provocation, that garrisons its armies in almost every country in the world, that turns around and sells its own military equipment and martial skills to its own internal police forces, who likewise commit daily atrocities, not the least of which has been to put more or less an entire generation of black men in jail--that such a nation can, in the rare moments of national introspection sparked by unsanctioned atrocity, delude itself into understanding what occured as without precedent, without cause, without a tether to the very heart of life in the nation, speaks to the sort of people we are, and it doesn't speak highly.