Coping with Debate
Posted by Zach Wendling on 17 April 2007 | one response
I’m ambivalent about the propriety of introducing policy advocation to the Virginia Tech Massacre, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is surprising. From the Right and the Left, two views defending the urge:
John Podhoretz:
The effort to shoehorn an event as devastating as this one into a predetermined set of ideas — like the need for gun control, or the need for the abolition of all gun controls — is an effort to make the unthinkable thinkable. Does this massacre seem to be utterly without cause? Well, then, we will find a cause in order to be able to wrap our minds around it, because when we have a cause we can determine a remedy.
When stuff like this happens, people like to talk. And when they talk, they talk about all sorts of stuff. They’re just being human.
Above all, I believe that policy-talk has its greatest utility in distracting us from contemplating the pure horror of the massacre. Even the parents of VT students have taken up a call for action, albeit merely the dismissal of university officials.
One Response to “Coping with Debate”
More importantly, network TV has to fill air time during a perceived crisis, so they get their jump to conclusions mat out and run the expert-of-the-week through a game of verbal Twister. All for the good of humanity.
Of course, they aren’t so concerned with the good of humanity to say, suspend commercial advertisements during the “crisis special”. I wonder which advertisers would enjoy having their products pitched between Katie Couric spouting off about the perceived shortfalls in how the crisis was handled by the university administration, even before the sun had set over Blacksburg.