sanctuary
Music: Today
Responding to the massacre at Virginia Tech yesterday, President Bush echoed the disbelief of millions when he said: "Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary and learning. When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community." I do not know who wrote those remarks, but they echo my sentiment when I learned the news from Blacksburg, Virginia. Although the history of my own institution, as well as numerous others, are exceptions, I have always thought of colleges and universities as "safe spaces": campuses are places of protest and disagreement; classrooms are places to voice opposition; controversy is the norm at the university. Echoing Kenneth Burke's life's project, ad bellum purificandum, it seems to me the achievement of the college campus is peaceful warfare---here we fight among each other, but that fighting is with words, ideas, concepts. The reason the massacre at Virginia Tech is so startling and so terrible is that (a) 33 people are dead; and (b) people should not be killed at school. Murder is a violation of the "pure warfare" that happens here. The university is sanctuary. The violation of sanctuary is consequently a spectacular sin.
I vehemently disagree with people who decry "the unthinkable has happened" or "the unfathomable has occurred"; insofar as the university has achieved sanctuary, fantasies of its destruction are inevitable. If you build a giant sandcastle, someone on the beach is thinking about jumping on it. The "movtive" of someone who kills dozens is not difficult to understand; it's the psychosis that leads to actualizing that motive that baffles us. The thing is, I think we're living in a time in which psychosis, however temporary, is sometimes encouraged.
Defiling the academic temple is a profanity so spectacular that one can guarantee "real-time" media coverage for weeks, of course. Today we're dealing with the motive of publicity. I've spent some time reading myspace.com pages, and it's not difficult to find evidence to support the claim that some young people do not believe they "exist"---that is, some folks do not think they have a social life---unless they have become a public spectacle of sorts. Warhol's quip on steroids.
As with all massacres, real-time coverage and speculation fuels the mass media maudlin machines, machines that will continue to churn out story after (stupid, paranoid) story: the shooter was not a legal resident; should we allow foreigners to attend the university? is it time for gun reform, again? Is your child safe at school? Is there a "profile" for crazed youth (other than being Korean)? How do you protect your college student from university massacres? What can you do to avoid a crazed sniper? Why didn't the shooter's friends see the "signs?" We have reason enough to dread the television for the next two weeks.
One final thought about profanity: Already the god-like real-time coverage is beginning to hover: As with the Columbine High School massacre, The New York Times is publishing aerial overviews of the the crime scene. Elsewhere David Beard and I have argued the first move of mass media outlets is the video-game-ification of atrocity: aerial views, maps, and time-lines of mass murder create the kind of critical distance that allows one to lord over a bloody scene. Ironically, this is the same kind of detached, critical distance that allows one to assassinate 32 human beings.