For mostly obvious reasons, I've avoided blogging about the Virginia Tech shootings: What new insights could I possibly provide? But now as the media feeding frenzy has reached, inevitably, a point of satiation--which, sadly, is not tantamount to saying that it has stopped feeding--I thought I'd scatter a few observations.
And then there's the picture above and the accompanying piece from the Paper of Record. Now, I should make it clear from the get-go that I think Old Boy is the most incredible film released in the last five years--a nuanced and breath-taking meditation on the nature of revenge (at times lyrically beautiful, and at times depraved in ways previously unknown to film-goers). Anyway, because in one of the pictures Cho sent to NBC he's seen wielding a hammer, because he's Korean, and because a Korean guy also wielded a hammer in Oldboy, ergo, that film was in part what inspired Cho to go on his murderous rampage. Of course, there isn't much evidence suggesting that Cho was inspired by Old Boy, but in juxtaposing the two images the Times lets our collective racist mind wander: fucked up Korean guy obviously influenced by fucked up Korean movie.
But what pisses me off really is this: The New York Times suggests that Cho was motivated by a Korean film, the blogosphere in its charmingly shrill way accuses him of being a Muslim terrorist, news outlets make noise about his residency status (preferring the otherizing term, "resident alien," over "permanent resident" or "green card holder"), and totally unnecessarily and repeatedly, the Government of Korea expreses its condolences to the United States, and so it remains as true today as ever--as a nation we cannot face tragedy or ugliness or violence without externalizing it. We cannot assume any sort of responsibility for evil that grows within the fold of our amber waves, our purple majesty. We live in a culture that glorifies handgun violence, one that desensitizes children to its consequences, while at the same time putting few obstacles in their path towards armament, yet we grasp at straws when something like this massacre happens. Maybe guns don't kill people. Maybe capitalism isn't godless. But when we let the homicidally deranged have access to guns, when we let the socially isolated and the financially aggrieved get a permit for them, let's at least man up a bit. We didn't make Cho Seung-Hui crazy, but we gave him the road-map from crazy to Columbine-style, faux-martyr fame. Maybe that's the price we pay for living in a free America--I don't know--but let's recognize it as our burden and ours alone.
Partly for your consideration, but mostly for your derision, here are the ten best films and the ten best documentaries I saw this past decade. A few things are surprising to me about this list. There are a lot more studio films on it than I was expecting; in terms of foreign cinema, I seem to prefer western Europe and East Asia. (Please note, I am feeling lazy and am hyperlinking none of these selections to IMDB pages or Youtube video.)
Films
10) Children of Men
9) Whale Rider
8) Infernal Affairs (Part 1) / The Departed
7) Amelie
6) Brick
5) Memento
4) Pan's Labyrinth
3) City of God
2) 25th Hour
1) Old Boy
Artists, 'cross time and space, have interrogated the nature of vengeance, its limits, its contours, its origins. None has done it as Chan Wook Park has in Old Boy. I have spoken about the film before, and am disinclined to do it again. Just watch it already.
Honorable mention (in no particular order) to:
X-Men 1 and 2, Brokeback Mountain, The Prestige, V for Vendetta, The Bourne Series, Kill Bill -- Volumes 1 and 2, Hero, You Can Count on Me, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Baadasssss!, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Road to Perdition, Ocean's11, 4 Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, The Lives of Others, Dirty Pretty Things, The Dark Knight, Traffic, Michael Clayton, In Bruges, High Fidelity, Paradise Now, Heaven, Super Troopers, Knocked Up, Shaun of the Dead, Water, Khamosh Pani, Lady Vengeance
Documentaries
10) Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
9) Murderball
8) Shut Up and Sing
7) Born Into Brothels
6) Bowling for Columbine
5) Control Room
4) Spellbound
3) Mad Hot Ballroom 2) The King of Kong
1) Capturing the Friedmans
A good documentary teaches you things. And this is a good documentary, for sure. What makes it the best documentary I saw this decade is that it taught me things about myself--about my own prejudices, my own view of the world. I saw Capturing the Friedmans with a friend several years ago. I came out of it feeling that I knew with great certainly whether or not Arnold Friedman was guilty or innocent. I felt like the film had made this clear to me. My friend felt exactly the same way, but had reached the opposite conclusion as I. That kind of narrative achievement must be lauded.
Honorable mention (in no particular order) to:
Street Fight, Grizzly Man, No End in Sight, Taxi to the Dark Side
"Best of" lists are the worst. We can all agree to that. Compiling them is a pointless exercise, an attempt to quantify and measure works of art that, by their very nature, should only be considered in and of themselves. But compiling "Best of" lists is fun. So here we have what is known in the bloggo-biz as a Sophie's Choice.
When, in an earlier post, I rated my top ten films and documentaries, I did so because I wanted to see where the chips would fall. I wanted to see what through the course of the last ten years stayed with me, and I was surprised by the results. It didn't occur to me until I sat down to do the list that there is no movie I have thought about as much, enjoyed as much, as Old Boy in the last decade. But rating films is a very different pointless exercise than the pointless exercise of rating albums. Generally, I don't re-watch films. I watch them once, and I let my feelings about them, if any, percolate. Thus, it's possible to compare one's feelings about a film watched in 2000 with one watched in 2009, the effects of senescence notwithstanding.
Rating albums, on the other hand, is a tricky business. What does it mean to love an album? If you listen to any album more than 50 times, don't you grow to hate it, or at least become indifferent to it? If I listened to Stankoniaon repeat in 2000-2001, and haven't listened to it once in the last eight years, can I make a reasoned judgment about it? More important, can I compare it to TV on the Radio's last album, which I am now actually sick of, but which I listened to on repeat last year, so it's fresher in my mind? These are all very good questions that I have posed. Of that there is no question.
So, where does that leave us? I don't know. Maybe it leaves us with this: I won't rate my favorite albums and compare them to one another. I will simply provide -- again for your derision -- a list of albums that at one point or another in the last ten years (not neccesarily now) I really, really enjoyed, albums that I derived some pleasure from. That is all you get. Now shut your mouth and be grateful for my munificence knows no bounds. Forever and ever. Amen.
Put aside the fact that 50 is now a parody of the parody that he used to be, forget that mainstream hip hop is so disjointed and confused people see genius in Jay-Z's diarrhetic musings and Lil Wayne's THC-imbued meandering. Remember "In Da Club," "P.I.M.P.," and "21 Questions." Remember the simple hook from "If I Can't" ("If I can't do it, homey, it can't be done...Make the champaigne bottle pop, Take it straight to the top..."). Remember Dre's beats and the wealth of other songs on here that could have been singles too ("Many Men," "High All the Time," "Patiently Waiting," etc.). The moralists decry the era of hip hop that 50 more or less brought to a close. Me? I miss it.
One time E. did me a huge favor and picked me up from the Detroit airport. I had been listening to Funeral in the aeroplane. And she was listening to it in the car! And as I recall, I think, we both kind of liked it. And I said, "Well that's one thing we got." 2010, and the Deep Blue Something references can't stop, won't stop.
This album is a really good example of the jibberish I state in the preamble to this list. I really loved this album when it came out. It is earnest and unassuming, and is littered with some very pretty songs. In the year 2010, what with my Apple iPad and my jet pack, I don't know that I have the time anymore for it though. Tracks from it still, bizarrely, appear in television commercials, but I'm all like "Oh, Romeo, Yeah, I used to have a scene with him" when I see them. Dire Straits reference! There is no stopping this blog post.
This album's inclusion on this list may be the most surprising for me personally. When I first heard it, I fell happily into the gentle dream pop Beach House constructed around my ears. Over time, I found myself returning to it every few months. Sometimes I think nobody knows how to write love songs like this duo.
Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit / Push Barman To Open Old Wounds
Look. I am twee as fuck. Everybody knows that. Belle & Sebastian is my boyfriend. Everybody knows that too. I could have put Dear Catastrophe Waitress here instead. I am such a devotee I could have put Fold Your Hands Child You Walk Like a Peasant. But I am going with the more "mainstream" picks. One time 'Pockets, E., silent (former?) readers JBell and Heidi, and I drove down to Chicago to watch B&S perform. They were so good! I wanted to hug everybody.
This guy -- they're really a band, but one of those bands that's really about the lead singer -- anyway, this guy sounds like what it smells like when it's cold in the woods. You know what I'm talking about.
Look. We can hate till the cows come home, but I am going to give you the straight dope. The cows, those cows you've been waiting on, they are out to fucking pasture. They are not coming home. So chill out, and quit your jibber-jabber. Who's had as brilliant a three-album career opening arc as this guy? Nobody. Not even Jesus Christ. Respect.
One thing that's curious about this list is that there are a few bands/artists on it who sound terrible live. Grizzly Bear is one; Clap Your Hands Say Yeah another. Those two bands I've seen live in person. I haven't seen TV on the Radio live in person, but I did see them on Saturday Night Live, and I felt so bad for them. They sounded like those kids your middle school principal let take the stage for five minutes near the end of 7th Grade winter dance. All that said, some bands were meant for the studio. This album is magic.
Does it bother you guys that I'm not even trying to defend these choices anymore? I'm just asserting that which albums I think are good, and then telling random stories in lieu of blurbs. No?! Didn't think so. You guys are the best.
Outkast - Stankonia
Look! I can make conventional choices too. As I've said before, it's okay to like things that are popular. Also, remember the first time you told somebody, "Hey, you know that "Ms. Jackson" is about Erykah Badu's mom?," and they were like, "Yeah, everybody knows that. What's wrong with you?"
Did this album do anything to alleviate the climate crisis? Did it help bring the Janjaweed to their senses? No. This album is cotton candy chased by a Shirley Temple. But it is catchy. This album is the H1N1 of 2003.
What is going on with the spelling of her name? What is going on with the Bud Light Lime commercials? No idea. But Pitchfork once described her -- and I am paraphrasing here -- as equal parts M.I.A. and Karen O. That is a good description.
I don't know. It's disco, it's kind of glam. I like it, but writing descriptions is hard and I'm getting tired.
The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow
Wow, these guys are vanilla. Look, did "New Slang" change my life like it changed Natalie Portman's? No. But sometimes vanilla is a good flavor. Example: pudding. All of this is my way of saying why I really liked this album a few years ago, but I did. So that's that.
Nowadays nobody tries to do a New-York-defining album/novel/movie without at least touching on September 11th. What's nice about this album, which came out before September 11th, especially upon revisit, is that it captures all of my stupid, post-adolescent thoughts-and-feelings about New York. This is a really good album by someone whom I paid a little bit of attention to before it came out, and none since.
Sometimes it's good to reward people for doing really well the thing they set out to do. The three women in this riot grrrrl outfit made really good punchy, power punk songs, and never tried to do more. The fact that this album is so enduring is a testament to how good they are. And, E., they were really good in concert.
I am not sure how to feel about alt-country and its various progeny. Sugarpockets pointed out the other day that a popular Kings of Leon song that happened upon the radio sounded a lot like the schmaltzy trash that comes on the radio all the time. I took the comment to heart, and listened hard, and tried to separate the song from my own unexamined sense that Kings of Leon is a good band. I guess that's the trick about this music. It sounds nice when you aren't listening hard, and sounds like something worth supporting. All that said, It Still Moves is something else altogether. Every track on this is a burner. It's heavy on southern-fried guitar and lyrics commensurate with that style. But -- and I say this as someone very uninterested in Lynrd Skynrd -- these are some seriously talented musicians in this band, and, for me at least, this album endures, the rule of multiple listenings notwithstanding.
I saw Fleet Foxes live pretty early on in their rise to indie-fame. This was in a very packed San Francisco club, which was infrequently visited by taxi cabs. I have never been to a mass gathering of people so committed to silence and to stillness. We all stood and strained to take in the self-serious harmonizing, the woodsy gospel vibe and felt surrounded by the mountains and mist of the Pacific Northwest. It's a hard thing to be serious and then to be taken seriously. These guys accomplish it.
So mumbly, and Brooklyn, and knit-capped, these guys self-released their debut album after forming at Connecticut College, perhaps the most useless college in America. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they all went to prep school and did a p.g. year at Lawrenceville and bought their drugs from a members-only delivery service. Still, this album has all the loose, jangly hallmarks of unvarnished genius. Live, as mentioned, they are terrible. Their next album was totally disappointing. But if you ever want to get a sense of what all those Caucasian, self-important weirdos in New York and their hoodies and their Japanese-edition only Air Jordans were going on about in the mid-aughts and why you might consider caring, pick up CYHSY's debut.
I really like it when old people confuse casual racism with witty observation or old world charm. There is, for instance, that old lady from Arrested Development, who said to Gob, "You could charm the black off a telegram boy." She ends up choking on a piece of chicken. And then there's CBS sports chief Dick Enberg (pictured). During tonight's broadcast of the Southern Illinois-Kansas game the old-timey announcer attempted to praise the Salukis' Jamaal Tatum, a gifted player--a young black man--with a 3.64 GPA: The only C's he's ever gotten, said Enberg in chuckling disbelief, were in African-American Studies. Whoah! But he's black! How is that even possible?! Don't you get, like, a B just for having awesome dreads like Tatum? I wonder if Enberg thinks I should have done better in that Terrorism and State-Sponsored Violence class I took in college.
aside from not being able to sleep off a hangover anymore and scoffing at people who dress inappropriately for the weather (e.g., tight jeans when it's 90 degrees outside--yikes!) and/or wear non-sensible footwear, i think age is making me sappy.
case 1. i feel really, really sorry for the japanese world cup team. i know, dude. i keep reminding myself, hello, the occupation of korea? comfort women? for manufacturing a shite car just after my parents broke their decades-long embargo on japanese products and purchased a toyota? APOLO OHNO????
nonetheless, to go out on PKs after defying all expectations is rough. i wish soccer had sudden death.
case 2. i got all choked up over party down's season (perhaps series?) finale. i love this show because it's kind of a relentless downer, which, let's face it, life can be sometimes. you can hope against all evidence and common sense that you're going to make it out of the wilderness, but sometimes you're just going to get kicked in the ass. repeatedly. i'll divulge nothing here except to say that there was an ambiguous glimmer of semi-hope at the end of this episode.
and you know what? that shit really got to me.
finally, and most treacly, case 3. i was on the subway yesterday, standing next to this large-ish black dude wearing a do-rag, a thriller t-shirt, heavy gold jewelry and giant gold sunglasses. i normally don't talk to anyone on the subway because, y'know, i'm not a crazy person, but it would never occur to me to talk to this guy. i'll say it: he was intimidating looking and did not seem like he wanted to casually converse. yeah, that's right, even though he was seated next to a stroller with his daughter inside.
a very pregnant white woman got on the next stop with two equally white little boys. the younger one, about 4 years-old, ran up to the black man and guilelessly exclaimed, "hello!" then he proceeded to show this man and his daughter a little toy he was holding in his hand. it wasn't even anything that exciting, a mere roll of measuring tape. the man removed his earphones and spoke briefly to the boy and his daughter, who attempted to snatch the tape away. whenever the train shook, the little boy held onto the man's trunk-like legs.
i tried to think of a lot of unsavory things to steel myself against the man-in-the-mirror-ness of it all, to no avail. this shit was seriously touching.
On Election Day, 2004, 'Pockets, some random tween-age boy, and I personed the Kerry table outside an Ann Arbor voting precinct. The air was cold and rife with hope. The exit polling leaked onto blogs early in the day and suggested wild possibilities -- notably, Virginia was tilting to Kerry. It is true -- as the aforementioned 'Pockets, blogger E, reader Owen and others will tell you-- that I had succumbed to the notion that Senator Kerry would dethrone the President that day. In fact I visited my feelings of hope on any and all and infected them duly. Of course, as we know, Virginia fell to the rogues that night --a full 8% margin eventually separated right from wrong -- and with it Ohio and anything that mattered. The taste of defeat, I have been told, was all the more bitter because of my evangelism. Kerry was a false prophet, and I spoke his gospel a bit too well. I had convinced even myself.
We now sally forth to a new election day, to a new dawn backlit by a supernova. The President is as marginal a lame duck as there has ever been. Prognosticators seem only interested in predicting how wide Senator Obama's margin of victory will be. I know I have been hesitant in these e-pages to embrace the New Testament that David Axelrod and the Obama Campaign have written in Obama's honor. I have resisted the notion that the obvious and remarkable symbolism of his potential victory is tantamount to substantive change. But I now publicly retreat from this position; While I believe Obama faces immense challenges in his first term and will have to make difficult choices that, at best, will serve to mitigate our national losses, not extend our gains, I can no longer deny the import of what he symbolizes. My former students, elementary school children in the Bush years, may just approach adulthood under the aegis of a man whose story and whose complexion are the same as theirs. This alone will not realign the systematic racism that impedes their progress, but it is a beginning.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There is time still for defeat to be snatched from the jaws, nay, the esophagus of victory. But whether or not the final results speak it, the electorate has changed already in myriad ways. We have rejected the glib and pointless Governor of Alaska; we have rejected the demented and desperate schizophrenic Senator from Arizona. They are the Rosencranz and Guildenstern of our unfolding Hamlet. They are bit players, but this is not to say they are necessarily losers.
You see, this election is not about them, or the Economy or Iraq. On November 4th we will take stock of only one thing: exactly how bigoted our country really is. This election will measure that and that alone. Should the polls reflect reality, we will have something to celebrate. However, should our fear of black male power, should our collective anti-Muslim hysteria, guide our choice, we will not. If Obama loses, none of what I have said above is undermined, but hope will be a hard sell down the road, and bigotry will rule the day and days to come.
So on Election Day, once again, I will turn to my home state, my beloved Old Dominion, and watch with bated breath. Virginia brought indentured servitude to colonial America, laying the foundation for the slave trade. Now it has an opportunity to atone for its sins -- and it will. I resist predicting an outright Obama win, but that much I am willing to say.
So, my boy Nick's brother, Peter, has put out his newest anti-Duke screed (above), and true to his nature, it's clever, it's catchy, and it's homophobic. Although there's some self-awareness here--really, why are hordes of Carolina and Maryland fans so consumed with Duke rage that they boost the ratings for games in which Duke plays unrelated opponents, thus ensuring that Duke's absurd broadcast dominance continues and little old me, out in the godless Bay Area can watch 15 to 20 games a year, no problem? Anyway, I know I'm just a "douchebag faggot who never got laid in college" as one Carolina fan put it to me at a sports bar a couple of years ago, but I support my team, and I support all ACC teams when they're not playing my team, and I think gays are people too, and I like a lot of mainstream hip hop, but I give none of its homophobic luminaries a free pass. On the eve of the tournament, can I say this: Go Carolina, go Miami, and go Duke.
below is my comment to e's comment to my last post.
e, this point, that pakistanis are the greatest victims of terrorism, is perhaps arguable, but there is a very compelling case to be made for it. first off, we have to define what "terrorism" means in this context. in my view it's composed of activities by state or non-state actors targeting civilians, or activities resulting in civilian deaths in far greater proportion to legitimate military / insurgent targets. of course, i'm declining to define what proportion is inoffensive enough to exempt said activity from my working definition, but suffice it to say that i believe the drone bombing campaigns over western pakistan, and yemen, and libya absolutely qualify as acts of state-sponsored terrorism. i know that that this statement alone will, for some people, nullify everything i say below, but i think it's important for us to divorce ourselves a bit from our creeds and flags, and think of these issues in terms of our principles and principles alone. i consider you, e, a fair mind and a very serious thinker, so you are not among the aforesaid people. you do what a friend does best -- challenge my convictions and make me think more clearly about them. i hope you do the same here.
according to wikipedia, last year alone there were 50 separate terrorist incidents in pakistan (excluding drone attacks). these were generally carried out by al-qaeda in pakistan, or a like-minded group like lashkar-e-taeba or jamaat-e-islami. these attacks were generally low-tech acts of violence (e.g., suicide bombs) carried out in public spaces. notably, in the last few years, these attacks have taken place in places like lahore, where my family is from, which is far from the badland west where the pasthun population resides and which is largely indistinguishable from afghanistan. while the sheer volume of deaths that has resulted from these acts does not compare to, say, a single act of terrorism like the september 11th attack on the world trade center, the effect of these attacks is palapable in everyday pakistan in a way that september 11th's is not (except when it's evoked by brain-dead shitheads like giuliani and schumer -- he of the genius "no-ride" list proposal -- and other cynical exploiters of that event). that is to say, terrorism has disrupted pakistani society much more than it has any other society on the face of the planet -- unless you count iraq and afghanistan, which i don't because i think those two places are uniquely fucked up places in which terrorist activity targeting civilian populations and insurgent attacks on military targets are caught up in a whole incomprehensible morass. to put in another way, afghanistan and iraq are sites of war -- unlike pakistan, at least officially, which is a site of non-militarily justifiable acts of terrorism.
now, it should be said that the wikipedia numbers are pure nonsense. they account only for high-profile events that have gotten press. i rely more on think tank numbers like the pakistan institute for peace studies, whose 2010 report states that there were 2113 terrorist acts in pakistan last year alone (again, not accounting for drone attacks) in which almost 3000 people were killed and almost 6000 injured. now, if drone attacks are counted, an additional 1000 people in pakistan were killed. this figure, 4000 people, is simply staggering, and i have not seen anything else anywhere in the world that compares to it -- again, with the exception of afghanistan and iraq, which are active theatres of war. more important, each year since 2001 has seen an uptick in terrorist acts in pakistan and deaths resulting therefrom. and with the killing of osama bin laden, it should be clear that any reprisal will be visited first and foremost on the pakistani people. such has been al-qaeda's (whatever that even is now, given its many diffuse forms across the world) modus operandi of late.
as for your other point, i appreciate it fully. human beings have no obligation to act in a principled manner or to put their emotions at bay. i get this. i totally do. know that, but know also i have a monumental problem with the notion that it's unobjectionable to celebrate the death of "someone who specifically targeted americans for being american." why is this relevant? seriously, why is it? if a person kills one person in a botched robbery, do we celebrate his execution? if a serial killer kills ten blonde women because he has some insane sexual fetish, do we celebrate his? if he kills ten black people because he's a white supremacist, same question. i have a huge problem with hate crimes legislation -- let me state that from the outset -- but the notion that a person's intentionality should affect my view of his bad acts is totally lost on me. this isn't about osama bin laden -- or it should not be. this is about us. our reaction to his death -- indeed, the way his killing was comissioned -- that speaks to our best or worst selves. i have a convert's zeal for this country and its bedrock principles. therefore, i cannot understand how it can be that we, collectively, have asked so few questions about the conflicting details of operation geronimo. it turns out bin laden wasn't armed. it turns out he wasn't using his wife as a human shield. it turns out that he attempted to surrender. brennan -- the deputy national security guy -- stated this was a kill operation. why was he not arrested? why was he not haled before a civilian court in the united states and given full due process rights and made to answer for the mountain of evidence compiled against him. why was he dumped in the sea? seriously, why? he was a piece of shit who couldn't give a fuck how his muslim victims were buried, and we're, well, we're denizens of a country that couldn't give a shit how the muslim victims of our drone attacks are buried. why afford this man a so-called islamic burial? what constituency does this satisfy?
i know there are still many details not known about geronimo. i know that. and it may turn out some of my questions have legitimate answers. i hope so. but putting aside protestations about america's egregious violation of pakistani sovereignty -- an irrelevant point, as far as i'm concerned given the pakistani army and intelligence services' incompetence in catching bin laden / duplicity in allowing him sanctuary -- and putting aside the basic human need, perhaps, to celebrate something, anything, after 10 years of confused, neo-imperial brutality in various parts of the muslim world, i put to you this: upon hearing news of bin laden's death, doesn't a mature population push aside its base instincts, and think about all that has been lost and can never be restored? doesn't it think about what we -- as a nation -- have lost, but also allowed ourselves to lose? when bin laden was shot dead in abbottabad and then dumped into the arabian sea, i couldn't help thinking we're now a nation that cannot stomach its own core values. we cannot put one of the world's greatest criminals on trial. as a fiercely proud, and thoroughly skeptical american, i wonder if america is now a shadow of itself. would tocqueville recognize this country? would tom paine be proud of it?
also, and i mean this question seriously, say you're a ten-year old pakistani boy whose entire family -- none of whom were involved in any kind of terrorist activity -- was killed in a drone strike. say you're face is half-charred and you lost an arm in the strike. say you did nothing -- clearly -- to deserve this. nothing at all. say "it's rather human to enjoy the elimination of one's enemy." who is your enemy in this situation? the guy in missouri manning the drone? leon panetta? barack obama? what measure of vengeance are you allowed? put aside creed and flag. put aside who-started-what, and tell me. what kind of world are we barreling towards? what have we wrought?
For mostly obvious reasons, I've avoided blogging about the Virginia Tech shootings: What new insights could I possibly provide? But now as the media feeding frenzy has reached, inevitably, a point of satiation--which, sadly, is not tantamount to saying that it has stopped feeding--I thought I'd scatter a few observations.
