ROUND UP THE DEPRESSED, THEY'RE DANGEROUS

I’ve already been accused of an unfeeling cynicism because I am not weeping over the deaths of one set of strangers rather than another. I weep for friends and lovers. But now I feel I have to court even more disapprobation by pointing out the very fine line between tragedy and The Death Circus, and I fear we are already walking into the big top. (There’s a pun in there that only Londoners will understand.) The media is now left with nothing to show but candlelight vigils and probing the minutia of the madman. The clowns are being sent in, the nuts and racists are entering the arena, and Newsweek makes sure we know it.

“The bodies had barely been removed when the racial epithets started pouring in. Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old identified as the killer of 32 on the Virginia Tech campus, may have lived in the state since his elementary school days, but to the bigots in the blogosphere it was his origins in Korea that mattered most. "Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians," wrote one unnamed commentator on the Sepia Mutiny blog. "They are also sick and tired of losing their Korean girlfriends to white men with an Asian fetish."

Talk radio fascists beat their chests and demand to know why the victims couldn't take down one lone gunman -- and an Asian to boot -- while NBC reacts with sanctimonious delight as it finds itself with Cho’s press kit of Travis Bickel pictures and his multimedia mental meltdown.

“Network officials turned the material over to the FBI and said they would not immediately disclose its contents pending the agency’s review beyond characterizing the material as “disturbing.” It included a written communication, photographs and video."

Voices bleat how can we stop such a terrible event ever happening again? The answer is that we can’t, and secretly don’t want to, or we wouldn’t sell machine guns to the mentally disturbed with such merry abandon. The occasional mass murder is just the price tag on the right to bear arms. And, of course, a symptom the quiet fact that American popular culture just dotes on death.

(And as I write this highly unconfirmed rumors flicker across my computer of two people shot at University of Missouri and a triple homicide and a suicide in NY????)

BTW -- Today's bodycount in Baghdad was 183.

The secret word is Broken