We are the Ass-Whores of Capitalism

For the inexcusably uninformed, the drugged up and detached, the oblivious and transient, and the reclusive and withdrawn, I have some disturbing shit to break to you. Another confused and tormented young person decided to take out his frustration/anger/fear/pain/sadness on many of his fellow young people. Then he turned the 9mm Glock 19 handgun on himself. He left a “manifesto”. The manifesto was sent to NBC. NBC released the manifesto and proceeded to play it over and over and over again. All media outlets followed in like manner. It revealed the disturbing mind behind the shootings and instantaneously sold a hundred thousand alarm systems, over five hundred thousand handguns, a million cans of mace, ten thousand SUVs, and twenty-five gas masks. I can’t back that up, but I will not deny the utter terror I felt watching it. It is permanently branded in my long term memory. I know it. I’m doomed to flashback to the sound of his voice when I’m eighty-five living in a post-apocalyptic fallout shelter. Fuck.

There have been three questions troubling me about this so-called manifesto, the second of which reveals much about the nature of this tragedy, the third of which reveals even more about the underbelly of our prosperity.

• Why did I watch it?

That I have always known the answer to this question does not make it any less disconcerting. The truth is that I have an intense fascination with death. Combine that with an insanely obsessive personality, and you’re in my brain. The three people I have studied the most in my life (in order of initial obsession): Jim Morrison (died in a bathtub of heart failure after years of heavy drug use), Hunter S. Thompson (died of self-inflicted gun shot wound after decades of heavy drug use), and Elliott Smith (died of self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest). Six Feet Under is one of my favorite TV shows. I love eulogies. I wrote one for my grandfather. I feel most at one with the world during a funeral. I married the granddaughter of a funeral director. How fucked up is that? I’m sure everyone has a different reason for watching that video. I wouldn’t doubt if the majority of the people who have seen it stumbled upon it accidentally. When they show clips of it TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY, it’s hard to avoid—even if you don’t have cable…which brings us to my next question.

• Why did NBC release “selected pieces” of the “multimedia manifesto”?

First of all, Cho Seung-Hui is not Karl Marx so don’t call his rambling (but tragically successful) attempt at infamy a freaking manifesto. Please—he did not change the world on Monday. He did something horrifying and unthinkable, but he is nothing more than a tormented individual with easy access to a destructive and unnecessary weapon of mass destruction (sold legally). He did not write one of the most influential pieces of political theory in the history of literature. He pulled the trigger of a semiautomatic pistol many, many times and played God for two hours to satisfy his psychotic delusions of grandeur and his primal desire for revenge after a lifetime of embarrassment, torture, and self-loathing. The simple fact that NBC called it a “manifesto” reveals the true irony of the entire twisted series of events that began early morning and continues at this very moment.

A manifesto implies overtones of political and social importance. The only thing political about what Seung-Hui sent NBC was the decision by NBC to immediately put it on the air. And why did they do it? Money. Why else? In this twisted dystopia we were handed by our parents, money trumps everything. Money is more important than people, it’s more important than the planet we live on, it’s more important than God. We are talking about paper with pictures of dead white dudes on it. Think about that for a second.

They glorified the killer. They gave him his fame. That’s what sensationalist journalism has come to. Glorifying a mass murderer for profit. Let’s not confuse it with anything else. They showed it because they knew people would watch. I’m sure the TV movie is right around the corner. It’s the same reason they committed to twenty-four hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death and the diaper-wearing astronaut, and conveniently forgot that the IPCC had just published a historic and definitive scientific report that cast humanity as the major cause of global warming trends. Only this time hundreds of families were affected. And hundreds more have been put in danger as a direct result of their careless and greedy actions. In their blind ratings scramble, the corporate vultures in the media have provided self-absorbed and demented young people a pedestal upon which to prop their destructive and false sense of importance. Cho made reference to the Columbine killers as if they were his heroes. He clearly thought of their glorification as he meticulously prepared his plan. There have been numerous threats in schools across the country since the tape was released.

And we have not seen the last of it.

The worst part about it all will be the fallout surrounding teenagers in schools across the country. Despite the finger pointing in the media now raging, the youth of America will be the ultimate scapegoat. Every time something like this happens, the answer is to take more rights away from young people. Install metal detectors, build walls around our playgrounds complete with razor wire and watch towers, put up cameras in every hallway, hire armed guards, board up all of the windows, more structure, less freedom, more suspicion, less acceptance—let’s go ahead and make teenagers feel like criminals. That will make them less violent. Our jails do such a great job rehabilitating violent criminals; we should apply the same logic to teenagers. Shit, people have even suggested arming teachers. Are you kidding me? That’s your answer. More guns? In the wake of the NRA Convention in St. Louis, I’d ramble on about this country's irresponsibly lax gun laws, but I couldn’t say it any better than KBO did in this post.

Guns may be the most physically dangerous of products shoved into our ears, but you have to dig much deeper to find the root of the carnivorous weed of capitalism. So...

• What don’t they want us to think about?

In our attempt to continue America’s economic dominance of the world, we have written a blank check to capitalism. A few blind and confused politicians have sold the collective soul of an entire nation. We have been hollowed out by a model of thinking that places all value on things and things alone. There is no value to the individual. There are no more values. Everything is extrinsic. Do whatever you can to get as much stuff as you can as fast as possible no matter who or what you have to destroy in the process. People are insects. We step on them everyday without second thought. How do we live with ourselves after trampling so many innocent people to get our things? Well, it’s easy when you have seven hundred channels of mindless distraction at your disposal.

We have become the ass-whores of capitalism. They have been penetrating our psyche for so long that we can’t feel it anymore. We have been fucked in so many psychological orifices that we are numb to all sensation. To make it worse, we are also junkies to their drug. We can’t stop. We need more. More violence. More death. More porn. More food. More drugs. More humiliation. More gluttony. More atrocity. They keep cramming it down our deadened throats as we stare blankly into the television set. The more we see, the more we want, until reality becomes so dulled that mass murder is the only real event that gets the dopamine flowing. The people who starve or freeze or get blown up each day as a result of our consumption seem so distant. So out of reach. So…artificial. And whenever we are reminded of them, and those blurry images begin to come into focus, we quickly change the channel.

We sold our souls to a system that by its very nature relies entirely upon greed to function. It is self destructive and uncontrollable. It relies upon the consumer to care more about money than people. This way of life erodes the inherent compassion that we once had as children.

Everyone is always quick to point out the undeniable role that bullying plays in almost every rampage. Politicians and administrators are quick to beef up security, add cameras, and train teachers in bullying prevention. But once again, no one is willing to look into the driving force behind almost every act of bullying.

So many people in all walks of life and at all ages have been identified as freaks, treated like outcasts, and then tossed aside like insignificant pieces of garbage. We sometimes unknowingly teach our kids that the only way to be “successful” is to exploit and belittle others for their own personal gain. (It’s not necessarily our fault either…for many of us [especially the generation of kids in high school now) it’s the way we've been raised--it's all we know.

And how is success valued in an extrinsic society? Growing up, it's grades, awards, letters, wearing the most expensive clothes, sitting at the “cool table”, etc…and once you get to the adult world, it’s who has the biggest house on the block, or the biggest SUV, or the highest paying job, or the most “successful” kids. Notice, this capitalistic definition leaves no room for integrity, courage (in the standing-up-for-what-you-truly-believe-in sense), kindness, generosity, selflessness, charity, or any of the other values that once epitomized humankind. All of the things that once were the true measure of success are now just catchy phrases exploited to sell the products that we buy to distract ourselves from the harsh realities of the unjust world we have created. Every day I witness good kids give up the fight for what they’ve always known is good and honest and just and adopt a new set of principles driven by the desire to fit into an unnatural and selfish model of living—a model of living that relies upon conformity and punishes individuality.

This devolution towards materialism and away from empathy has corroded the decency and geniality for which we used to strive. It has turned us into an ugly people who do and say ugly and hurtful things. Cho Seung-Hui, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Osama Bin Laden, and every other twisted mind to commit mass murder on American soil in the last twenty years are little more than a manifestation of our ugly and evil addiction.

Our collective insides turned out for all to see.

____________________________________________________________________LINKS:

LINKS:

+There are an estimated 200 million guns floating around the United States. I think it's safe to say that we have a gun problem. If you don't think so, read this article which features an interview with the dude who owns the firearms store that sold Cho the Glock 19. He actually said this: "I've sold 160,000 guns, and out of those, half a dozen have been used for homicides or suicides...I know it's a tiny percentage, but it just absolutely tears me up every time it happens." Could he be any more oblivious in his roll of the violence in this country?

+If you want a carefully researched and well rounded account of the events of April 17th stop watching the shit spin on the 24 hour news channels. I recommend the the Special Report in latest issue of Newsweek titled "Making of a Masacre" by Evan Thomas. It 10 pages long, but that's because it is real news without spin and without knee-jerk perspective. Though the entire article is terrifying and heartbreaking, I was most affected by section that described how Cho got the guns. Evans writes:

"Buying a gun is easy in Virginia, a state with a strong gun-loving population. There is NO WAITING PERIOD and only MINIMAL BACKGROUND CHECK. On Feb. 9, Cho walked across the street from the Virginia Tech campus to a pawnshop, where he picked up an Internet-purchased Wather .22...He began buying ammo at stores like Wal-Mart, and on March 13, he went upscale. At Roanoke Firearms, he used a credit card to purchase a
Glock 19 and a box of 50 cartriges for $571. The semiautomatic, lightweight Glock, a
favorite of police and gangbangers alike, can fire five rounds a second. A magazine of ammo, holding up to 33 hollow-point bullets (effective at tearing internal organs), can be swapped out for another in under two seconds." (I added all caps for emphasis)

Yeah...no problem with any of that at all. We have the right to bear arms that are "effective at tearing internal organs," right?

+Read "Story of a Gun" if you are interested in educating yourself about the effects of irresponsible gun-lobbyists from the NRA and the Republicans who they pay off.

+Every single person who has followed the shooting has a moral obligation to read "Lost Lives", a special report written by Andrew Romano. It remembers all thirty-two of the victims.

+In case you forgot, we are also in the middle of a bloody civil war in Iraq. Listen to Keith Olbermann's podcast (via Quicktime) on the day of the shooting and you may understand how numb we have become to the violence that we hear about each day. That's right, 32 young Americans died in the ten days before the Virginia Tech shooting and we didn't bat an eye. After pointing this out, Olbermann appropriately asks, "why isn't our flag permanently at half staff?"

+And finally, Bill O' Reilly's defense of playing the Cho tapes explains yet another insightful reason for releasing the tapes: to affect policy by scaring the shit out of people.

O' Reilly begins, "I ran the tape last night and I’d run it again.”

“Evil must be exposed and Cho was evil. You can see it in his face, hear it in his voice. All of us who saw the tape will never forget it. And it made me and millions of others angry. Once evil is acknowledged, steps can be taken to contain it. And once anger is in the air, policy can change...public policy must make it more difficult for evil people. It's a lot harder for terrorists to kill Americans today than it was before 9/11. And that's because new laws and better security have been imposed."

He goes on to talk about how the tape could help people to become more active in fighting for stricter gun laws, and I'm glad he's willing to admit that despite his conservative bias, but is he suggesting that the tape was necessary to make that happen? Seriously, 32 people were killed.

He continues by explaining the old conservative mantra, “public safety trumps privacy," and explaining how he believes the "greater good was served by protecting people from the likes of Cho."

So there you have it. He admitted that he and his colleagues at Fox played the tapes to scare and anger the public. They know that we will watch if we are scared and angry, and thier ratings will soar. Their employers know that we will buy lots of shit if we're scared and angry. And Bush knows that we will not question his wars or his assault on our civil liberties if we are scared and angry. Just like 9/11 and every other sensationalized story that the media has spewed since.