At the same time, the social gap in America has widened in the past decade. By 2005 the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the US population earned nearly as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Those 300,000 wealthy individuals each received 440 times as much income as the average person in the poorest half of the population, nearly doubling the divide from 1980. The rich lord it over everyone else, piling up fortunes that come directly at the expense of wide layers of working people. Society is divided starkly into “winners” and “losers.” For the latter, the future is bleak.
The decay of social solidarity, the domination of the political process by cash, the erosion of democratic rights, the transformation of the media into more or less a propaganda arm of the government and the Pentagon—all of these processes, under way in 1999, have now attained a far more finished state.
More generally, the past twenty-five years have witnessed a sharp lurch to the right by the American political and media establishment, driven by its relative economic decline, and an accompanying coarsening and degeneration of the social atmosphere. Brutality in language and action is now the preferred policy of the powers that be.
The proliferation of violence, the continuous appeals to fear, the incitement of paranoia—all of this has consequences, it creates a certain type of climate. American society has for so long tried to cover up or ignore its most pressing problems. What are the official responses? Punishment first, then the invocation of the deity. The suppression of contradictions, however, doesn’t make them disappear.
The culture as a whole has suffered. Without giving any ground to the right-wing morality police, the prevalence of video games, popular music and films that celebrate rape and killing can hardly be taken as a sign of social well-being. Every effort has been made to atomize people, to render them callous and inured to the suffering of others. Human life has been devalued and often held in contempt.
Clearly, there have been consequences. The ability to kill one’s fellow students methodically in cold blood reveals a terrible level of social anomie. A doctor at Montgomery Regional Hospital, where the injured were treated, commented: “The injuries were amazing. This man was brutal. There wasn’t a shooting victim that didn’t have less than three bullet wounds in him.”
The gunman in Blacksburg, a 23-year-old Korean-American, Cho Seung-Hui, is one of those forlorn individuals who inevitably figure in such tragedies. He was a “loner,” says one college official. His roommates describe him as “weird,” a young man who ate by himself, refused to engage in conversation, appeared to have no friends or girl-friends and who sat at his computer for hours or simply sat “staring at his desk, just staring at nothing.”
Cho’s English professor indicated that there “were signs he was troubled,” based on his work in a creative writing course and directed him to counseling. One of his fellow students in a playwriting class described his work as “really morbid and grotesque.” She remembered one of his plays: “It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play the boy threw a chainsaw around, and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy treat.” It’s unpleasant to have to acknowledge, but would such a scenario be unthinkable in the contemporary American film industry?
Cho, who came to the US as a child and attended high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, in suburban Washington, DC, left behind a note, in which he reportedly ranted against “rich kids,” “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans.” He also wrote, “You caused me to do this.” According to school authorities, the young man posted a warning on a school online forum, “im going to kill people at vtech today.”
This was a troubled person, but nothing was done. He fell through the cracks, like so many. There are plenty of well-meaning individuals in America, more than willing to lend a hand, but as a society it is uncaring. Many obstacles—institutional, financial—block the way of truly helping people, and all of this takes place in unyieldingly competitive conditions.
The incident in Blacksburg, dreadful as it is, is not unique or isolated. One day after the mass shooting in Virginia, university administrators in Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee locked down or evacuated campuses, along with officials at two public schools in Louisiana. In Hollywood Hills, Florida, a high school was closed after a student sent a picture of a gun over his cell phone and threatened to kill himself. In Iowa, Rapid City’s Central High School was also locked down after a report of someone on the school grounds carrying a gun.
