Sad to say, these type of stories have become so numbingly ubiquitous in recent years...disturbed loser goes on a rampage with a gun, killing others and then themselves...that they tend to pass through your awareness without making a lasting impression, other than the thought that modern life becomes more de-personalized and more horrific (in general) as the years pass by. The incidents all seem to blend together; the names of the guilty parties become difficult to recall (I suspect that if Richard Speck and Charles Whitman went on their mass-murder sprees now, they and their crimes would pretty much be forgotten in a month by most people). For instance, can anyone recall, off the top of their heads, the name of the Asian kid responsible for that massacre in Virginia a year or so ago? I can't. Or the pederast in Great Britain some years ago who killed all those schoolchildren (I think his name might have been Hamilton, but I could be wrong). Or the stock-broker (or insurance salesman) in Atlanta.
What's different about this case, of course, is that the perpetrator is still alive, and that he is, as someone noted in one of these reviews, what bigots would refer to as a "raghead". Puts me in mind of an incident I witnessed at a nearby soup shop yesterday at lunch, which I had with a friend of mine and his 5-year old son. A woman at the next table, a middle-aged blonde, was talking loudly to her friend...as well as everyone else in the room, who couldn't help but overhear her. She had been somewhere public earlier in the morning...a post office, I think, but I could be wrong about that...and had started commenting loudly on how this crime clearly demonstrated that all "sand niggers" needed to be kept out of the country. Those already here needed to be unceremoniously thrown out, the quicker the better. At the time, she was confronted by another woman, and it escalted into a near-physical confrontation.
The leathery blonde, wearing a NOBAMA HEALTH CARE button, then started in on how everyone in the restaurant knew it was a free country, she could say whatever in hell she wanted, and everyone needed to start writing to their Congressmen, their Senators, etc. It was the "progressives" she said in a withering tone, making imaginary marks around the word with her fingers, that were responsible for how far down this country had come in recent years. But there was hope. If only we'd write to our Senators, Congressmen, etc., we'd all be ok. And got the "sand niggers" out of the country, of course.
(In deference to my friend's 5-year old son, I didn't tell the woman to get the fuck out of the restaurant and let me eat my meager meal in peace-- I later accused my friend, a former neo-con now calling himself "an old-fashioned conservative", with setting the whole spectacle up for my benefit. He just laughed.")
The point? In my cynicism, I think all the furor has less to do with the fact that innocent people were brutally, senselessly slaughtered...yet again...than it does with the fact that the sick scumbag who did it was named "Hasan."
I'm not suggesting that the fact of his origins might not have had a place in the development of his delusional system of belief. But nobody blamed all Jewish people because of Berkowitz, or all blond all-American looking guys because of Whitman, or all black Jamaicans because of Colin Ferguson, or all WASP stock-brokers (or insurance salesmen) because of that guy in Atlanta (Barton: his name comes to me now), or all maladjusted high school kids because of those 2 at Columbine....etc., etc.,...
