Obviously, there is nothing new to say about the insanity of American gun culture.
But here are three thoughts anyway.
First, we have to stop seeing these events as tragedies. They are inevitabilities, even triumphs. The patient who smokes two packs a day cannot be upset with the doctor when breathing gets tough and these events are nights out, permanent benders by a country that is happily addicted to lighting up. Thus the logical progression is to celebrate mass shootings, a narrative that has already begun in the over-praise of the police who shot the assailant. When you watch that video and read the comments you can feel how titillated the YouTube audience is, how impressed they are but the difference between this and Uvalde. But their turn-on, they forget, comes at the cost of more children, and more teachers murdered. The thrill is now Roman.
Second, while I am glad the Senate Chaplain said we are beyond thoughts and prayers, the god of “God, Guns, and Trump” needs a more severe dressing down from those in a position to do it. Religion in America is a straight-up disaster for public policy. Defacto racist, brutally anti-science, and more theocratic than they have been in generations, America’s faithful are the wellspring of a backward-looking Supreme Court, climate change idiocy, and a spate of embarrassingly incompetent elected officials. Yes, it will do for young people to get offline and do more in real life just as it will for the left to consider the political liabilities of its approach to identity politics. Still, demographics and causes do not get tax breaks nor the cultural pass those of “faith” enjoy. And if moderate preachers cannot put their god against guns then they are no more than hosts of social clubs. Unlike the well-meaning vicar, I do not stand in awe of his god. (There are eloquent exceptions, of course.)
Third, and I am not sure how to put this or whose responsibility it is, we need a less pornographic society. I don’t necessarily mean less sexualized or less graphic, though neither would be so terrible, but one less fundamentally defined by titilation and release, by the eroticism of shock and the idea watching a thing makes you a guardian of it. To scroll through Tik-Tok or listen to the talking heads on the better-known channels or watch a little porn does not just scramble the wires and pummel the soul, it normalizes emptiness and shouting, makes trauma and abuse the frequencies of the age. No surprise, then, that some of us find that currency so overwhelming, or so difficult to plug into, that we want it to stop, want everything to stop, and would rather murder the world than live with it or its celebrants.
And then, unlike every other sane society in the world, we make the tools of such murder not just available, but sacred . . . holy.
For the Christian guy who needs to shoot Jews and the student who needs to shoot peers and the white kid who needs to shoot black churchgoers and the transwoman who needs to shoot her teachers, the issue is not “who” these people are but what they became. We have not made the worst amongst us ready killers so much as ensured that there must be those amongst us who will do the worst. This is to say the obvious once again, that the blood of the children killed in these fiascos does not consecrate the final passion of a lost soul who would make sense of now and of us in the most terrible of acts, but rather signals what we now choose to sacrifice, together.
Powerfully put, Ted. I especially appreciated that you start with the bizarre public response in comment threads. I couldn't believe how quickly the conversation shifted away from the horror of more murdered children to a collective drooling over body cam footage like it was a highlight reel from a first-person-shooter video game.
I'm trying to wrap my head around the porn of it all — trying to think like Bataille, or Lasch. Something about mediated violence and the perverse narcissism of the West. And that got me to revisit Sontag. I remembered reading her own repudiation of "On Photography" and those detached French poststructuralists and how it really complicated my thoughts on an early thesis attempt at the Falling Man. It's a long passage from "Regarding the pain of Others," but I think worth sharing. When the violence comes home, the West still struggles to see it as real (that's a gross exaggeration, of course — so maybe I ought to hedge to just media culture, which still amounts to an overstatement).
"According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a "society of spectacle." Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media... [But] To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern," and a prerequisite for dis-manding traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."
I think this holds up well to your critique of American religiosity. Even when we are "invited" to patronize reality, as you write, that participation is pornographic — not in a sexual way as you say but as a form of release. To stick with religious metaphors, rapturing comes to mind. Gun violence is exalted, transcendental, and extra-worldly — in other words, unreal. Mass bloodletting to excise societal demons? In this theatre, Commando cops respond by performing the divine retribution of a sanctimonious God by proxy. The failure of the Uvalde cops amounts to a dereliction of duty on a divine scale. The crusaders were called upon from high and could not put evil to the sword. But those cops from Nashville took up righteous arms to restore cosmic order. What an abstract and violent ritual. Of course many of us look on in terror. We can't believe cops even need to be called in the first place. We can't accept that the violence takes place at all. To this group, life is a sacred thing to be preserved rather than sacrificed.
But to a certain sect of this country, life is cruel, brutish, and short — and it must remain so. Or else the real won't make sense.