Pittsburgh killer

Forgive me for not feeling much of anything over George Sodini’s sick fantasy of himself as the tough guy taking down The Enemy, in this case a roomful of young women doing exercises. It’s all so predictable that I guess I’ll leave the mourning to people who still think we aren’t actively fomenting such outcomes.

Not that there’s a direct line between an individual case of psychosis and the pandering dementia served up daily on cable or the criminally irresponsible social attitudes toward guns. No one is exactly to ‘blame’ for what happened in Pittsburgh, but all you have to do is turn on the TV to see people cheering the attitudes sustaining this sort of senseless slaughter. How tragic can things be that aren’t really accidental?

One hardly needs to read through Sodini’s now-public diary ravings to find out that the guy was upset because his weenie wasn’t getting the attention he thought it deserved. Therefore, all women are guilty and deserve to die. Nothing new there.

But as usual the standard reports are cherry-picking that narrative line from the guy’s screed and downplaying his enthusiastic membership in the lunatic fringe that somehow has become the "other side" in our national debate. Turns out Sodini posted to ‘militia’ websites in the 1990s, and in recent weeks as he tumbled over the edge, he associated Obama’s election to the take-over of white womanhood by black males.

Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama's plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl hoe to hone up on.

This repugnant horseshit sounds almost laughably antebellum, but isn’t the subtext a familiar and disturbingly current one? Sodini sounds like any one of the army of disgruntled guys who are being coached incessantly that they’re really special underneath, but somebody is cheating them out of their deservedly triumphant march through life. Hour after hour, the Glen Becks and the Rush Limbaughs are drilling into them the idea that they could be on top, but undeserving minorities and (the horror!) actual females are getting the prizes instead.

Add the hilariously lax regulation of armaments that we have agreed to as a nation, and you get the exactly the mayhem cooked up in his toxic stew of a brain. It’s as surprising as liver cirrhosis should be to an alcoholic.

Instead, we get assurances that nothing could be done, like the local police chief who told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Democrat that Sodini ‘just had a lot of hatred in him and (was) hell-bent on committing this act, and no one was going to stop him’. Yeah, just a lone wacko, so whocouldanode?

When we decide we don’t like this sort of behavior, we can do something about it, which would reflect true lamentation and regret instead of what we get—another chorus from the hired wailers at CNN.