I'll try to make this, my last blog for a while, short and sweet.
What happened in Newtown, CT, on Friday, has brought how events cause us to think about events and politics to the forefront. And I feel at a loss for words. Or at least, I don't feel that I have anything to add to the conversation. Not yet. Or perhaps I'm merely reluctant. It seems that everywhere across the country, we just want to get through this weekend. This holiday season. This year. We want to pick up the pieces. And then we want to figure out what fatal flaw is antagonizing our nation. And we'll disagree. But that's politics.
I won't include any photos or links in today's blog. I'm not seeking to put together a "Top Ten Most Depressing Pictures" album or anything like that. We've seen them. On the news. On Facebook. And if there's any topic that I mention in this blog, feel free to google it. Anyway, these pictures follow the trends we've seen. Aurora. Columbine. Even September 11th. However, there's something different about this one. Something is making the country want to talk. I don't know if it's because these kids were so young. Or because the act seems so nonsensical. Or because so many such tragedies of this scale have happened during the Obama presidency. Conversations are developing. I'll list them here.
- Our obsession with the image and identity of the murderer. Ever since Columbine, and perhaps even before that, there has been the concept of the celebrity mass shooter. The moment a shooting happens, we want to see the face of who did it. It's getting to the point that if we had our way, we'd want to know the persons name, and get a picture of their face on CNN, even before the shooting was confirmed over. After Sandy Hook, people have awakened to there being something wrong about this. This has come from two sources. First, from people confusing the murderer from his older brother after major news networks started distributing screenshots from the brother's Facebook page. And second, how we celebritize the shooter, in spite of the victims. This happened after a viral Facebook thread started circulating, which was (wrongly) attributed to Morgan Freeman. It spoke to how we need to stop looking up the murderer's name. Stop searching for a picture of his face. Don't give these murderers the attention that they expect, even crave. Still. I fully suspect that there will be that one famous image of the murderer that all the major news networks use. It's been that way for every shooting I can recall. It won't change now. We need an image of someone to blame. Otherwise we feel that we won't know who to stop next time. Even if we can't stop them.
- Guns. Guns, and images of guns, and types of guns, and gun laws, and legal guns, and illegal guns, and the meaning of guns, are once again part of the national conversation. And with that has come the even more testy topic of when is it ok to talk about gun control. After Aurora and the murder/suicide that happened in Kansas City on December 1st, there was much outcry about politicians and journalists using these tragic circumstances to try to talk about gun control laws while communities and families were still grieving. This was especially true after Bob Costas read a statement about gun control during the halftime of the Kansas City Chiefs game that followed the murder there. But what has occurred at Sandy Hook has caused an outcry, and it looks like if there's ever going to be presumably necessary gun control talks, they're going to happen now.
- This is related to the above topic, but politicizing the dead. Using the existence of dead bodies to force political conversations. Is it ethical? Is it unethical to do nothing?
- And finally, mental health. What drives someone to do something like this; to target those who have obviously done you no harm? We've tried to try to rationalize shootings as the work of the angered, the outsider, the terrorist, or the criminal. Now it seems that the real talk is about how do mentally unstable people fit in to our nicely constructed categories. Or are all murders unstable. Or are there no categories.
Images, from photos, to memorials, to memes, will surface around these categories, and perhaps even new categories. I will report on them, if it feels acceptable. As if any of this can ever feel acceptable.
This is my last post for the semester. Check back every once and again, especially if there seems to be a big story in the news, or an interesting political image going around. Or, you know, if you see one of my Post-it notes somewhere (cause that's still a thing). Also, later this spring, I will be presenting my Post It Politics work at the Honors Humanities symposium, and perhaps even making the scholarly side of my work public in some fashion (Does that make me a scholar? A meme scholar? How quaint). So I'll let you know about that when the time comes.
For now, please, give someone you love a hug. And have a joyous transition into the new year. May it be full of friends and family and other people that you like.
So long
(wow, this blog stopped being short and sweet a while ago...)
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