heh? perhaps you dialed the wrong # Nell…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 18 2007 3:15 utc | 4

Anna Nichole deserves more respect! After all she made herself and others a lot of money, in the finest American traditional way — by screwing people. And continues to make a lot of money for other people still, as we speak. Just like that other American hero Elvis. I’ll be the first to start a new tradition and be the first to acclaim her “The Queen”.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 18 2007 3:41 utc | 6

No, the level of violence is not equivalent, but these students lost their lives and acting as tho this is material to denigrate actions taken by the U.S. govt. is truly a lack of compassion and also in bad taste imo and is really not that different than the cruelty of some rightwinger dismissing deaths in Iraq.
and this act of violence has nothing to do with Gonzalez, either.
and it has nothing to do with Anna Nicole or sharks. really, b. these students’ deaths are not a media event. just because they’re american doesn’t mean it’s okay to sneer at their tragedies to make a point about another. Bush has nothing to do with this either. He is acting as the representative of the nation where these students were killed.
some things aren’t political.

Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 18 2007 4:13 utc | 8

my sense is that bernhard was referring to the media circus in the u.s. and how the administration will take advantage of it to deflect from the gonzales hearing, etc. regarding bush’s posture, this was posted by an alum of virginia tech on dkos this morning:

From A Virginia Tech Alumnus to President Bush Hotlist
by DWG
Tue Apr 17, 2007 at 07:37:02 AM EDT
I find your desire to attend the memorial service on Virginia Tech to be just another callous and manipulative act. Do these people suffering from an inexplicable tragedy the favor of staying in Washington. You have nothing but empty sentiment to offer. However, to accommodate and protect your monstrous ego, security procedures will destroy the emotional sanctity of the memorial service. You know that, but you cannot resist the temptation to distract people from your failed foreign and domestic policies, not to mention the corruption threatening the survival of your terrible tenure as the president.
* DWG’s diary :: ::
*
You have a history of the cheap political stunts to encourage people to think you are capable of caring about others. Your many visits to the destroyed Gulf Coast are perfect examples. You politicized and gutted FEMA. You were warned Katrina was a serious threat, but did nothing. You visited devastated areas time and again, but your administration accomplished little to clean up the mess. The least fortune and most vulnerable suffered the most from Katrina. Your words and sympathy did not translate into action.
You now want to pretend to grieve the loss of young lives. Before you bring your security circus to my alma mater, please explain your failure to attend the funerals of the 3300 young men and women killed in Iraq and 380 killed in Afghanistan. You made the decisions to send those soldiers to their deaths, but do everything possible to keep the deaths out of public conscious. You should stay in Washington to figure out how to end the humanitarian crisis YOU created in Iraq.
You are expert at little more than transforming tragedy into carefully crafted political theater. Now you want to intrude upon the memorial service. I know God is dead in you, but do try to imagine for a nanosecond how the security might prevent the university community from coming together in grief. Your words will ease no one’s pain.
You cannot begin to understand what those of us with ties to Virginia Tech have lost in this tragedy. You have never jogged around the Duck Pond. You have never tubed down the New River. You never braved the winter winds trying to cross the Drill Field to get to classes. You never spent more than you could afford at Bogen’s or Books, Strings, and Things. You never watched the sun rise and set over the mountains. You never took a date to the Cascades for a romantic picnic. You never hiked the Appalachian Trial above Mountain Lake. You never watched a football game at Lane Stadium. You never practically lived in the stacks of Newman Library. You are not, nor will ever be, a member of the Virginia Tech and Blacksburg communities. You will never have to reconcile years of wonderful memories of Tech with the senseless loss of life on April 16, 2007.
Stay in Washington, D.C., and let the Virginia Tech community heal.
Class of ’79 (BS), ’82 (MS), ’90 (PhD)

link

Posted by: conchita | Apr 18 2007 4:51 utc | 10

One thing to remember about NRA is that its membership & funds raised lists will result in lots of confiscated guns & people, except of course at the very top.

Posted by: plushtown | Apr 18 2007 10:28 utc | 12

Fauxreal at 8 posted: No, the level of violence is not equivalent… and I agree with the spirit of the post, if not with b ‘sneering’.
One can, however, see similarities, which unite all the victims. American interactive culture has sunk down into a sort of non-responsive authoritarian confusion, accompanied with post-hoc hysteria and lamenting, tinged with very superificial, ersatz emotion. I could not believe it when I read that VT did not have a loudspeaker system (nor even sirens I suppose?) Seeing that (some?) students were warned by e-mail my blood ran cold. E mail!
It is just like the CPA setting up new traffic laws for Baghdad and publishing them in English. It is insane. Literally.
No security at VT at all. No communication system! What kind of locks did they have on the doors..etc. How could someone dressed and armed as he was even walk about? Well I don’t know all the details.
from MSNBC. LOS ANGELES — “Three days of large-scale exercises involving local, state and federal emergency responders are getting under way Tuesday morning.
Tuesday’s drill will simulate the release of poison gas from an exploding terrorist lab in the aftermath of a major earthquake. The drill is starting at the Museum of Tolerance on Pico Boulevard (…)
The final day of exercises will be conducted at Universal Studios, where teams will handle a simulated crash between two airliners.”
link
No comment.

Posted by: Noirette | Apr 18 2007 11:18 utc | 14

fauxreal
i simply think b was comparing a bloody day all over the world
there was no sneering
but america is a culture of violence & it permeates everything
judt a paranthetic note here – on french tv which covers less & less of that outside france – delights in the faits divers americain in a different from of the murdochian detail
what murdoch does with news is to take that sordid aspect of our species & rub our nose in it – to explain the necessity of elites of which he is an integral part
& the facts are simple in a way fauxreal – incidents like this one happen almost exclusively in america -in the south & in the west of north america
even when they happen here you can palpably connect it with american culture . in a culture of absolutes where there is no ethical or civic authority in the family school & church it is the media which teaches most morality & in that sense i am not surprised
& in the sense that the everyday murder of the ‘other’ is forgotten while it is being done is borne of that very same morality
& in a general sense – we live in such a terrible state these last few years i forgive all edginess in the posts here even by my erstwhile comrade slothrop. these are terrible times. these are dark times. our speech will sometimes turn into screams

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Apr 18 2007 13:30 utc | 16

To find Moon discussing these points is an odd sort of comfort. I have been torn by the questions everyone raises here, since news broke of the killings at Virginia Tech, and then the saturation coverage by the broadcast media.
It is truly news. It should be covered. But when does coverage become sensationalism? People in the whole country share the shock and sorrow, so perhaps it is apt for the President to represent them at the campus. But this President? Who encourages the country to look away from so many national and international sorrows in which he has an active hand? Who has used tragedy as a political platform again and again? And what about the enormous security detail which takes over every location that he visits?
I waited to hear or read a reporter or commentary mention the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly violent deaths of Iraq’s civilians, like 10 Blacksburg rampages in a single week, week after week. I heard none. It is not a contest of comparative numbers. But why can Americans immediately share the sorrow of this bitter tragedy in a beautiful, small town in rural Virginia, where few Americans have ever travelled, far from many of us; yet we seem to lack all imagination for the horrifying situation that has prevailed in that other country for 3 years? We cannot imagine Iraq. We could not imagine Dresden.
Can we not imagine war? Has the communal memory of America’s bloody Civil War vanished with too many generations? Do schools and books only teach war as strategic encounters over great principles? A conspiracy of silence closes around those who cross oceans and encounter it. None want to hear; they want to forget.
One has to read the history column in the local Maryland paper to find memoirs, left by farmers at Antietam, of the deadliest day in US military history. They say, the armies retreated leaving their thousands of dead and dying behind. The residents of a small farming community were left to bury the thousands of bodies, a couple country doctors to try to minister to the wounded and dying. They say, the stench of death lay over the area for months afterwards, and no one in Antietam could ever forget it or the cries or the fields covered in death. No one reads such tales in history courses here.
I am not wishing for more war. But I wonder whether the nation-wide shock at the violence at VT comes from our deep desire to believe that there are safe places in the world, and that we know where they are. To US minds, Iraq was never a safe place. How overwhelmingly dangerous it has become under our care, by many orders of magnitude, seems to remain beyond our recognition.
It has seemed to me that tragedy of VT might lend a little light to open US imaginations and empathy to the desperate agony of Iraqis, in a land where, one has the impression, many parents no longer let their children go to school, if the schools are open; where teachers are targetted or flee from death threats.
Would this betray, or demean, the deep suffering of victims and survivors at VT? Or would it lend their suffering a further meaning, opening hearts a little to the daily dying of Iraqi civilians in their schools, their homes, their mosques, their cars, their markets?
In terrible times the choices are always double-edged. It is hard to criticize grief in any form.

Posted by: small coke | Apr 18 2007 21:08 utc | 18

small coke- thanks for those thoughts. and b- sorry if I misunderstood.
the event becomes sensational, imo, when people will not turn off their tvs. if they did, the media would not cover this on and on… tho, since it breaks some sort of record, no doubt it will get heavy coverage simply because it is a “new record,” however disgusting that is. I haven’t had my tv on for two days. I have read about the incident, but I do not want to have the pricks of a thousand sound bites nibbling at my brain.
and yes, I think the fundamental problem is that Americans lack empathy, that they have a sense of entitlement that allows them to accept misery that their (and my) own govt. creates… and that allows priorities to be so fucked up.
billions for weapons to kill babies and pretend it doesn’t happen.
however, in one sense, situations like this are also demonstrative of how people live…they care more about what happens to those they love first, then their community, etc. the difference is the amount of damage such affliative levels of concern cause — not caring about what happens as a result of foreign policy, as an American, has much worse consequences than not caring about your neighbor.
no doubt the frustrations with American people are warranted considering U.S. history recent and past. Unless the issues of war crimes and unconstitutional acts are brought to the attention of the american ppl, then they’ll continue to deny reality for so many others in the world. cheney has said the american way of life is not negotiable, and that’s supposed to mean that we can kill for our own comfort.
yes, that’s a far greater tragedy.

Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 18 2007 21:30 utc | 20

jcairo,
Yes, of course it was Milo. Yossarian was everyman. I only read the book once, about forty years ago. I ought to read it again and see if it in any way resembles what I “remember”.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Apr 19 2007 8:03 utc | 22

sorry, ‘gloves come off soon’ wasn’t supposed to have link. Put in
MonsantoTitty if you like, or Greenpeace Green. Everything else on site relates also.

Posted by: plushtown | Apr 19 2007 12:45 utc | 24

Congressional Democratic leaders are moving to make their proposed timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq “advisory”
hahahahaha hahahaha….
Give em’ Hell heck Harry…lol
Pepsi! the choice of a new generation…lol
Fucking coward boot licking whores.

Posted by: Anonymous | Apr 19 2007 12:55 utc | 26

#26 was your cranky Uncle…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 19 2007 13:00 utc | 28

actually in the nineties for math, should have remembered to proof it though

Posted by: jcairo | Apr 19 2007 17:36 utc | 30

This in defense their airing of the video; “I’m not sure we’ll ever fully understand why this happened, but I do think this is as close as we’ll come to having a glimpse inside the mind of a killer,” Steve Capus, head of NBC News, said on the network’s Today programme.
Isn’t this just plain sick? He, and presumably his ‘audience’, want to be in the head of a killer, but simultaneously censor images of the killed and dismembered in Iraq and a myriad other places?
These media vampires don’t give a shit about the victims, whether their last sight was down the barrel of a gun some psycho picked up in a corner store for a couple of hundred dollars, or they were at a market stall trying to buy some simple groceries when they and all around them got blown to pieces.
I even caught sight of one media-whore fair gloating at the ‘scoop’ that his network had been the one to receive the package of ravings.
And they are all so holier-than-thou. Argh!

Posted by: Raveheart | Apr 19 2007 20:12 utc | 32