Right-Wing Memes on Virginia Tech

There are several right-wing memes circulating about the Virginia Tech massacre. Take your pick. As with the case with a lot of right-wing commentary, the underlying issue is the profound disaffection of conservatives with American culture as it's developed since the New Deal and especially since the Sixties. In the case of the Virginia Tech massacre, what's bothering the right are the many failures of manhood in American society.

For poster JustOffal on Slate's Fray, it's Cho Seung-Hui's manhood that was failing in the context of the bizarre world created by liberalism.

"It is not too much of a stretch to imagine a young man bewildered in the forest of new age values and standards being completely devastated by what he sees as an insurmountable combination of unreachable and unfulfillable demands being placed upon him and his masculinity.

From this view, America has a sick culture of "new age values" with traditional standards "being completely devastated." Thus, someone like Cho Seung-Hui becomes unhinged because he can't find a place for himself within "an unsurmountable combination of unreachable and unfulfillable demands being placed on "his masculinity." Just as Dinesh D'Souza believes that American liberalism brought on 9-11 with its rejection of traditional culture, "JustOffal" believes that the rejection of traditional culture creates internal enemies like Cho Seung-Hui.

For other conservatives, the problem is the manhood of the Virginia Tech students who were killed. It appears that none of the young American men charged Cho as he went killing through Norris Hall. None of the college men went out in a blaze of glory. There were no battle cries like "Let's Roll" or "Make My Day" or even "It's Clobberin' Time" from the Fantastic Four. The only guy who appears to have given up his life for others was an elderly Israeli professor. This is all too much for Nathaniel Blake at Human Events.

Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.

The same was the case with John Derbyshire of National Review online:

"Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy?"

What Blake and Derbyshire were looking for was stories of Virginia Tech college men who they could admire and idolize, men whose memories they could cherish, men who writers like themselves could make into martyrs and legends. In other words, Blake and Derbyshire were looking for men they could love in the same kind of homoerotic way that they loved someone like Oliver North and they disappointed that they couldn't find any. For Blake, there is also a suspicion that American men in general wouldn't pass this kind of manhood test. "Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture."

Unsurprisingly, one of the permutations of disappointed love is hate and another Fray poster nicknamed "Jack_Goebbels" used the occasion to express his hatred for American men in general.

Americans are goddammed fucking sheep. Did you see those pathetic losers, lining up like lambs to the slaughter? What's happened to the frontier in our souls? What's happened to that good old American love of violence?American liberals make me sick with their weakness and their immorality and their gun control and their embrace of victimhood and their passive mewling failure to take responsibility for their own fucking lives.

What was unspoken in Nathaniel Blake is stated clearly in "Jack_Goebbels." Liberal culture had drained Americans in general of independence, courage, or backbone, in other words, of any manliness, and made them easy targets for a killer like Cho Seung-Hui. Not only do Cho's victims deserve nothing but contempt for their failure of masculinity, but American culture has become pathetic and contemptible with its "weakness," "immorality," "gun control," and "passive mewling." For Goebbels, Cho himself was the only "American hero" in the incident--the man who was able to "BLOW AWAY everything that stood between him and his destiny."

"Jack_Goebbels" is obviously not a mainstream conservative, but mainstream conservatives themselves view the Virginia Tech through the same lens of disaffection from American life.