Virginia Tech, National Community, and the Right

There were a fair number of students wearing Virginia Tech sweatshirts on my campus in Kentucky today. I would bet the same is happening at high schools and college campuses all over the country.

People usually think of the avalanche of publicity concerning school shootings as something that mostly enables other school shootings. For example, Harry Shearer argues on Huffington Post that NBC's airing of Cho Seung-Hui's video provides inspiration to future mass murderers.

Cho's pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from--in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read, see and parse them. Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time . . .

While not disagreeing with Shearer about the effect on Cho wannabe's, I think the media deluge has also reinforced the sense of national community in America. The reports on the victims from friends and families have been so ubiquitous and detailed that many people have begun to feel symbolic bonds with the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, the friends and acquaintances giving testimonials, and the families expressing their sense of loss and grief. People who pay attention to the news, web sites, talk shows, Facebook, and other media outlets begin to feel that they "know" the victims and their families and empathize with them "as if" the victims were their sons, daughters, and friends and the victim's families lived in their own home towns and cities. As the pain and grief of Virginia Tech students and families becomes "our" pain and grief. As a nation, we become a community of pain and grief.

This is what I think is happening on my campus in Kentucky. Just as Prof. Nikki Giovanni of Virginia Tech affirmed that "we are Virginia Tech," students at my university are saying that "we are Virginia Tech" when they wear Virginia Tech gear.

The same was the case with the saturation coverage of Katrina and the terrorist attacks on 9-11. The deluge of reporting in those cases also helped to create and reinforce a sense of community between a nation full of viewers and the people directly affected.

The activist right-wing is very suspicious of this crisis-born sense of national community. A couple of weeks after 9-11, I heard Rush Limbaugh satirize New Yorkers as effete and cowardly (an interesting formulation given Limbaugh's longstanding reluctance to leave his room when not doing his show.) Conservative op-eds also began to appear in my local paper reminding everyone on the right that they needed to refocus on the "war on liberalism." Ann Coulter encapsulated the revulsion of the right for 9-11 victims in Godless: The Church of Liberalism when she claimed she had "never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much” as 9-11 widows.

The same thing is happening now with conservatives like Nathaniel Blake and John Derbyshire who are casting aspersions on the courage and manhood of the Virginia Tech victims and American culture in general. It's as if the sense of community arising from the grief over the Virginia Tech massacre were a repulsive, soft, and womanish thing to right-wingers, something they would want to distance themselves from at all costs. To be a right-winger is to be disaffected with mainstream American culture and society, the national embrace of Virginia Tech is only increasing that disaffection.