Asshole of the Century

Saturday, May 12, 2007

I Will Never Be a Fucking Hokie

There are so many prisms of sickness and perversion that reflect off the Virginia Tech massacre. It’s a rabbit hole I would really rather not go down. First, there is the killer himself, self-righteous and absorbed, his fascination with guns, an amalgam of a dozen other serial killers, but a lot less interesting. Whereas the Columbine kids were, first of all, just that, kids, and had a series of interesting obsessions, from trench coats to Rammstein, the Virginia Tech killer was fairly dull and straight forward, his schizophrenia budding into its mid-20’s bloom, filled with a vacant defiance that probably could have been assuaged with the right drugs, or maybe even redirected if he could just have crawled far enough out of his personal hole to get laid. There was none of the panache of a Gacy and his alter ego clown or of Dahmer with his detailed sexual obsessions and his wrenching regret. Maybe the Virginia Tech massacre represents a new kind of killer, dull, efficient, and soulless, a mirror of our dull, efficient and soulless age. Maybe he has helped make mass murder boring, a less appealing model to someone already on edge. But then again, maybe his sheer ordinariness will appeal to other boring nobodies, much like sheer ordinariness makes some folks feel close to Steve Gutenberg as an actor, or Mickey Rooney as a dancer, or Rosie O’Donnell as a commentator, or Princess Diana as royalty.

I really didn’t pay much attention to this media tempest until I kept hearing the phrase “We are all Hokies” being spouted as a statement of brotherhood with the slain. Day after day, the cameras kept panning over small bands of students who had gathered around sad papier mache replicas of the Virginia Tech initials, the same ones worn on the helmets of their perpetually ranked football team. These totems were sometimes nothing more elaborate than the letters VT hastily drawn on a piece of cardboard, with sad store-bought knickknacks on the ground around it, reminding me of the mementos that Mexicans leave against the wall outside an IHOP after one of them imagines that they’d seen a silhouette of the Madonna on a pancake one Sunday.

“We are all Hokies,” first students, then school backers, then pundits, then the appointed representatives of the public at large all declared.

Well, let me be the first to state that I will never be a fucking Hokie. I feel no solidarity with a school who has a reputation for ignoring academic standards so they can recruit a bunch of athletes from the ghetto for the only thing the university is known for, namely its football team. I feel no reason to defend an administration that more than once tried to brush earlier threats of school violence under the rug. I feel no reason to get behind a university just because they are showing lots of rah rah spirit in the face of adversity. That’s just the default condition of mankind: Threaten us, and we show our fear or confusion by playing John Philip Sousa, or maybe Bob Seeger, and hi-fiving our solidarity with the guy down the hall.

As an odd coincidence, the most famous Hokie of them all was in the news recently for another reason, namely Michael Vick, that football phenom with an arm like John Elway and moves like Barry Sanders, and that “other reason” being that the police discovered an extensive dog fighting business being run out of his house in rural Virginia, abused and beaten dogs cowering in cages scattered throughout his compound. Vick’s immediate response was to blame his family for daring to run their dog fighting network out of his otherwise fine, upstanding home.

Of course, it shouldn’t be that surprising that the kind of school that wants to win at all costs, whose most famous alumnus (can you be an alumnus if you never graduated?) is an athlete known for dissing his own teammates, whose sheer idiocy and unpleasantness may keep him from ever winning the big one, despite having the kind of physical talent that comes around a handful of times in a generation, that this kind of school, in the kind of community that looks at owning your own gun as a rite of passage, in a kind of state that refuses to enact even the most basic of common sense gun laws, that this kind of place would provide fertile ground for a massacre. I know that this is not totally fair, and I’m sure that there are plenty of nice places that have nurtured their own murderers. But it’s time for the media to quit wallowing in feel good platitudes.

“We are all Hokies,” the people cry, like extras in a zombie movie. Maybe that’s why I feel increasingly isolated from the lot of them.