The Numbing Down of America
Blacksburg seen from an emotional distance.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, April 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
The killing of 32 students and teachers across the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., is as awful in its particulars as virtually any of the stories of death on a large scale that have struck the national consciousness. And yet it seems somehow that the public's emotional response to this event has been more controlled than in times past.
This is in no way to suggest that the response was inappropriate, inadequate or lacking sympathy. Nothing of the sort. It just seemed that the emotional surge was discernibly less than with similar events in the past--such as Oklahoma City, the Beltway sniper, Columbine, the Branch Davidians. This was the sort of event that normally would have caused one's phone to ring off the hook or email inbox to fill with alerts from friends. But that didn't seem to happen this time. If one wasn't watching TV, the news arrived with an uncharacteristic delay.
While the grief death visits on individuals remains an emotionally devastating event, it may be that as a nation we've reached tilt with tragedy. "Tilt" is the famous metaphor drawn from the old pinball machines, which shut down if one banged on them too hard. Pinballs could survive plenty of random shocks to the system. But there were limits. Of late, we have been banged on hard.
This has nothing to do with not caring, or turning cold to tragedy. But one deals with what the world brings, and given the pace of such stuff now, the adjustments one has to make have come quickly. After September 11, after years with the Iraq war and after a lifetime of media coverage of tragedies large, small and phony, it would not be surprising if people began to resist drawdowns on their emotional reservoirs.
The media itself has become cooler and even clinical in its reporting of domestic tragedy, delivering bushels of data and detail, with many of the event's participants willing to do reporter-like stand-up interviews. This week, on any channel one watched and in most newspapers, the coverage of Blacksburg was almost literally forensic. The murderer was "the shooter," the first killing seemed to be a "domestic dispute," and we were all trying to "piece together the details." A police procedural is better than leering and false emotion. But if the way we absorb the complex strands of tragedy now is as the police do--the real ones and the ones on 45 TV police dramas--then we will learn to approach death as they do, at a remove.
This doesn't strike me as obviously terrible, but it is different. Our capacity for shock at genuine violence has been recalibrated.
There is no more powerful reason for this downward pressure on public sensibilities than the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is the most persistently violent event of our time. More precisely, the suicide bombers are. The suicide bomber is the most emotionally corrosive phenomenon since World War II.
The bombings around Baghdad began about April 2003. At first the bombings were mainly directed at Iraqi military and police installations. Then in August, with the Canal Hotel bombing, they killed 22, including the popular U.N. human rights commissioner, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Ten days later, on Aug. 29, the suicide bombers arrived in the neighborhoods of the Shia to murder noncombatants, killing perhaps 125 people. It was just the beginning.
Attacks of this design against defenseless civilians are hardly new. Israelis live with them. Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers have committed similar barbarities for more than 30 years. But if you have followed the war in Iraq, you have had a remarkable encounter with the blood-drenched world of suicide bombers. The way the American people have absorbed these bombings in faraway Iraq is unique in the annals of war and in journalism.
A very great number of the suicide bombings--there have been more than 700 since 2003, occurring weekly and often several times a week--have been reported in detail to the American people. The stories routinely include body counts and vivid details and color photography of shattered bodies and street scenes. These suicide bombings are often the first news story one sees on such Web sites as Yahoo and MSN, and they have been displayed prominently in newspaper coverage. If one were at all interested in the U.S. role in Iraq, this has been one's primary experience of the war for three years.
As an extension of its determination to be even-handed, contemporary journalism has attempted to impart not only the politics of war but also its human cost. It will be interesting, years hence, when histories of this war's journalism are written, as with Vietnam, to discover the basis of the news judgment that placed the suicide bombers' work at the top of the news pyramid. Almost any normal reader who consumed these accounts as often as the suicide bombers staged them would eventually pull back emotionally from the bombings, and from the war itself.
This has had the expectable result of producing what one might call the numbing down of America. Setting aside support for or opposition to the war, the muting of the emotional pathways of the American people is a neutral event, a normal defense against the killings of the suicide bombers, or the crude murders of Cho Seung-Hui.
The effect of all this is disabling, perhaps for a long time. One example: Supporters of intervention in Darfur are upset that the international community hasn't responded. That hesitation may be morally unattractive, but one can hardly drain the limited wells of emotional and moral fortitude in Iraq and expect them to produce elsewhere. For the foreseeable future, Americans may decide they don't wish to expose themselves to similar drainings.
We are far from the events in Virginia. But we have been putting emotional distance, in stages, between ourselves and the Blacksburgs for some time. An event such as the mass murder in Blacksburg will always elicit sympathy and a coming together of what each speaker at its memorial service called "community." The pain of individual families closest to such death can never diminish or be diminished. Still, we may be passing through a period, as Europe did after World War I, when people became hollowed out by repetitive exposure to violence and death--real or manufactured. No one should be surprised if our shell-shocked population is reluctant any time soon to revisit the experience outside the realm of friends and family.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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