‘I FILMED THE SHOOTING’
‘Disturbed’ man kills U.S. journalists live on morning TV
Here we go again: If only there was a way to stop it, and if not it, then at least the rest of the grotesquerie.
As someone pronounced on the tube during the wall-to-wall coverage of the shootings of the Virginia television reporter and cameraman, Vester Lee Flanagan II did indeed manage a first — his was apparently the first shooting of journalists doing live television that was simultaneously recorded by the shooter (and then, apparently, that video posted by him to Facebook).
You see all the qualifiers there. It’s getting trickier all the time to achieve that precious status, which is the good and bad news both, because while it may be harder for such clowns to make their marks, there’s no reason to hope they’ll stop trying.
Adam Lanza had to kill 20 firstgraders (and six adults, too) at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., to ensure his place.
Luka Magnotta had to video his dismembering of Jun Lin, the sweet student from China he killed, and then post it to gore sites on the web.
The chief online complaints, even from those who plainly recognized that what they were watching was the body of a fellow man being taken apart, were about the accompanying soundtrack.
Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who four years ago killed 77 people — most of them young people at an island summer camp — was remarkable simply because he was the first modern mass killer in that small and peaceable country. He was, in this way, lucky; because it was Norway, he didn’t have to do much else but kill to be noticed.
The two are increasingly indistinguishable, killer from culture.
As Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote this summer of Breivik in The New Yorker, “He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else.
“Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.”
Or, as the great Canadian anthropologist Elliott Leyton put it a decade ago, in an update to Hunting Humans, The Rise of the Multiple Murderer, first published in 1986, “Reared in a civilization that legitimizes violence as a response to frustration, provided by the mass media, the Internet, and violent pornography with both the advertising announcing the normalization of sadism and the instruction manual outlining correct procedures, they grasp the ‘manly’ identity of pirate and avenger.”
Lanza schooled himself on Columbine, the first major school shooting in the United States and still something of a standard, though it’s no longer the worst, being outdone by the massacre at Virginia Tech eight years later, where 32 people were killed, as opposed to the 13 at Columbine.
The Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had been considering a bombing after the fashion of Timothy McVeigh, whose bombing in Oklahoma City four years earlier left 168 dead. Breivik also modelled his bombing in Oslo — it was the distraction, leaving him time and space to get to the island, where he killed 69 of his victims — after McVeigh’s.
And Flanagan, too, had his role models — they feed on one another — and among them were the Columbine killers and the Virginia Tech killer, Seung-Hui Cho. Flanagan called Cho his “boy” in the 23-page screed he faxed to ABC News in between Wednesday’s shooting and when he turned a gun on himself.
A self-described “powder keg,” Flanagan cited a litany of grievances, including racial discrimination, sexual harassment (he described himself as a gay black man) and workplace bullying.
Given his litigious nature — he sued another TV station, WTWC-TV in Tallahassee, Fla., where he worked in 2000, for racial discrimination, and at least twice claimed to have filed race-based complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — and his inability to hang onto a job for more than a year or two, his assertion that the church shooting this June in Charleston, S.C., where nine African-Americans were killed where they worshipped, was the “tipping point” for the shooting hardly tells the story.
Since the Sandy Hook massacre, the press, especially on the cable news networks for whom such events are bread-and-butter, have been attempting to play down the killers and elevate their victims.
This gesture, born I suspect of complaints from viewers properly fed up to the gills with what they see as the aggrandizement of killing machines, has had unintended tragicomic effects.
One of them is how on-air reporters were tripping over each other Wednesday not to say Flanagan’s name.
But the more serious unintended consequence is the way that the victims are acclaimed in language and terms that are ridiculously over-the-top. The dead were “always happy,” “always smiling,” or the “perfect daughter” or the “perfect colleague,” heroically something-or-other.
The treatment is absurd, even dehumanizing.
Before they were dead, the victims of WDBJ-TV, like the victims of Columbine and all the modern massacres since, were living, and as flawed as everyone else. You don’t have to be heroic or perfect to be loved, mourned, deeply missed. You just have to be human.
The killers never see others like that. That’s how they can shoot them with such ready cheer.
As Knausgaard wrote, and here he was borrowing an anecdote from his countryman Asne Seierstad’s book about Breivik, minutes after his arrest, after he’d killed the last of 77 people, as corpses in pools of blood littered the island, he was frantic about a cut on a finger.
“Look,” he told a policeman. “This will have to be bandaged up. I’ve already lost a lot of blood.” He was afraid he’d pass out, he said.
As a bandage was being applied, Breivik worried aloud about how the heck his finger had been cut: Then he remembered. When he’d shot one victim at close range in the head, something had flown into his finger. It must have been a bit of skull, he told the officers.
The cut was five millimetres long. Look at me. Look at me.