Tragedy reenacted as farce

Just to set up a little story, let me explain that I lost my old newspaper job this spring (no hard feelings) but have landed a new position elsewhere after coasting on severance pay awhile. There was an orientation session for new hires today, and part of the program covered what was to be done in the event of an active shooter in the workplace. The instructional video pulled few punches, showing what a live instructor aptly called a "Vin Diesel type" clad in militant black marching into a building, producing a shotgun and blowing away several people. The surviving workers demonstrated recommended methods of escaping, hiding or, if necessary, fighting the attacker. Unfortunately, the video's budget didn't allow for the use of master thespians, as became clear when characters attempted to emote. So maybe bad acting can ruin any mood or disrupt any purpose, or maybe there was a certain mood in the room two days after the incidents in El Paso and Dayton. All I can say definitely is that whenever one of the fictional employees was shown panicking, there was a lot of laughter in our orientation room.  I've long noticed that lots of people look for any excuse to laugh at something seemingly serious onscreen, and not only because that something has turned out unintentionally funny. For some, that impulse expresses a preference to treat everything in life, if not life itself, as a joke, in order to not look weak or like a whiner. Others may have other reasons for laughing and needing to laugh. And if people, for whatever reason, can laugh at a sincerely-intended instructional film about surviving a mass shooting within 48 hours of the real thing twice over, that impulse must be irrepressible. Whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm not quite sure.

Amoklauf at Walmart

Investigators in El Paso are hoping to learn the motive behind today's slaughter of 20 people in a local Walmart, and the wounding of many others, from both alleged online writings of the shooter and interviews with the shooter himself, who reportedly surrendered to police without a fight. Words are merely rationalizations, however; all that really matters is that this person felt entitled to mass murder. You can believe any garbage you please without feeling such an entitlement. Not everyone learns the desire to kill from books or sermons or online ravings. Some no doubt turn to ideology or religion simply to find an excuse that fits their mood. It remains all too easy for people like this, whatever their beliefs, to kill others. Neither left nor right has the answer for this murderous sense of entitlement. The actual ideologues on both sides no doubt sincerely deplore the senseless sort of violence we've seen today; some actually may believe that specific people or sorts of people should die, but randomly motivated violence, as this most likely was, serves no purpose for them. There is, of course, an ideological predisposition on one side against limiting the ability of degenerates like the latest shooter to kill by limiting the availability of many firearms, just as there's an unjustified optimism on the other that greater gun control will end mass murder. There are also persistent assumptions that old forms of mental or emotional discipline will overcome this murderous sense of entitlement, as well as theories that eliminating certain "dehumanizing" stimuli will abort the murderous impulse. But the impulse to commit mass murder probably predates all philosophies and religions and pop culture. Yet the impulse seems stronger in our time, and not just in the gun-happy U.S. as various bladed rampages in Asia attest. City and state officials in El Paso are calling on the people to unite after today's atrocity, though they were predictably reticent about addressing the problems of gun violence and mass murder specifically. If people are to unite for a solution, however, they must be willing to address all possible solutions, or else the coming together will be merely a show. It's hard, after all -- or it should be -- to imagine a solution worse than this problem. The suspicion that some solutions might be worse may be as much a problem, if not as great a danger, as the entitlement to kill.

Bullying at the Democratic debates?

Senator Warren of Massachusetts showed herself "an effective bully" during the latest round of Democratic debates, according to New York Daily News columnist S. E. Cupp. Warren's bullying, Cupp writes, consisted of questioning the courage of more moderate candidates who refuse to endorse the "Medicare for all" idea. In her own words, "We're not going to solve the urgent problems we face with small ideas and spinelessness." Cupp equates this with questioning the manhood of those contenders -- all male from Cupp's account, who don't share Warren's vision. To call them spineless is insulting, certainly, but is it bullying? Hardly. For the progressives to call the moderates spineless is no more bullying than for the moderates to claim that the progressives effectively are handing the 2020 election to President Trump. Perhaps personal factors account for Cupp's reading of the debate -- she writes as if her own honor as a moderate Democrat has been besmirched by Warren -- but as far as I know the debates will continue with the moderates unbowed. Cupp's real complaint seems to be that Warren is unwilling to meet the moderates on the ground they prefer. They argue that "Medicare for all" is impractical and impolitic and claim, in Cupp's words, to be "strategic and realistic" about that. Whether they are right hasn't been shown yet. Unfortunately for them, they're up against a mindset that treats assertions of limits with angry skepticism. Progressives seem too ready to believe that all limits -- except those of the planet's resources -- are man-made. If someone tells them some pet project of theirs can't be done, they assume the skeptic means simply that he doesn't want it done for some selfish reason or another. At their most reckless, they assume, as did generations of tragic fools during the 20th century, that all obstacles can be overcome by political will. To their minds, it's the moderate belief that "Medicare for all" won't work, not any inherent flaw to the idea, that keeps it from becoming a reality. Again, I'm not learned enough on the subject to say whether it can be done, although it is clear that in any nearly evenly divided legislature passing the thing will be supremely difficult. But that's why we need more than assertion and counterassertion in the debates, though there probably isn't time for much more than that given the bloated field of candidates. Moderate observers like Cupp may feel that progressives like Warren are trying to cut off debate in a bullying way by questioning the courage of skeptics, but moderates should be careful not to use "it can't be done" as yet another method of cutting off debate. And for what it's worth, I would have expected the moderate Democrats to be less likely to accuse opponents of bullying than the presumably more sensitive or p.c. progressives. But when moderates are accused of spinelessness from both left and right in our time, I suppose Cupp's lament is sadly unsurprising.