O.K. Aurora, Time To Move On

O.K. Aurora, enough with the boo-hooing.  The President has shown up and felt your pain.  The Pols have nattered on about the strength of the community and how it will come together to heal.  The Pols and yakking TV heads have all said that now is not the time to mention the word "gun." God forbid anyone discuss the issue or start asking questions.  Noooo, can't have that discussion.  Need to mop the blood off the floor first.  And by that time the topic will be soooo yesterday that nobody will bother.

At the I-Feel-Your-Pain memorial service, Aurora mayor, Steve Hogan, read out the names of the dead and asked the crowd to respond to each name by calling out,"We will remember."

Really?  Remember?

The next day the headline in the L.A. Times Calendar entertainment section said, "Moviegoers undeterred by tragedy," and noted that the Batman movie broke all records and continues to break records.  Nothing like a little killing to goose the ratings.  Lots of money to be made in them there multi-plexes.  Lots of money.

The radio news reports that sales of guns have skyrocketed.  The reporter says it's a fear-fueled spike.  Nothing like more guns in the hands of unstable, scared crazy people to fix the problem of too many guns in the hands of unstable, scared crazy people. 

Over at the website "Rotten Tomatoes," anonymous bloggers started posting ugly, threatening remarks about the few critics who dared offer an opinion of the Batman film that was less than glowing.  The web editor had to suspend user comments, so ugly and hateful had the anonymous posters had become.

Ugly, hateful anonymous posters filled with rage, posted by unstable, scared crazy people seething with fury.  That's now our zeitgeist.  But, we can't talk about that either.  Not now.  Remember, now is the time to focus on the families of the dead.  Oh, and keep moping up the blood.  So much blood.  So many mops. Better order more to get ready for the next gun slaughter, which will come like clockwork. Especially since there's now even more guns in the hands of even more unstable, scared, crazy angry people.

Yes, it's our National Wack-A-Mole Game and it's being played in Alzheimer Nation!  Can't beat it for blood AND constant short-term-memory surprise! Woa! did you see that?  12 dead.  Who could predict that!  Woa! 8 dead. That's never happened before!  Woa! 18 dead. Who knew that could happen!  Woa!  32 dead.  Never saw that coming!  Woa! . . . .  

But let's not talk about that either, time to move on, let the healing begin, we'll remember, blah-blah, blah.

Right. 

  

 

Summer Sequels

Calhoun’s Cannons for July 21, 12,

Summer Sequels

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

                                                               Joan Didion

            It’s all Hollywood now, nothing but damned sequels.  Columbine, Virginia Tech, Luby’s cafeteria in Texas (23 people were taken out there. You forgot that one, didn’t you?), Congresswoman Giffords, Ft. Hood, now Aurora, Colorado, a mass shooting at a Batman premier.  Here we go again. Another damned summer sequel! 

          Same assault weapons, same high-fire, large magazine cop-killer handguns, same angry crazy guy, same dead people, same floor awash in blood and bullets, same ritual of faux cries of shock and outrage, same 24/7 cathartic TV coverage (great for the ratings!). And always the same hack dialogue, the sad-faced pols asking us to pray for the families of all the dead people, the excited, shocky survivors declaring how grateful they are that God was looking out for them, at least. 

            Then comes the braying calls for better gun control and the same old questions:  Why do we allow the country to be awash in weapons of war?  Of course, there’s never a serious answer to that question, but it has to be asked.  Like in old war movies you just know the guy who pulls out a photo of his family will be the next to die.  It’s a cliché but it just has to be in the script. 

            Yes, it’s all a hackneyed formula, but the AK-47 question is needed to segue to the NRA and its wholly owned Congresspeople who trot on stage to declaim their battle cry:  Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This is followed by talk-radio voices from the heartland who declare that if all those people attending that Batman movie had been carrying weapons of their own, the shooter would have been taken out in a matter of seconds, which is even more blood fantasy: The Hollywood vision of a theatre filled with highly trained snipers, our very own American Leatherstockings, who can shoot the eye out of a squirrel in a tree on a hill six miles away and do that even in a dark theatre filled with tear-gas and chaos.  That’s a fantasy script that regularly plays out in the heads of so many out of shape, middle-aged American males who have been watching too many Liam Neeson movies.

              Yes, Folks, it’s another episode of The All-American Komic Kabuki Theatre of Blood with a script as preordained as a Noh theatre piece.  It never changes. It’s all damned sequels now.  But we never get tired of the reruns.  Not Americans.  Like little children who want Mommy to read the same story over and over and over again, we can’t get enough of this particular story --big guns, lots of big guns, we love those, and the Rambo, Bruce Willis, Falling Down, Yippee-ki-yi Guy who doles out rough justice to all those people who’ve done us wrong, we love that guy! He’s our contemporary Deerslayer, once described by that sniffy Englishman, D.H. Lawrence, as “A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact.  An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but is pure white.”  Yep, that’s our secret inner vision:  Every man armed, out there on the edge of the Indian-infested wilderness, stoic, a killer. Give us AK-47s or give us death!

            And the violence.  We love that, too. We need that killing like a coke-head needs that spoon up his nose, then another and another, we just can’t get enough.  We’re a culture filled with anger, paranoia and fear, addicted to the pornography of violence, living on the rage and adrenaline. Faster pussycat, kill-kill!

            In a sane world, this state of affairs would cause despair in a normal person.  Or prompt serious evaluation of the culture.  Or even an intervention. But despair and questions and interventions only function if there’s hope that things can change.  Since things will never change here, despair is pointless.  So are questions.  And things will never change because the sad truth is this:  Americans love their guns more than they love their children, more than they love their friends and neighbors, more than they love their fellow citizens, more than they love even themselves. 

            Since that’s the case, the only sane response is laughter. Silly us.  We’ve turned ourselves into a bloody rerun of a bad movie that’s now on a constant replay loop.  Whack-a-Mole and we’re the moles. Of course, in a sane world, America would be declared insane and locked up in a mental hospital to keep her from doing harm to herself and others and be given treatment to restore her to health. Sadly, that isn’t about to happen, because we do not live in a sane world.

            So, grab your car keys. I hear there’s a gun sale at Wal-Mart. Time to stock up.