narcissus

Of all the reactions and reactions to the reactions we have seen this week to the Virginia Tech shootings, the thing that has struck me the most forcibly is the number of people who have cynically seized upon the tragedy and, well, Brad from Sadly, No! said it best, I think:

Shorter Everybody On The Internet

  • The senseless massacre at Virginia Tech basically confirms everything I’ve been saying all along.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Yes, each hour that passed since the first awful shots were fired has reliably brought us another wave of ideologues all frantically trying to seize the moral high ground by blunt trauma if necessary.  Tomorrow morning marks a mere week since the horror began, but those seven days have been marked by a disgraceful amount of posturing, defensiveness, and shameless opportunism.

One of the few essays I've read that hasn't seemed to be viewing the event through an ideological prism was this by Cintra Wilson, author of A Massive Swelling (Celebrity as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations).  I have long admired Wilson's surgically incisive views on our culture and this piece on the Virginia Tech shooting boils the situation down to what I believe are its fundamentals.

Ms. Wilson?

Our society, via our mainstream media, rewards important people with attention. Positive or negative – doesn't matter which. Attention is the currency in a world with too many people – whoever arrests the news cycle long enough to make themselves the topic, wins.

Cho, the VA killer, wanted the world to stop and pay attention to him… and the world did exactly that. Even the president stopped what he was doing to attend to the tragedy.

Cho played the media perfectly: he knew what kind of chum he'd need to make a shark-frenzy… and the media went wild. Cho predicted this response – he knew how big he'd be in death: he was a big fan of the famous Columbine killings. Cho, between shootings, and presumably still adrenal, took a break from slaughtering innocents to send his extensively prepared press-package to NBC: his "multimedia manifesto," containing at least six days of video footage, and self-styled Taxi Driver-esque publicity shots.

Cho stuffed the equivalent of a sociopathic My Space page into an envelope, sent it to NBC…..and now he is, as planned….. #1, with a bullet. He knew exactly what material the media would eat up. He virtually You Tubed it, and got his crucifixion – just not in the way that sane people would want it.

And for a brief and heady moment, NBC gleefully luxuriated in its role.  Cho's image was inescapable.  I've seen multi-multi-million dollar publicity campaigns for movies, rock bands, and political parties that were far less effective.  It seems that in the absence of hard cash, the Great Media Messaging Machine will accept blood as payment.

His material makes a point of mentioning Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, speaking of them as guides for his martyrdom. Cho saw himself as the Jesus Christ of disenfranchised young losers, doomed to commit an act of gruesome revenge that "we" forced him to enact. Islamist suicide martyrs are celebrated in their culture with such videos; it is a certain tragic rock-stardom reserved as the last hope of the truly invisible and powerless, in a global climate where attention is the measure of success. Some people will kill and die to have their voices heard, particularly in a cultural framework that guarantees a certain postmortem celebrity to persons who go out with a sufficient bang.

Wilson goes on to introduce us to the phenomena of "malignant narcissism" and "narcissisistic injury", the twin motivating factors of serial killers and mass murderers.  From Wiki:

malignant narcissism as a syndrome characterized by a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial features, paranoid traits, and ego-syntonic aggression. Some also may find an absence of conscience, a psychological need for power, and a sense of importance (grandiosity).

(snip)

According to Kernberg, the psychopaths' paranoid stance against external influences makes them unwilling to internalize even the values of the "aggressor", while malignant narcissists "have the capacity to admire powerful people, and can depend on sadistic and powerful but reliable parental images." Malignant narcissists, in contrast to psychopaths, are also said to be capable of developing "some identification with other powerful idealized figures as part of a cohesive 'gang' … which permits at least some loyalty and good object relations to be internalized."

Malignant narcissism is highlighted as a key area when it comes to the study of mass, sexual, and serial murder.

Back to Wilson:

Malignant narcissists seek a "narcissistic load" — their drug of choice — which is ATTENTION. Positive attention and negative attention are one and the same — attention is attention. People suffering from this disorder tend to blame others for their difficulties, fly into a "narcissistic rages," and seek revenge as their due. Attention is the drug, the victory, the raison d'etre — the narcissist simply needs to be the center of attention, and will get his fix by any means necessary.

Even if that means calling John Edwards a "faggot" at a national convention of your supposed peers.  Or mocking a Parkinson's victim on national television.  Or whatever fresh poo Michelle Malkin is smearing all over herself today before she goes running around the neighborhood screaming about the Global Jihad.

Whether we're talking about Cho's incoherent ravings about The Rich or Glenn Beck's and Bill O'Reilly's increasingly loony, incoherent ravings about The Left, the megalomania, bottomless need for attention and the feverish desire to punish one's supposed "enemies" (i.e., anyone who ever made the speaker feel powerless, small, or insignificant) is exactly the same.  Why should we be the least bit surprised that shooting rampages are the end manifestation of a culture awash in hate and aggressive egotism?

Cho reached out in his videos, addressing many of his incoherent ramblings to future generations of disgruntled, schizophrenic losers who admire serial killers. Cho's brilliantly publicized rampage was his gift to future psychopaths, who will now have Cho as their new watermark, their new hero, their new rock star. As a student of killers, Cho probably knew exactly how many bodies he'd have to notch up to be the "biggest" killer in America. Future sociopaths will use his death-toll as a starting point.

The Virginia killer's "manifesto" — and the media's willingness to dote on it like a catechism – will be the reason for future killers to do what they already feel like doing: shoot everyone that makes them feel small. As the Columbine killers' impulses were fed by the rapt, prurient attentions devoted to previous serial killers, so Cho was emboldened by our worship of the Columbine killings.

(snip)

NBC must count itself as the invisible gunman in all copycat crimes resulting from the Virginia Tech massacre. They nailed Cho to the crucifix he so desperately wanted, and said, "Behold."

This is where Wilson and I diverge a bit.  NBC's decision to publicize the material did not occur in a void.  They are hardly the sole polluters in our highly toxic media environment.

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