What They Want

so their eyes are growing hazy
'cos they wanna turn it on
so their minds are soft and lazy
well, hey, give 'em what they want

if lust and hate is the candy
if blood and love tastes so sweet
then we give 'em what they want
(Natalie Merchant, Candy Everybody Wants)

Lionel Shriver writes in today's Washington Post about what he dreads - and is pretty sure is coming - as a result of the relentless media coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. Because, ultimately, the media attention for monsters like Cho and his predecessors - and those who will surely follow - are really what the whole thing is about.

Even more than these gruesomely gratuitous incidents themselves, I have come to dread the campus shooting's ritual media aftermath — a secondary wave of atrocity, all conducted under the guise of grief, soul-searching concern and an ostensible determination to ensure that no demented loner ever opens fire on his classmates again. Yet the bloated photographs on front pages, the repeating loops of interviews on cable news, the postings of warped creative writing assignments on the Web, and perhaps above all the airing of Cho's self-pitying, quasi-messianic video clips on every network all help ensure that similar incidents will indeed recur — and soon.

When researching a depressingly copious array of real-life campus massacres for a fictional variation on those macabre melees in my last novel, "We Need to Talk About Kevin," I grew to appreciate that every school shooter has his own sorry story. Yet the one motivation that seems to tie all these misguided characters together is a yearning for media recognition. In an era that has lost touch with the distinction between fame and infamy, so driving is the need to be noticed — for any reason — that even posthumous attention will do. Much like those fun-fair photo booths in which one can push one's face through a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you can be sure that more than one American kid has already mentally snipped out the zomboid face on those front pages and poked his own mug through the newsprint instead. Cho's video "manifestos" may stir revulsion in most, but they will stir envy in a dangerous few.

Moreover, Cho has deliberately upped the ante; exceeding Dylan Klebold's and Eric Harris's body count by more than a factor of two on the eighth anniversary of the Columbine shootings, nearly to the day, was surely calculated. So how many victims will our next shooter figure he has to claim in order to merit the same delicious scale of coverage? Sixty-four?

Despite all the searching-for-an-answer hand-wringing we have been subjected to this last week, the most obvious ounce of prevention would be to stop allowing the likes of Cho to play the media like a piano. As it is, we gave him everything he would have wished for. In so doing, journalists who claim only to be helping us to "understand," the better to prevent future rampages, are hypocritical. Ask any Skinnerian psychologist: Reward behavior, and it rises.

I don't agree with everything he writes, but I think his basic point here is quite correct. The rush by politicians and officials to do something - anything - will inevitably lead to a lot of bad decisions. Questionable things will be done at college campuses across the nation to offer up an illusion of safety. And, sadly, that will be all that is accomplished. An illusion. Because there really are madmen in this world and they will always find a way to act out their madness. But the relentless waves of media coverage will certainly not escape the notice of some of the mad or the marginal longing for the same attention. They are quick learners.