Christopher Hitchens's new Slate column on the latest Fort Hood massacre is a real Tour de France. We can see that all those Vanity Fair exercise workouts have not been in vain as he bicycles all over the place in an effort, not to get at the truth, because that would be a pointless exercise for Hitchens, but simply and transparently to pin the blame for the tragedy on Islam and then scream to himself "Mission Accomplished!" Never before outside of the realms of fiction have I witnessed a crime solved so effortlessly, so promptly, and with so little equivocation as this masterpiece of deductive logic, made, as far as can be ascertained from this distance, with the aid of nothing more substantial than a selective sampling of information made available at second or third hand and a possible set of talking points from the Pentagon or the American Enterprise Institute. Indeed, the last time I was this favorably impressed by a detective's prowess was when Holmes said to his associate, "Watson, I appear to be suffering from a bout of constipation!", and the good doctor replied, "No shit, Sherlock?"
In a case like this with a media crack whore like Hitchens — the thinking man's Bill O'Reilly — what you see is what the powers that pimp and pay for his journalistic services want to draw your attention too, nothing more or less. Oh it IS interesting — I myself find it ABSOLUTELY fascinating, don't YOU? — that a mere two and a half years ago when a Korean-born student named Cho Seung-Hui allegedly launched a similar mass shooting killing 33 people including himself on the Compass at Virginia Tech, Christopher was equally certain in his diagnosis although at that time he was rudely dismissive of the idea that people should explore the significance of the event:
The grisly events at Virginia Tech involved no struggle, no sacrifice, no great principle. They were random and pointless. Those who died were not soldiers in any cause. They were not murdered by our enemies. They were not martyrs....
Almost everybody in the country seems to have taken this non-event as permission to talk the starkest nonsense. And why not? Since the slaughter raised no real issues, it was a blank slate on which anyone could doodle....
But the quest for greater "meaning" was unstoppable. Will Korean-Americans be "targeted"? (Thanks for putting the idea into the head of some nutcase, but really, what an insulting question!)
Hitch is also reported to have called the Va. Tech. shootings "a non-story" at American Society of Magazine Editors' annual board meeting/luncheon for 2007.
This time around, however, Tweedlehitch is talking contrariwise. Now he's fairly altered his meaning, now he's fairly changed his tune, as the old song goes. Here we have a struggle, soldiers, principles, causes, enemies and martyrs aplenty. What gives?
"Aah," I hear a few skeptical voices humming with index fingers waving in harmony. "Apart from lone gunmen going plumb loco, as I believe they say in Texas, and gunning down dozens of their fellows, these two stories have absolutely nothing in common." Actually though, as Hitchens has brought up the subject of salient facts, there is one very juicy connection that no proper investigation can afford to ignore. And that is that Major Hasan and Cho Seung-Hui both studied at the same college. Hasan is a graduate of Virginia Tech. To have one dingbat crazy mass shooter among the alumni may be dismissed as a freak one-off event. To produce two of them within two and a half years is beginning to look like carelessness. And when you throw in that incident last January when a Chinese graduate student was decapitated by a fellow student with a knife, you get to wondering whether there isn't something in the water or in the curriculum that contributed to this over-the-top snuff-movie violence.
If you'd like to play Holmes and Watson on the Fort Hood case, you can begin by ploughing through this little lot. It's called Fort Hood Shooting 'Oddities' and if it doesn't set you off on a Tour de France of speculation and head scratching all your own, then I guess you're just not detective material. And while you're at it, please don't forget that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is deemed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, regardless of anything Christopher may say to the contrary.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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