The 1960s were a very strange and turbulent time, though they almost seem tame by today’s standards. The 60s brought us Andy Warhol, Tiny Tim, Hugh Romney (who was known as Wavy Gravy) and Truman Capote. For me, one of the most shocking moments of the 1960s was when I found out who Truman Capote was.
I remember staying up late one night to watch Capote on the Dick Cavett show, and he was not at all what I expected him to be. Based on reading his book “In Cold Blood”, I expected he would be a sort of Jack Webb poster boy for law and order. Only after he appeared on TV did I realize I had misunderstood his book. I found out later that Capote was famous for his alcoholism and drug abuse, as well as what I observed that night, his whiney effeminite voice (he was as stereotypically gay as anyone I can imagine) and his self-absorbed ego, the ego which kept telling Dick Cavett that “In Cold Blood” was a masterpiece. I kept thinking that most of the people in western Kansas must have been awfully uncomfortable around him, but he became a late night celebrity in the 1960s, and they did not. I walked away from the telecast, wondering if he thought the November 14, 1959 murder of the Clutter family was good for his career. He promoted himself as well as he could, but he seemed unconcerned about the unfortunate Clutters. Knowing who he was made the already considerable sadness of his book doubly depressing.
I also realized that even though he knew on some level that the crime was hideously evil, he had spent a lot of time with the killers and had become fascinated with them. I think he really felt he had more in common with them than he did with their victims. “In Cold Blood” was not overtly merciless, but two-thirds of the book was written from the killers’ point of view. Capote can be partially forgiven, because he spent five years with the killers and he never knew the Clutters. Yet I think the Clutters were part of a world Capote rejected, and the killers were not. In a subtle way, Capote switched sides, befriending the killers and entertaining their demons.
Beyond that, I believe Capote was miserably unhappy, and he wrote the book in order to rationalize his own decadent lifestyle. The Clutters were churchgoing people, and Capote felt that either their God did not exist, or he wasn’t interested in them when they were tied up and shot with their mouths taped, and Mr. Clutter’s throat was cut. Capote reasoned that even if there is a real, personal and loving God, if he wouldn’t help the Clutters, he sure wouldn’t do anything for Truman Capote, who recognized in himself a walking time bomb full of evil.
“In Cold Blood” was supposed to be great writing because it gave us a glimpse into the criminal mind, and ever since its publication, the news media has been trying to put a face on killers so we can understand them. Decades later, this hasn’t enriched any of us, and it has encouraged crime, rather than reducing it. Evil doesn’t deserve our exploration.
Not long after “In Cold Blood” was published, Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses and Charles Whitman climbed the tower at the University of Texas, randomly murdering 15 victims. His crime wasn’t completely random, because he began his crime spree by murdering both his wife and his mother. Borrowing their coverage from Truman Capote’s nightmare, the media began obsessing about Whitman’s brain tumor and anything else which might have made him snap. Charles Whitman is still remembered today, but it would be nearly impossible to find a paragraph about one of his victims.
Since 1966, we have had a seemingly endless series of mass murders, including one at a McDonalds, one at a Luby’s cafeteria, several at post offices, most memorably one in Edmund, Oklahoma. Ironically, the real kings of mass murder, the pseudo-religious Jim Jones and the spoiled army castoff, Tim McVeigh, found more efficient weapons than guns. Then the school shootings began, and everyone remembers Columbine High School. I was living in Littleton, Colorado when it happened.
A pattern from these killings began to emerge. Most of today’s mass murderers never intend to survive and escape. They are cowards, unwilling to face both society’s wrath and the slim possibility that their own consciences might awake and condemn them for their depravity.
Secondly, the media becomes obsessed with the motives of these murderers, wanting to understand them and peek into their minds and find out what drove them mad. The media has virtually no interest in the innocent dead or in the living souls who are physically and emotionally wounded in ways few of us can imagine. Only the psychotic are interesting anymore. I have a simple suggestion for the media, a suggestion I’m confident they won’t listen to. They don’t publish the names of rape victims. There isn’t any law against doing so, it’s just a consensus, and I agree with it. Why not take the same approach to mass murderers? Instead of allowing them to vent their maniacal anger on TV, why not spend all our energy on talking about the survivors and the lives the dead have lost? Instead, the media’s morbid fascination with murderers has fanned the flames of every borderline lunatic in the country, and schools in at least a dozen states have been locked down or have had threats and potential emergencies in the three days since the Virginia Tech massacre. For the voyeuristic press and too much of the public, it’s all a big video game. In a just society, their coverage of the Virginia Tech story this week would make NBC as obsolete as the Studebaker.
Even before the murderer’s corpse begins to decay, the media and some of the survivors begin searching for living people to punish for a crime they supposedly should have anticipated and prevented. I was saddened, but not surprised, this week when people began blaming Virginia Tech University for not anticipating a second crime scene. Perhaps the university should have warned everyone on campus that a killer was on the loose. But there is no way to know what’s in a lunatic’s mind or where he will strike next. We should all remember that the employees at the World Trade Center were told to remain at their desks, and the ones who did so are dead. Any advice the university might have given about what to do, “Stay in your dorms”, “go to class”, “leave campus” may have been precisely wrong, and it might even have given the killer a clue about where to go to inflict the most possible loss of life. I don’t think all of the lawsuits from the Columbine massacre have been settled yet, and the finger-pointing over what happened at Virginia Tech is likely to be worse.
Every time I hear the words Kent State, I think back to May 4, 1970 and the four students who were killed there. I’m sure Kent State has issued many thousands of degrees since then, but Kent State for me brings just one lasting memory. Similarly, when I hear about Texas A&M, I think about the 1999 Aggie bonfire and the lives it cost more often than I think about A&M’s football and basketball teams. On Monday, the image of Virginia Tech was scarred by one man’s depravity, the depravity of the sick and twisted mind of a man whose name I don’t want to remember. Fortunately, I can’t pronounce it anyway.
But I mentioned Cornell instead of Virginia Tech in my title, and here’s why. There was a memorial service for the Virginia Tech victims at Cornell, a memorial service which should offend people everywhere. At that service, Cornell University’s president, David Skorton, invited Cornell’s students to mourn for all 33 victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, including the murderer. Here is what he said.
“We are one.” “We are one community, one people, one planet. We are here today to affirm that oneness … We are here to bear witness to the passing of the 33 members of our family at Virginia Tech University who have met an untimely and terrible fate.” “We are here for all of those who are gone, for all 33. We are here for the 32 who have passed from the immediate to another place, not by their own choice. We are also here for the one who has also passed.”
The Virginia Tech killer may be part of David Skorton’s family, but he is definitely not part of mine. Virginia Tech plans to postumously award degrees to his 32 victims and perhaps Cornell will give 33 honorary degrees, but they shouldn’t. We are not one big happy family. What sort of madness would cause an Ivy League school (I bet Cornell’s tuition isn’t cheap) to have a memorial service which is as much on behalf of a murderer as it was for his victims, and to have the university’s president speak on his behalf?
Even as troubled as he was, on Sunday night I would have agreed that the Virginia Tech killer’s life was as valuable as anyone else’s. But on Monday morning, when he pulled the trigger hundreds of times, shooting his victims repeatedly at close range and probably being soaked by their blood, his madness made him something less than human. Cornell’s president and the mainstream media want me to feel sorry for this monster because he was picked on in school or because he had an unhappy childhood. On Sunday, I would have cared about his pain. All I can think about now is that I would like to give his rotting corpse a good hard kick. But I don’t deserve that opportunity nearly as much as those who have lost children, brothers, sisters, parents or friends. Those people, not this demented jerk, need Cornell’s concern. We were all picked on in school. I was picked on in school. My sons are picked on in school. But very few of us are heartless enough to empty a gun’s bullets into stranger after stranger and keep reloading and reloading. I hope this maggot of a man who murdered 32 innocent human beings is eternally as terrified in hell as his victims were in their final moments on earth. He may not find many people from Virginia Tech down there, but he may have some company from Cornell, and from the mainstream media who have spent the whole week trying to rationalize his behavior and give him a face we should have loved, while at the same time trying to make sure his victims are buried anonymously.
If you meet a Hokie , hug him or her. They need it right now, and they’re going to need it for a long, long time.
