Analyze This

In our desperate need to make sense of a terrible incident, we seek explanation, making sense of what seems senseless. We want to know what Cho Seung Hui was like. What made him do it?

Within a day of the shootings at Virginia Tech, someone had posted a one act play about a guy named Richard McBeef. Hundreds, if not thousands of people have read what presumably only two or three others had before. He's getting instant analysis posthumously, from armchair psychiatrists.

Here's one of the better examples. In it, the author claims the story, which incidentally reads horribly, making little sense, is somehow a story of Hamlet, told in modern times, with names like Richard and McBeef borrowing two other Shakespearean names, though mocking them as well. I suppose, in its way, it's darn clever to weave so many ideas together, and yet the actual execution (as it were) was rather poor.

But beyond that, the blogosphere is ready to respond, and mere moments afterwards. Many have seen it as a statement on gun control, or commented on lack of quick university response, which may or may not have helped (it may simply have switched the venue from a lecture hall to a dorm--indeed, it's puzzling why the first shots were fired hours earlier).

The New York Times recently had some graphics showing the locations on campus, and honestly, I swear I thought it was going to be some sort of 3D flyover, like some first person shooter, in some tasteless re-enactment. Fortunately, it did not devolve into that, but we're pretty close to having the technology to do that, and people are often curious, wanting to replay the event, down to its minute detail.

Justin says I should avoid blog entries like this, that merely gets drowned out amidst the comments of thousands of others.