Irony can be so ironic.

In what has become a hideous irony, I must say something. In my previous post, I compared some aspects of the incident at Virginia Tech to a Saturday Night Live skit many years ago. In a parody of ABC's Nightline, a Ted Koppel caricature interviews Eddie Murphy's caricature of the "Our Gang" character Buckwheat. As it progresses, "Buckwheat" leaves and is assassinated by "John David Stutts" (also played by Murphy by the way) filmed in such a way as to resemble the assassination attempt by John Hinkley on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Stutts is captured and his neighbors and co-workers are interviewed and asked if he wanted to kill Buckwheat to which they reply "Yes, that's all he ever talked about." The climax of the skit consists of Stutts being killed in a parody of the Oswald assassination.

I tell you all this to get to the ironic part. It seems that our protagonist showed all the signs. He wrote disturbing plays, prompting his English professor to advise him to seek counseling. (Unfortunately, we lack the laws in this country to forcibly commit someone for writing disturbing plays. That may change after this, but I digress). He had a loner mentality and was so disturbing to his classmates that many identified him as the perpetrator even before his name was officially released. It seems that killing and darkness were all he ever talked about and something set him off, drove him over the edge.

The media coverage on this incident seems so like this skit that the ironic parallels are just crazy. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this contradiction. Perhaps Murphy's writers at SNL struck a chord in this media savvy world of ours that pointed out this sometimes idiotic rumination whenever there is a major incident such as this. (Part of the skit consisted of playing the "Buckwheat assassination" over and over in slow motion much like the Challenger disaster and the Reagan assassination which were recent history at the time of the skit).

So, if you see me walking down the street, chuckling at the media coverage of this deplorable incident, please do not think me callous. I only laugh at the irony of the media which has become obsessed with blood and disaster, endlessly obsessing on stories to the point that they no longer have meaning or impact. Stories which in our strange media world sometimes have no meaning except to the media insects themselves.