The selfie-video made by New Zealand shooter Brent Tarrant shows the world once again how shockingly banal an act of mass homicide can be. He went through the various chambers of two mosques in suburban Christchurch exterminating unarmed, helpless worshippers as if they were mere points to be racked up in a video game. They had no personalities or histories. They were just targets. And when they moaned or moved, he shot them again to make sure they were out of the game. The shooter was arrested and lives on in police custody.
In the aftermath of every mass casualty event there is an immediate and almost reverential turn towards the motive for the crime. The media unites in its pursuit for the reasoning behind the violent episodes that seems appear on a regular basis these days, often creating a narrative when facts are absent that follows the established script of the status quo. Every so often the perpetrator either survives or leaves behind a detailed laundry list of grievances and beliefs.
You can tell a great deal about the person responsible, but you can tell even more about our culture by the way the story is told. In the past the best way to convince someone of the legitimacy of an idea was to lay out both sides and allow for discourse and inevitably work toward some kind of compromise that works for both ends of the political spectrum at any given moment in a culture’s history. Everyone seemed to understand that in order to maintain a stable and well-ordered body politic, the greater force should be centripetal in nature with the greatest number of people in the center of an ideological Bell Curve rather than drifting too far in either direction one way or the other.
