MONTREAL – As a former teacher at Dawson College who lives only eight blocks from the scene of last Wednesday’s mayhem, I followed developing news with troubled fascination, grateful that time and circumstance had spared me any direct role in the drama.
In the tidal wave of response to the event, one group of commentators focused on what could be done to prevent a similar disaster. They were in turn divided over the question of whether prevention is even possible. The 25-year old killer, Kimveer Gill, had been obsessed with guns, violent video games, gruesome web sites and, most disturbingly, icons of mass destruction, such as the Columbine High School killers and Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City bombing fame. Animated media arguments took on the issues of stricter firearms acquisition laws, extended surveillance of gun owners and sanctions against violent games and provocative Goth Web sites.
Then there was the other group—more interesting to me—of social and cultural commentators who looked at the “larger picture,” and sought to identify the “real” reasons for Gill’s apparently motiveless crime. Of course, Gill had posted his “reasons” on the Internet: “I’m ashamed to be part of the human race,” and “Look what this wretched world has done to me,” etc. But self-pitying outpourings are boilerplate accessories in the bizarre antisocial culture Gill identified with, and are universally recognized by pundits as symptoms of some profounder malaise.
Every professional or ideological hammer seeks its validating nail. Psychologists want the answer to lie in a dysfunctional family situation (no joy to be found here—Gill’s middle-class family is stable, his parents described as “caring”); educators prefer a narrative around bullying (sorry—the tall, physically intimidating Gill was not only never bullied, he was protective of bullying victims); sociologists yearn for signs of racial, cultural or linguistic marginalization (nope—although of east Asian provenance, neither Gill himself nor any of his friends evidenced a speck of race-consciousness, and if language were the issue, he would have shot up a francophone institution).
And then there are … the anti-American Marxists. Would you believe the motivating force behind Gill’s homicidal rage was the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan? No? How about Reaganomics? Me neither, but last week the Globe and Mail featured two of the intellosphere’s more opportunistic hammers, who leaped on the Dawson tragedy as a board into which to pound their anti-American “nail.”
In his column last Friday, Rick Salutin mused: “In fact, who knows what part 9/11 and its long bloody aftermath played at Dawson College … ?” He then adduced suicide bombing stats and reports of carnage in Afghanistan and Iraq, wondering about “the numbing effect of hearing daily about such events.”
Kimveer Gill was a fully grown adult of 20 on 9/11. If it’s foreign carnage that explains his actions, then why not blame the “numbing effect” of the Rwandan genocide, which occurred when Gill was an impressionable 12 years old? Because Rwanda’s evils cannot be attributed to America. References to Iraq and Afghanistan are, for leftwingers, code for America-generated disaster.
But Salutin’s curious strain of logic (which does not explain, for example, why unremitting suicide bombs’ “numbing effect” has failed to produce school shooting rampages in Israel) is a model of Cartesian purity beside that of Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion, from Reagan’s workplace to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, to whose crackpot views the Globe allotted a half page interview summary in Saturday’s Focus section.
Ames’s vituperatively anti-capitalist maunderings link stagnant wages and a “Darwinian” workplace (“making the world a crueler place”) to middle-class dinner-table stresses causing children’s insecurities, which in turn result in mass shootouts. Such a “theory” is simply lunatic by any normal scholarly standards. At one point, we are informed by his interviewer, Ames actually compares the rampages to—I am not making this up—“spontaneous incidents of slave rebellion common in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
The true home for this farrago of non sequiturs (which are in any case irrelevant to Canada’s social and economic realities) is not a respectable national newspaper, but some obscure Marxist Web site trading in pathological anti-Americanism. At a time when Canadians are groping for soberly reasoned enlightenment and preventative strategies, the mainstream media has an obligation to provide intelligent comment, not rancid intellectual mutton dressed up as lamb.
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