Our Culture: April 2007 Archives

On "The Sorpranos," Corrado "Junior" Soprano, locked up in a mental institution for his mistaken shooting of his nephews, boss Anthony Soprano, wrote a letter appealing to the vice president.

"Dear Vice President Cheney," he writes, "As a powerful man all too familiar with accidental gun play, I am writing in the hope that you will intervene in my case. Like yourself, I was involved in an unfortunate incident when a gun I was handling accidentally misfired ..."

Uncle June received a form letter in return.

There's been a lot of debate over whether NBC News should have broadcast the multi-media manifesto sent by the Virginia Tech killer.

But the bottom line is, it was news and as journalists. NBC had an obligation to broadcast it.

Yes, it may have been upsetting to some people, but news is frequently upsetting. That's simply the nature of news. Taken to its extreme, journalists wouldn't have reported anything about Sept. 11 and wouldn't have reported anything about Osama bin Laden.

This is information that people need to know. Certainly, journalists make judgment calls every day. And those calls will be second-guessed. It's part of the job.

But in this case, the killer's words and images helped explain what happened, as much as anything can explain that kind of madness. Yes, the killer was nuts, and the package he sent to NBC illustrated just how nuts he was. Withholding it would have been a disservice to news consumers.

Or, as Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford put it on "Scarborough Country," "It's NBC News, not NBC Your Mother."

We have a winner.

His name is John Derbyshire and he's a pundit with the right-wing National Review Online. You have to see what he wrote about the Virginia Tech massacre to believe it.

Here it is:

"As NRO's designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

"At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

Yes, yes, I know it's easy to say these things: but didn't the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything? As the cliche goes—and like most cliches. It's true—none of us knows what he'd do in a dire situation like that. I hope, however, that if I thought I was going to die anyway, I'd at least take a run at the guy."

You know, these were frightened college students, kids, and this wasn't a Chuck Norris flick. It was real life.

This guy is nuts.

First bit of news I heard this morning was the passing of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. at age 84.

He was a brilliant satirist, a great writer and a wonderful human being. He was able to find great humor in dark subjects, in the stunning capacity for human beings to inflict cruelty upon one another and in the absolute craziness of human existence.

He was a giant in American literature, his novels, classics. "Slaughterhouse Five," "Cats Cradle," "Breakfast of Champions," great works all. He was often compared with Mark Twain, which was apt because he shared Twain's ability to mine humor from human folly.

He wrote his own epitath, I believe, in "Breakfast of Champions." It was, simply, "He tried."

He certainly did.

The big news this week has been Stones guitar slinger Keith Richards telling a Brit music magazine that he mixed some of his father's ashes with cocaine and snorted them.

It raised quite a stink, so to speak.

A day after the story broke, Keef retracted the story, saying he just made it up to be, well, Keef.

Someone asked me, What kind of person would make up something like that?

Hey, we're talking about Keith Richards here.

On a side note, I recently saw a movie called "Stoned," a biopic about Brian Jones, one of the founding members of the Stones. The band kicked him out because he was too stoned and drunk and wasted. There's a scene in the movie where Richards tells Jones he has to clean up his act.

If Keith Richards is telling you to clean up your act, you have a real problem.