In regard to last night’s mass shooting at the Dark Knight Rises screening in Colorado, now that the indiscriminate killing of innocent people is over comes my least favorite part, the part where helpful schoolmarms offer reasonable tips for preventing future senselessness (as if senselessness can be prevented).
Take it away, New Yorker:
A modest proposal: could midnight screenings be suspended? First, for reasons of security; there are always troubled or idiotic souls who dream of fomenting repeats of a public disaster, though they seldom succeed. Second, because those screenings, starting when most people are in bed, often have a crazed and hallucinated air, which is all part of the game to those who enjoy them—anyone who has driven to a theatre to fetch teen-aged Harry Potter devotees, as they wander out in costume at three o’clock in the morning, can attest to that weary delirium—but which, right now, seems volatile, ominous, and redundant.
For all the excessive multisyllabicism and stilted, purple prose that makes the writer seem like he f*cks through a hole in the sheet, that “modest proposal” has all the wisdom of a local news segment about killer bees. Yeah, that’s great, let’s all completely change the way we do things because of some assh*le. Spree killers get off on disrupting people’s routine. Let’s show them who’s boss by completely disrupting our routine! WOOF.
“Massacre at the sandwich shop? Well! The least we can do as a thinking people is to ban sandwiches. Right now the thought of eating sandwiches seems pregnant with import – volatile, hallucinatory, and crazed in its redundant delirium.”