The Long View 2007-04-18: Soggy Internet, Virginia Tech Massacre, The Secret Glory
The infrastructure failure that John mentions here where a big storm inundated NYC and affected theoretically robust networks like the Internet would be repeated on a much larger scale five years later with Hurricane Sandy.
Soggy Internet, Virginia Tech Massacre, The Secret Glory
No, it wasn't a nor'easter: That storm that dropped nine inches of rain on the New York City area over Sunday and Monday was not a coastal storm, which is what nor'easters (I hate that contraction: northeasters) are. The pattern was more like that of a winter continental storm that brings a blizzard.
Anyway, my own neighborhood is right at the mouth of the Hudson on New York Bay. Short of the Deluge, there is no way to get the sort of flooding here that forced evacuations further inland. On the other hand, the ground becomes completely saturated; my condominium's basement took a foot of water, and that was with the pump working.
I mention the storm here only because, while it was happening, the Internet slowed to a crawl and became unusable for a time. This has happened repeatedly in civil emergency and bad weather. I thought the point of the Internet was to be a communication system that would keep working even during a nuclear war.
Maybe it will, if the weather's fine.
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The first mention I saw of the Virginia Tech Massacre characterized it as an assault on our Second Amendment right to own guns. Other variations on this offensive-defense include this surreal column: Virginia Tech's Gun-Free Zone Left Cho Seung-Hui's Victims Defenseless. Actually, if you are a Second Amendment buff, the massacre should cause you no concern. The new Democratic majority in Congress, NPR noted this morning, is based on representatives from rural districts who won election largely by adopting the National Rifle Association's position on gun rights. As we have noted before, the high strategy on the Left is to trade guns rights to the western states in order to secure their support for the Darwin Award Agenda on reproductive and marriage issues.
It could work.
I suspect that, even in Thomas Jefferson's day, students were not expected to come armed to the lecture halls.
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We should compare this latest incident with the murder-suicide at Harvard in 1995. Cho Seung-Hui produced disturbing writings and otherwise gave signs of mental deterioration. So did the Harvard student in her diaries, as well as in letters to perfect strangers asking for help. In both cases, the students absented themselves for a long time from their classes before taking violent action. Perhaps steps should be taken to ensure that faculty note such absences and that the school administration investigate them. That would be more practical than requiring faculty to carry guns, even stun-guns.
The Harvard student was clearly depressed, and was even getting some futile counseling from the school medical service, but did not seem to be dangerous; at least, not to people other than herself. The Virginia Tech student, we are now told, frightened his teachers and fellow students. I wonder how seriously to take that: he was scary, we learn, because he was so, well, so quiet. Even in retrospect, I would not read too much into the violent themes he chose for his class assignments. This is evidence not that he was homicidally insane, but that he had been seeing the films created for his cohort.
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Speaking of violent films, I recently ordered a set of DVDs from Amazon Canada of the films of documentarian and horror-director Richard Stanley. The one item that interests me is his documentary, The Secret Glory, about the life and alleged Grail Quest of Otto Rahn. I got started on this because I just reviewed Rahn's book, Crusade against the Grail. After I finished the book, it occurred to me that Rahn would make a good subject for a documentary. Then I discovered it had already been done.
By the way, despite its vulnerability to inclement weather, the Internet has now advanced to the point of Rahn blogging, as we see at Arcadia, Andrew Gough's blog.
There would still be something to be said for a biopic of Otto Rahn, but it would be a mistake to view him as a hero. Esoteric fascism has never been a good thing.
Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly
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