THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Hunting Hokies: The Washington Post just doesn’t get it and never will, judging by the opening grafs of its article on the deadly shooting rampage at Northern Illinois University:
If there were lessons learned after the Virginia Tech massacre, they were: Lock down and notify. Virginia Tech officials did neither until hours after the first shots sounded across the Blacksburg campus in April. Northern Illinois University did not make the same mistake Thursday.
But the university's actions still could not stop a man armed with powerful rapid-fire weapons and the intent to kill as many people as possible, higher-education and safety experts said Friday. …
By many preliminary accounts, the university did well: Within 30 seconds of a report of shots fired at Cole Hall, the first officer was on the scene. But he was too late. Stephen P. Kazmierczak, a former graduate student at the school, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and three pistols, had already sprayed more than 50 rounds of buckshot and bullets at panicked students before turning one of his weapons on himself. Six people, including the shooter, were killed, and 16 were wounded.
NIU President John Peters tells The Associated Press that the emergency alert system the school developed after the Virginia Tech massacre is a response plan “meant to contain the carnage rather than keep it from happening,” and the university’s police chief, Donald Grady insists that, “[I]t's unlikely that anyone would ever have the ability to stop an incident like this from beginning.” Unless, AP opines (this is a news story, by the way), “colleges are willing to turn themselves into armed camps.”
By “armed camps” AP means at least one trained and licensed professor or student in Cole Hall who could have dropped Kazmierczak after he got off the first couple of shots. True, no one can stop that first shot from being fired, but shooting back at a crazed gunman is more effective at containing the carnage than shooting off e-mails warning students of a crazed gunman on campus.
Taking aim at “gun free zone” campuses, radio talk show host Doug Giles point blank asks, “College Presidents: How Many Students Have To Die Before You Allow Guns On Your Campus?”: “[I]f your foe has a gun, then he has a solid and deadly advantage, and the cops can’t get there fast enough to do much about it. … your campus must have deadly force on the spot to counter deadly force. Duh.”
Here’s how NIU student Allison Warren, 20 plans to protect herself against the next campus massacre: “I'm going to be looking over my shoulder and skeptical of people coming into class late.”
Good luck with that, Allison.
† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: Susan Jacoby wrote her new book, “The Age of American Unreason,” because she fears “Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.” Jacoby tells The New York Times that she decided to write the book on 9/11, when she stopped off at a bar within walking distance of her home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to calm her nerves with a Bloody Mary and overheard this conversation between two (presumably young) businessmen:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
Oy.
Jacoby ticks off some reasons Americans are getting dumb and dumber with which The Stiletto can’t help but agree: “It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office” and “the triumph of [digital media] over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.”
Where The Stiletto parts company with Jacoby is extending the blame for this downward intellectual spiral to President George W. Bush and (Christian) religious fundamentalists. More harmful to children’s intellectual development than teaching creationism in schools as an alternative theory to evolution has been the introduction of such pedagogic fads as “whole word” reading and “new math” with little or no evidence that they increased learning and comprehension better than phonetics and drills; unionized teachers who cannot be fired short of molesting children; and a notion peculiar to American parents and teachers that self esteem, rather than shame or fear of failure, is a powerful motivator for achieving excellence.
† War Breaks Out At Crawford Peace House: The Washington Post reports that now that President George W. Bush is a lame duck, “the Bush boom is over” and Crawford, TX, is transitioning from being a host to world leaders visiting the “Western White House” to being a sleepy, unassuming town west of Waco. Ironically, as the sun sets on the Bush administration, the Crawford Peace House is also in its twilight: “[T]he Crawford Peace House, base camp for antiwar protesters and alternative-thinking folks, looked forlorn this week, all locked up, the two “staff parking” spaces empty. … The activists had a meeting a few weeks ago that drew nearly 20 people, but they can't staff the Peace House on a daily basis. Funding just isn't there.”
† The Shawn Bradley Effect (second item): The role that “anti-Mormon bias” played in sinking Mitt Romney’s presidential hopes will long be the subject of debate. For her part, The Stiletto maintains a far bigger factor in Romney’s failure to gain traction with voters is that he was an inept candidate (second item). Here’s why: On a proportional basis, far more evangelicals voted for Romney than Mormons voted for Mike Huckabee - in NV and UT, for instance, 90 percent of Mormons voted for Romney (if Huckabee had consistently racked up this level of support amongst evangelicals, John McCain would fighting him tooth and claw for the Republican nomination) - so you can attribute the behavior of Mormon voters either to “voting for one of their own” or to anti-evangelical bigotry.
As with evangelicals tending to vote for Huckabee over Romney, The Stiletto prefers the more benign explanation, especially as there are more egregious and unambiguous examples of bigotry in this election cycle. Just ask Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who is running for re-election in a majority black district in Memphis. Cohen was mailed a political flier being disseminated in his district urging voters to support his main rival black lawyer Nikki Tinker, because “Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen and the Jews hate Jesus.” The Associated Press reports, “The flier, which was also sent by mail to the Memphis Jewish Federation, included a contact name, the Rev. George Brooks, and a phone number in Murfreesboro, a town near Nashville and some 200 miles outside Cohen's district.”
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