Den Satz habe ich bei Christopher Hitchens
Suck It Up: After the shootings came an orgy of mawkishness, sloppiness, and false sentiment. gefunden und er ueberzeugt mich.
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The grisly events at Virginia Tech involved no struggle, no sacrifice, no great principle. They were random and pointless. Those who died were not soldiers in any cause. They were not murdered by our enemies. They were not martyrs. (…)
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(…) When piffle like this gets respectful treatment from the media, we can guess that it’s not because of the profundity of the emotion but rather because of its extreme shallowness. (…)
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It was my friend Adolph Reed who first pointed out this tendency to what he called “vicarious identification.” At the time of the murder of Lisa Steinberg in New York in 1987, he was struck by the tendency of crowds to show up for funerals of people they didn’t know, often throwing teddy bears over the railings and in other ways showing that (as well as needing to get a life) they in some bizarre way seemed to need to get a death. The hysteria that followed a traffic accident in Paris involving a disco princess—surely the most hyped non-event of all time—seemed to suggest an even wider surrender to the overwhelming need to emote: The less at stake, the greater the grieving.
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Gerade weil der Amoklauf an Virginia Tech so sinnlos war, eignet sich der Vorfall fuer emotionales Hyperventilieren. In anderen Faellen (sei es ein Attentat im Irak, ein Bandenkrieg oder auch ein schwerer Autounfall) muesste man moeglicherweise Schlussfolgerungen ziehen und nach ihnen handeln.
