The national hankie

There's an article by Christopher Hitchens on Slate about last week's shootings at Virginia Tech in America. It's a little hardhearted, but I agree with the general point. The point is to question the need everyone seems to feel to "whip out the national hankie" (in America and elsewhere) when strangers die tragically:

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.

And getting to the point:

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.

Back in 1997 I marvelled at the over-the-top grieving for Diana (even while -- I sheepishly admit -- I stayed up late to watch the funeral back in Canada). I wondered for the first time why people seemed to need these triggers; these moments of spontaneous national emotion. Watching the film The Queen recently, I wondered if poor old Elizabeth II didn't get a raw deal, at the time, being pilloried for attempting to demonstrate the famous British stiff upper lip.

Why do we find events like Diana's accident, or the Virgina tech massacre, so much more emotional than other, equally tragic deaths? How many people are murdered each day in America? How many soldiers and civilians die in Iraq each week? (U.S. soldiers dying in by ones-and-twos in Iraq and Afghanistan barely makes the U.S. headlines any more). How many people die in road accidents each day? Do we stop paying attention when the deaths stop being sensational? Since these less famous deaths are no less tragic or senseless, why are they so much less important to the public? Or, more to the point of Chris Hitchens, why are the Virginia Tech murders so much more important?

Is it simply because they're sensational and unusual? I really don't want to be insensitive, but maybe we should ask ourselves: Is it that, deep down, we all love a good tragedy now and then?