The Sage Forge: Flash Fame

Wanna be famous? Do as the media shows others doing! Rant! Rave! Blow yourself away after taking thirty total innocents with you! The media will take the packet you send them as you take a breather from strenuous carnage and make you a cause celebre!

That's the ticket. Let the rating points show the way. Info-tainment as not even the Romans could do it.

At Virginia Tech this week the world was witness to the cost of media hype. Nine years ago the worldwide media made stars out of a couple of misfit high school boys after they had killed a dozen of their peers. Their faces became familiar to everyone. Their maladjusted pain became everyone's judgement-free pain. Their victims were made into nobodies, pawns, unfeeling props in a national morality play.

The media accorded the limelight to the audacious brutality of the killers and lifted them up as a sort of anti-hero to be gazed upon by all. The meekness of their victims was rewarded with silence, and sod.

What is our reward for this action toward the killers at Columbine? The monster of Virginia Tech, of course. An attention starved, misfit, bitter outcast has, in the eyes of thousands of other attention starved, misfit, bitter outcasts, been made into a star emblazoned brightly upon the media firmament where everyone MUST see him. Thus is cocked the hammer on the next April copycat killer.

NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and all the others who revelled in the chance to make money from lurid murder, who bathed in the blood of the innocent, and made icons of those who released that crimson torrent, they killed thirty-two people filled with promise at Virginia Tech.

And now they have set us up for the next round of loss, and, of course, ratings bonanzas.