Bryan Ferry was wowed by them:

The 61-year-old lead singer of Roxy Music told Germany’s Welt Am Sonntag newspaper last month: “The way that the Nazis staged themselves and presented themselves, my Lord!

“I’m talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags — just fantastic. Really beautiful.”

Ferry has apologized. He hates the Nazis—really! he was merely critiquing Nazi iconography from an “art history perspective,” he says.

Hit and Run’s David Weigel, ever ready to assume the role of the detached intellectual, thinks Ferry has nothing to apologize for. After all, what he said was true!

This is a totally true statement about how Nazis had excellent design sense. C’mon, does someone want to argue that Leni Riefenstahl didn’t have a great sense of aesthetics?

Well, no one is accusing Ferry of lying. Something can be both true and reprehensible, because it is so intellectually detached. So utterly clueless. So tin-eared. So stupid.

That message of peace that Nancy Pelosi claims to have carried from Israel to Syria didn’t exactly work out:

Syria [to Israel]: Accept Arab initiative or we’ll resort to violence

Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal threatened on Monday evening to return the Golan Heights to Syrian hands “by way of resistance If Israel [rejected] the Arab peace initiative.”Bilal did not elaborate but some analysts raised the possibilities of either a full scale conventional war or a terror campaign in the Golan as one of the means to undertake a mukawama (resistance in Arabic).

Is anyone surprised?

I can’t really distance myself from the Virginia Tech story enough to comment with my usual detachment, probably because, as I’ve said, I’m the mother of two young adults. My heart is broken for the kids on that Blacksburg, Virginia, campus, who have suffered such a profound, shocking, inexplicable loss, who have had their feelings of safety and security so cruelly violated.

There has been so much loss already in the lives of these kids, who, after a childhood (following a generation) of peace and prosperity, have grown up in the shadow of 9/11 and the war in Iraq and the war on terror or whatever you want to call it (and the Brits don’t want to call it that anymore, because it’s not helpful and it’s alienating, but that’s a topic for another day).

Also: I don’t feel much like dissecting the media coverage. I’ve got CNN on in the background as I write. It’s vaguely comforting to commune with others who’ve been affected by this horror show, even if “commune” is surely a pitifully exaggerated way to describe the wallowing in gory details that’s going on.

Jack Shafer had some thoughts about the coverage, though:

[M]urders committed at random discompose us at a primal level. They rob us of the false sense of security we use each night to tuck our children in to sleep. The Virginia Tech shootings also marked a new American death record, a detail that many outlets keep repeating to rationalize the news torrent they’re producing. Add to all of the above the fact that the lives stolen were still green, that none of the promise nurtured by loving parents can ever be fulfilled, and you’ve got immeasurable sorrow. And immeasurable sorrow breeds immeasurable interest—not just from journalists, but from news consumers as well. …
If the New York Times weren’t compiling a “Portraits of Grief” for the Blacksburg kids right now—as I bet they are—and if the story came to a close tonight on Anderson Cooper’s show, readers and viewers would riot.

Well, maybe not. But readers and viewers who got emotionally caught up in this incident are seeking closure and/or catharsis. Cable news networks wallowing in the gory details provide something like it, or at least they provide company for your misery.

That’s infotainment. So it goes.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

I am the mother of two young adults. This picture made me  cry:

Students console one another in front of campus War Memorial.

Add the fear of blaming South Koreans—I kid you not ***—to the brilliant list of the post-Virginia Tech media memes compiled by ETP’s Jason Linkins. Weirdly, none of them attribute guilt (sole guilt or, for that matter, any guilt) to the perpetrator, who was apparently a lone gunman (and a VT student), Cho Seung-Hui.

Linkins’s list:

GUNS, GUNS, GUNS (and a subset of same: THE JIM WEBB COROLLARY)

EVERYONE IN CHARGE FAILED AND SHOULD BE FIRED

“INSTANT PREJUDICE” [I'm not quite sure against whom --ed.]

CREATIVE WRITING AND THE AGONIES OF ARMCHAIR PSYCHOANALYSTS

VIDEOGAMES? REALLY? [the commentary "really?" is Linkins's, not mine]

In a later post, Linkins also remarks on the “English major” meme—which is really a subset of the “creative writing” meme. You can’t trust an English major—and you certainly can’t trust an English major at an institution where he’s surrounded on all sides by engineers. Right?

——-

*** Here’s where Americans are supposedly going to explode in a massive backlash against South Koreans—or so the South Koreans fear:

South Korea expressed its condolences, and said it hoped that the tragedy would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.” “We are in shock beyond description,” said Cho Byung-se, a Foreign Ministry official handling North American affairs.

It’s quite the coincidence that just a few days after I wrote a post called “the Eleventh Commandment,” in which I made fun of all the people in the world whose feelings are hurt and who are mad as hell and just won’t take it anymore, the Imus brouhaha expoded into the news cycle.

I have nothing to add about Imus. But I can report that the Indians are not at all happy with Richard Gere:

Protesters burn effigies of Gere after Shilpa kiss

Richard Gere’s repeated kisses on the cheeks of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty in an event to promote AIDS awareness sparked protests in India on Monday with demonstrators burning effigies of the actor.

What were they protesting?

The protesters said Gere’s kissing of Shilpa was against Indian culture.

Uh-huh.

By the way, this is the Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt not (dare) insult the hypersensitive.

Today, the WSJ reports more or less everything I posted about Gaza yesterday (which I painstakingly stitched together after five weeks of following this story).

 Uncertain Fate
Of Gaza Reporter
Deepens Concerns

 Fanatical Islamists of the type sowing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to be operating with increasing impunity in the Gaza Strip, heightening concern about the rising danger posed by al Qaeda-inspired groups or similar violent fringe groups in the Palestinian territories.

An unconfirmed statement on Sunday by a group saying it had killed abducted BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has added to these fears. Even if that claim turns out to be false, the kidnapping marks a low point for the already troubled Gaza Strip. Palestinian human-rights groups are documenting an increasing number of firebombings and other attacks against targets such as Internet cafes, libraries and cultural centers.

Concerns about such violence come amid an overall state of lawlessness that has prompted even the United Nations to keep nearly all of its foreign staffers out of Gaza. The convoy of a lead official for the world body was shot at last month, despite the use of clearly marked U.N. vehicles. Foreign charitable organizations working in Gaza are similarly concerned.

So I’ve been saying for quite a while now.

I’m not bragging—I’m noting the lag between the time an energetic amateur like me notices a straw in the wind (in this case the Johnston kidnapping, which I’ve been writing about for five weeks) and the time it takes for the MSM to use its megaphone to luanch the story into the news cycle.

Truth be told, despite its huge impact on journalists and on journalism—and despite its ramifications for the rest of us, who depend on journalists to report those things that we cannot see or hear for ourselves—this story may never make it into the news cycle. The WSJ doesn’t have much of a megaphone.

Much will depend on what happens to Johnston (and the kidnappers are hoping to hook us with that ongoing soap opera, to grab our attention with it, as kidnappers are wont to do [[see this June 2006 post, "kidnapping makes for good television," for a link to a study about how kidnapping is an excellent headline-grabbing narrative for terrorists who are looking to make their mark, or their point, in a shrug-it-off world.]] ).

But let’s not forget that Johnston’s kidnappers are competing with what’s  being called the ”deadliest shooting rampage in American history“. Those kidnappers don’t stand a chance. Because we’re now going to feast on this orgy for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Is our understanding of the frightening and shocking bloodbath at Virginia Tech amplified by the presence of every “name” reporter and anchor and talking head in the business?

Apparently so. Here are the headlines (oldest first) from TVNewser yesterday:

Va. Tech Shooting: Greta En Route

Va. Tech Shooting: Couric To Blacksburg

Va. Tech Shooting: Hour-Long Nightline Tonight; Cuomo, Roberts On Scene Tomorrow

Va. Tech Shooting: Williams En Route; Dateline Schedules Special At 10pm

Va. Tech Shooting: Lauer, Vieira, Barber Going To The Scene

Va. Tech Shooting: Harry Smith To VA

Va. Tech Shooting: CNN Suspends King’s Anniversary Programming For Now

Va. Tech Shooting: 10pm Special On MSNBC

Va. Tech Shooting: Greta Live From 10pm to Midnight; Geraldo Live From 12 to 2am

Va. Tech Shooting: Williams & Couric Interview Victims For Evening Newscasts

And just to show you where the American media’s priorities are:

Anderson Cooper is returning from Afghanistan — special live AC360 programs from there have been cancelled…

Last week, Alessandra Stanley, in reviewing the PBS series America at the Crossroads in the NYT, wrote [e.a.]:

The title alone suggests the series’s ambition: “Crossroads” is an attempt to look at the post-9/11 world as broadly and deeply as possible. It’s a worthy and worthwhile examination of the clash between Islam and the West, but it’s also the kind of sorrowful, all-knowing look backward that makes viewers wonder why all these journalists, experts, scholars and former government officials were not more outspoken about the impending crisis before it blew up the twin towers and drove the Bush administration to invade Iraq.

The next time some huge geopolitical horror happens and people start wondering why nobody “connected the dots,” you will know why: because the American media serves the American audience with full-time wall-to-wall “news” coverage of sensational incidents, to the exclusion of “news” coverage of almost everything else.

It’s not the news. It is a weird form of therapy: wallowing in the horrific details.

And when the media doesn’t have events as horrifying and senseless and tragic as the bloodbath at Virginia Tech, it creates dramatic news. Or dramatizes that which is inherently not dramatic.

Because infotainment rules.