The shock of the few.

You'd think the media would get tired of it. It's more or less the same story every time some deranged youth takes a gun to school and starts shooting the place up--like Kipling's Kurrum Valley scamp "who knows no word of moods and tenses"

 
   But, being blessed with perfect sight, Picks off our messmates left and 
   right. 

What "causes" such behavior? Is it the availability of guns? In the case of "Andy" Williams of Santana High School, California, this was a less favored explanation than usual--perhaps because the gun he used was of a type (a .22 revolver) of which no one had as yet thought to propose the banning. But there were plenty of the usual suspects left. Is it our "violent" culture and images of "violence" on television? Or a more general moral decline? Is it uncaring parents or unobservant teachers? Or are we thrown back upon the "bad seed" explanation? Young Mr. Williams, it appears, had been the victim of bullying, so there were seemingly endless opportunities to discuss what might, assuming that the laws of human nature were repealed, be done about that.

Yet through it all, the media never cast its eyes down to look at the explanation lying coyly under its nose. The kids do it at least in part because doing it makes them instant celebrities. I remember once when I was a teacher asking a class of sixteen-year-olds how many of them thought they would one day be famous. All but two or three hands went up. Even if they did not admit it, the youth culture's devotion to celebrity is well-established. And who is the principal manufactory of celebrities? Why, the media themselves, of course. Thus, the more that the gatekeepers of the popular culture agonize about school shootings, and therefore publicize school shootings, the more school shootings there are likely to be. This seems to me axiomatic. Kids respect celebrity if they respect nothing else, and what did "Andy" crave more than respect?

But the reason we don't notice this explanation is that the meretricious values of the youth culture are increasingly also those of the general culture and, a fortiori, of the journalistic culture. Can any star-struck teenager be more celebrity-worshipping than those same journalists and pundits who profess to be mystified by the actions of star-struck teenagers? No wonder the quality doesn't occur to them as an explanation. They would have to suspect themselves. But, as in so many other cases, the myth of journalistic objectivity and neutrality helps to preserve their invisibility to themselves. Naturally they assume that they are observers and not participants in the processes that lead either to school-shootings or to political acts. Their quasi-sacerdotal function in the culture, as invented by themselves, depends on it. Not that that makes it true.

Actually, not much about journalists' self-conception is true. For people who pride themselves on their fearless pursuit of the truth, they seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-deception. Throughout the presidency of Bill Clinton, for example, they assiduously pretended to believe that he meant what he said, even though they did not believe it. You could tell by the quality of the media outrage when, in August 1998, the president was forced by the DNA evidence to admit that he had been lying to the country about Monica Lewinsky for seven months. Only people who had been desperately trying to believe him and not quite succeeding up until that point could have been so bitterly and vocally disappointed. The more they complained of having been deceived the less deceived they are likely in fact to have been.

There was plenty of evidence before Monica, after all, of Clinton's goatish disposition, and a prima facie implausibility to the alternative explanation that a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy had somehow recruited this brainless and even unattractive political groupie to make false charges to the independent counsel. Surely, if the VRWC had been behind Monica it wouldn't have been behind Monica, if you see what I mean. But the will to believe in Bill Clinton was strong--as it again became obvious when the press's outrage didn't outlast his expression of contrition at a National Prayer Breakfast on September 11.