Whenever the news media explodes with the newest manifestation of man's apparent creativity in the destruction of innocent life -- as it has with the tragedy at Virginia Tech -- I think of a book that I read years ago. "Wisconsin Death Trip" was a fascinating book by Michael Lesy, published in 1973 by Random House, and now out of print. It was sent to me about 25 years ago by my brother, who is always forwarding strange and unusual works of fact and fiction that he discovers in his travels. I read them all, with varying degrees of enthusiasm (I have to admit, "Are You A Transhuman", by FM-2030, was a struggle). But Lesy's quiet and troubling work of historical interpretation left a deep impression on me.
Making use of photographic and newspaper archives, Lesy examines a small Wisconsin community during the period of 1890 to 1910. The photographs and the stories present recurring images of death, murder, suicide and madness, that are both surprising and familiar. To state the obvious -- which is somewhat obscured in the reporting from Blacksburg this week -- we have been killing ourselves and others in wildly imaginative ways, in obscure places, and for unfathomable reasons for a very long time.
More below.
The material presented in the book seems to make another point, at least to me: that 100 years ago death, though no less fascinating, was less an object of intense curiosity and endless analysis. There is something to be said for the apparent acceptance with which the frequent visitation of death was met in that place and time. And finally there is the unspoken premise of the work -- that a young historian had to labor in an isolated, rural newspaper archives to uncover barely reported stories that today would be banner headlines, media events, and made-for-TV movies.
There is a largely unspoken message in the demand that we focus our attention on Virginia Tech: "Look at it. It is terrible. And because it is so terrible, it is new." Except, it is not new. But in its apparent newness, it seems to demand of us some sort of a solution. And when I think of the recent 'solutions' to which we have succumbed in reaction to the new and terrible events in our national life, out of fear that they may recur, I become alarmed.
Invariably, these solutions have involved greater intrusion on our rights as individuals, more restrictions on our behavior and autonomy, and more scrutiny of our writings, our speech, our associations, and even our thoughts. And under a regime that privatizes what it wishes to hide, and in a society that sells anything of value, these intrusions reach beyond our relationship with the state, and now infect our relations with everyone else. Our employers administer pre-employment psychological tests. Our schools perform criminal background checks on parent-volunteers. Our health care providers document from infancy every statistical tendency that might one day form the basis for a pre-existing condition exclusion. Our financial institutions know and report every significant transaction in our lives. The servers through which we post these diaries record where else we've been.
And now we watch as all of this information about Cho Seung-Hui, collected over a brief lifetime, is being dumped into the public domain. It is as though we are following an episode of CSI, and when it is done we will have somehow solved the case. We should not lose sight of the fact that it is really the predictive value of this information that is being evaluated. And that the inevitable search for every possible "Cho" out there, with whatever statistical, 'scientific', or intuitive tools available, necessarily entails very serious consequences for all of us.
Postscript: I have chosen not to link to the amazon.com site for the book, due to amazon's continued relationship with Coultergeist. Also, "Wisconsin Death Trip" was the basis for a movie of the same name several years back, which I have not seen.