That is the part of today's mass murder in Aurora, Colorado that won't let me sleep.
What a comment on our age.
Think about this, folks: we have so deadened ourselves, specifically our children, by the use of our screens and our technologies and our three-D visions of the world - as a substitute for the actual world - that when a real live man steps forward with a gun and begins to shoot at them,
they
think
it
is
a
special
effect.
How diabolically clever of the man to dress like a character in the movie. I wonder if this effect had something to do with why he chose the movie theater to do his crime. Now Mr Drudge says he is re-creating a scene in the Batman comic books.
Am I alive, or is this a particularly stunning 3-D movie starring me?
Am I dying, or is that an actor pointing a 3-D gun at me?
Is it possible this can be one of those moments when the nation wakes up from its vivid horror dream and says "we can do something about this?"
Note that I am not saying the people who made "Batman" are in anyway responsible for the actions of this nutjob. But the surreal world we are creating through violent imagery plays out in the real world, and that seems to me inevitable.