This is what passes for high-level conservative thought in that bastion of right-leaning American policy known as the National Review:
...thoughts also arise on the killer's being an English major and on the spiritual emptiness of much education nowadays.
That's right, blame Beowulf for the massacre at Virginia Tech. Or Swift or Shakespeare or Dickens. Those English professors at Blacksburg didn't hold the automatic weapon in their hands, but they provided so much spiritual emptiness with their endless lectures and seminars and blue books.
National Review education writer Carol Iannone - she of the snappy "Phi Beta Cons" blog - uses that throwaway line toward the end of a litany of blame. Indeed, she begins her post with this call to action: "Without judging or condemning anyone, we need to learn from this for the future."
After the hand-wringing about slow police response and the lack of a campus-wide warning after the first killings, Iannone trots out another aspect that she says "gnaws" at her:
I am sorry that no one had a gun to take the killer out before he could destroy more lives.
[snip]
We all need to learn to act, and not necessarily to rely on security and responders. We are supposed to be at war. This was not an act of terrorism but it may as well have been, for the damage it caused. We must be wartime ready.
Catch that? We are at war, and this episode was war-like in its bloody toll. Conclusion: students should be war-trained. This Buckley intellectual protege, this education expert has more:
And I'm sorry, some will really think me foolish, but I don't think dorms should be co-ed, so that crazed, jealous boyfriends can enter their girlfriends' dorms and kill them and the innocent young men who come to their aid.
That'll solve the jealous boyfriend problem at college campuses, alright. Won't be any more sexual tension if coed dorms are demolished. Your 18-22-year-old youngsters will just calm down and won't mess with those nasty hormonal surges anymore.
And keep them away from Jane Austen, too. Saucy minx that she is.
UPDATE: Another National Review scribe, John Derbyshire, blames the victims. Oh,and another conservative columnist has this take on manliness (hint: blame the gays):
Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.
from Amazon.
