darkmatter Journal

‘The Message’ or at least a version of the rhythm track spills out of the Buick’s windows. From my vantage point the sound leaks through from the concerns of another age. I’m sat in the car parked next to it in an industrial lot. Remembering. People pissing on the stairs because they just don’t care. But the lyrics belonged to some other place, equally distant, vicariously sampled. The Buick itself whispers ‘old timer’ at upstarts in their hybrid imports. Young Turks with nervous smiles, never really sure what they’re laughing about except that when the laughter ends, the trouble begins.

It’s a couple of days since a young, Asian-American man, Cho Seung-hui, armed himself with two handguns and slaughtered 32 fellow students at Virginia Tech University Campus before turning the weapons on himself. It’s being reported as the deadliest shooting rampage in recent U.S history and if the talk radio stations that i’ve been picking up are anything to go by, public reaction to the events are as confused and schizophrenic as ever. This after all is a nation whose key mythology, the fearsome stepbrother of ‘rugged individualism’, is that of the lone gunman, filtered through an embrace of the ‘wild west’ and gangster films and enshrined in the Constitution. Where less than 24 hours on from the shootings, the influential Republican Senator John McCain felt moved to restate the case for gun ownership: ‘We have to look at what happened here, but I do believe in the constitutional right everyone has to carry a weapon. Obviously we have to keep guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens.’ Or presumably at least out of the hands of creative writing English majors with no prior convictions or other such maladjusted types. But this is California, not Virginia, a different coast, virtually another country, and there is some comfort in that. This is a state which in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 both passed gun control bills and dropped liberalisation bills supported by the Charlton Heston behemoth, the National Rifle Association. But then look closely at the fine print and a different picture begins to emerge: the swingeing reforms add up to little more than a pyrrhic insult such that in California official gun sales are limited to one firearm per customer per month and some assault weapons are now outlawed. So that’s ok then. No need to worry about those estimated 200 million firearms in circulation in the U.S or that 39% of U.S households who own at least one gun and have produced who knows how many English graduates. I decide that perhaps i should be more concerned: i am after all working on an American campus and my courses deal with the iconography of gun culture, mass media and popular film so the distance from classroom loner to Oldboy quoting revenger is maybe not as great as i’d like to think. It feels odd to deal in theories about bounty killers for instance when there are clearly real live killing machines just waiting to be activated all over the American heartland. That inarticulate rage just waiting to be unleashed on a campus or in a mall near you some time in the near distant future. Such is the spectre that looms at the feast of post industrial America. And sadly far beyond too. The nightly dispatches from Iraq – charred bodies, bewildered faces, chaos – remind all and sundry that the trauma at the heart of the idea of America obliterates lives, communities, whole countries separated by faith, oceans and history.

If the tragedy of Virginia Tech highlights anything, it’s how even the shiniest, apparently most innocuous surface can descend into madness without the basic infrastructure to support it. Mind you, shiny and innocuous is hardly how i’d describe the public toilets in Santa Monica after an increasingly desperate jog along the promenade. The simple call of nature becomes a frantic search for amenities – an outlet, an honourable khazi. By the time said ‘restroom’ appears like some desert oasis all thoughts of dignity have gone. All the better to cope with the sad scene inside – a junkie injecting a vein where needles were never destined to go and the hybrid use of the urinal as crapper. It’s not good but it helps focus the mind, spend a penny and scram. It’s tempting at such moments to annexe some distant sociology to decipher how the shiny boulevard gives way to such degradation in an instant. But in the end it’s just life in all its unfairness cocking a snook at the weak humanist clasp at lifestyle. The taciturn arrangement where some find relief and others just go to the wall. High in the hills from the airbrushed viewing platforms of the Getty, everything, and nothing changes. Like Terence Stamp in the Limey you’re standing on ‘trust’, looking down at the soldier ants crawling along the peculiar hell of L.A’s freeways. But up above this maligned City of Quartz the low level drama seems as far away as ever. Beautiful cactus gardens and the sky shifting its allegiance from day to night, this is another kind of drama. Friday night at the Getty and in the background, for there is always a background, the sounds of Peanut Butter Wolf trawling the archives. Old school Hip Hop and old time ravers. Melle Mel again, looking down at the gridlock a little sadder. But older, wiser and more distant too. Makes you wonder how you keep from going under.