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i considered the copycat notion as an explanation but didnt find it terribly compelling: but it you add in external pressure/coverage and the usual terror university p.r. administrators fall into at the thought of potential damage being done to the institutions reputation, i suppose it makes sense.
but it nonetheless seems to me kind of hysterical, only imaginable as routine via the past 6 years of routinized hysteria. as if people in uniforms wandering about entrances to buildings could reasonably be expected to stop or even influence an event that they are only anticipating in the most general sense, with nothing to link it to any particularity. given that, there is no greater effect to be had from what amounts to the arbitrary deployment of people in uniform around entrances to buildings: they might as well be sitting at desks somewhere.
what bothers me about this is more indexical than literal: the acquiescence in the face of uncertainty to increased official security, as if that security apparatus can reasonably be expected to protect folk from uncertainty or randomness. there is something of an acquiescence to authoritarian rule in it.
television information has a curious side-feature, which is an effect of the medium itself, in that it reduces the world to an arrangement of objects and politics to the fact of that arrangement. so what is given, what is encountered visually in your everyday experience, is de facto posited as self-contained, self-legitimating. people do not make meanings, they find them. the political order within which we operate is co-terminous with the world of objects, and the world is nothing but objects. this seems to me a set-up for an exaggerated fear of uncertainty or instability, which is excerbated by the simple fact that ideological adjustment is pretty hard to imagine if your world is framed for you as a collection of things. so people get unnecessarily anxious when they are confronted with images of violence because all of it seems equivalent in that all of it is equally arbitrary--and its arbitrariness is demonstrated through its effects on objects (human beings are a particular type of object in this curious world we live in...)---so it is that people not only consent to bizarre shows of "security" but even seem to want them.
i dont know if this is clear: this line of thinking is a preoccupation in the writing that i do that is not for here....but it informs this sense i have that the vt shootings are resonating at some level with the past 6 years of routinized hysteria that was called the "war on terror"...
it would be more than passing strange were these resonances to be something more than logical connections.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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