Really Going Dark

We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done
We haven't told you a thing
--Dirty Laundry, Don Henley

Olivia de Havilland: You speak treason!
Errol Flynn: Fluently
--Robin Hood (1938)
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O.k. -- I lied. Just a quickie from the WaPo today about the recent Holocaust Museum shooting:

"Which is why one hopes nothing changes at the Holocaust Museum. The defense against terrorism isn't just physical, and it isn't just about violence. It's about the decision not to be terrorized ("The Built-In Response to Terrifying Moments").

This is erroneous commingling of crime with terrorism. The Holocaust Museum shooter was a bigoted whack job who committed a craven crime. A white supremacist who figured he'd go hunting over a baited field, and ended up killing a black security guard. Not the sharpest pencils in the box, those supremacists.

I resent the news media using every instance of "scary crime" as being in the same ballpark as terrorism. The media exploited the recent killing of an abortion doctor in the same way.

Instead of using these discrete examples of criminal behavior as teaching points to highlight the difference between what is homegrown crime versus terrorism, they shamelessly elided the two into one muddy ball of wax. Fear is the product, all the time.

They could have said, "a terrorist aims to reach an audience beyond the actual target. This crazed racist just wanted to kill him some Jewish people." But that would be to put the blame where it belongs, squarely on the shoulders of the racist and bigoted society and subculture which spawned such a murderer.

It is the intersection in the media of two impulses, neither good: Feeding a no-responsibility culture, and a need to whip up fear and frenzy among the populace, to keep them on the straight and narrow path their government has laid out for them. The press is colluding with the government.

It is lax thinking and reportage.