Oh God Not Again

Another multiple shooting, another senseless tragedy perpetrated by some deranged cretin in Pittsburgh.

And it seems like this shooter, too, has left messages for the rest of us on the internet.

As Maria of 2 political junkies has also discovered, it seems the alleged LA Fitness shooter, George Sodini, has left a Web site behind. 

I’m wary of providing links to, or excerpts from, the site. For one thing, I’m not positive it’s genuine … although a bit of internet sleuthing confirms that it is registered to Sodini’s home address. Other addresses on the site also check out. 

Mostly though, I don’t want to quote from the site because it seems that’s just what its author wants us to do. The bottom of the Web page urges visitors to “Copy this to usenet/newsgroups where my voice will speak forever!” Yeah, no thanks, dipshit. Plus which, the site identifies the names and addresses of family members who the author felt were insufficiently loving during childhood. If the site is genuine, those folks are probably suffering enough already. 

At any rate, suffice it to say that the site’s author puts Sodini’s own date of death — yesterday — at the top of the page,  followed by the question: “Why do this?? To young girls? Just read below.”

What follows is a pathetic mixture of abject self-pity, racism and rampant misogyny. None of which would be particularly surprising for someone who carried out these acts. In fact, the author claims to have orginally planned to commit this act several months ago, and nearly went through with it in January.

Reading this over, one is reminded of the old maxim about the banality of evil. Here’s a guy who claims that he didn’t get enough love as a child, can’t get laid as an adult, feels misunderstood … and so apparently decided to shoot up a roomful of innocent women.

Everywhere is the sense that a mass-murder/suicide will give the author some of the accomplishment he lacked in life.

And what comes through, in word and deed alike, is the portrait of an abject, pathetic loser. Here is someone who thought he was superior to the “hoes” who rejected him, who smugly derided religious hypocrisy but thought HE was going to Heaven … someone who was convinced of his superior intelligence, but couldn’t understand a goddamn thing — and so tried to destroy everything he was too stupid to comprehend. Including himself. 

I’m leaving for vacation in a few hours, and this blog will go dark for the next week and a half. But I’ll be thinking of my grieving neighbors and my city — wounded more times already this year than any of us could have imagined in our worst nightmares.

There is some kind of madness in this culture that I don’t have a name for. But it seems to be getting worse. 

This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2009.