I was out when news of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School first hit the online media. When I got home, I made some effort to catch up, but quit after about 20 minutes. It just seemed pointless. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a depressing sameness to these shootings. The shooter\u2019s almost always a boy in his teens or a man in his 20s with a history of psychological disturbance. Sometimes he turns out to have kept a diary or written a manifesto. (There\u2019s a sameness here, too. Unless you\u2019re a researcher, paranoia doesn\u2019t make for very interesting reading.) Stories of heroism usually do come out \u2014 sometimes sooner, sometimes later \u2014 but they never make me feel any better. A dead hero or heroine is still dead. <\/p>\n
Knowing there was no easy wisdom to be got, I went to the bazaar, the longhouse, the corner of the village common where my fellow villeins and I sharpen our sickles and put up our maypoles and compare our swelling buboes and listen to old Theobald the Bald relate for the millionth time how the unicorn kicked him in the groin. I logged into Facebook.<\/p>\n
A number of people had posted a message delivered by Pope Benedict through the Vatican\u2019s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. \u201cThe Holy Father,\u201d it read, \u201cwas promptly informed of the shooting,\u201d and had asked that his \u201cheartfelt grief\u201d be conveyed, along with his \u201cassurance of this closeness in prayer to the victims and their families, and to all affected by the shocking event.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re one of those people who\u2019s determined to impose fresh legal restrictions on gun ownership or ammunition sales, or who would like to see the mentally ill better monitored, a statement like this is meaningless. It\u2019s a bromide phrased in formulaic language, presented by an underling, and possibly ghost-written by someone even less important. But at least in my own small corner of the Internet, it made a significant, not unpleasant impact. Some people Liked it, others shared it. A few dug up older Benedict quotes that seemed relevant, for example: \u201cIn the face of horror \u2026 there is no other answer than the cross of Christ: Love that descends to the abyss of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n
Love descending to the abyss of evil is one of those concepts I\u2019ll probably spend the rest of my life breaking my head against. To tell you the truth, I\u2019m not awfully confident there are a good thousand people in the world who really understand it the same complete and instinctive way in which people grasp, say, good manners. But, you know, sometimes you have to ask for ten bucks to get five. Even if nobody was able to follow this very bold, very immodest prescription, the great mass of my Facebook cronies and I managed to do something that just a little earlier would have seemed almost as miraculous. For a few hours, we canned our opinions, clamped off our snark glands, and went out of our way to be gentle to one another.<\/p>\n
All the gestures were small, but many were beautiful. One woman announced she was streaming Mahler\u2019s \u201cResurrection Symphony\u201d on Spotify and apologized to anyone who might find it \u201cterribly trivial.\u201d One guy, who normally plays the cynic to the life, offered to lead a Chaplet of Divine Mercy online. There were memes containing quotes on the subject of evil and some of statues of weeping angels or the Blessed Mother. Yogi Berra\u2019s reply to the skeptic who asked whether kitsch could heal the soul \u2014 \u201cDe gustibus non est disputandum\u201d \u2014 pretty much speaks for the ages. <\/p>\n
For my own small contribution, I bing\u2019d \u201cbaby + basset + hound + images.\u201d Bing came through with a shot of a six-week-old tricolor, apparently in search of a nap, its big, round head sagging from exhaustion. Both the photographer and the model were clearly amateurs, and that\u2019s what made the picture so winsome: it didn\u2019t slap anyone in the face with the dog\u2019s cuteness. To make it topical, I added the caption: \u201cBasset hound puppies may not be able to fix the world, but you can be sure they won\u2019t break it any worse.\u201d It drew a respectable pile of Likes, which tends to support my theory that cat memes are for happy times and dog memes for sad ones. <\/p>\n
The group hug lasted about as long as most of its kind. By the time night fell on Phoenix, PhD candidates were posting about their brain-dead students. A couple of bon vivants posted on new restaurants or microbrews they\u2019d discovered. One gun-control advocate posted a meme reading: \u201cHow did \u2018A well-regulated milita\u2019 get twisted to mean \u2018A well-armed, un-regulated populace?'\u201d Someone found out that atheist blogger Hemant Mehta had reported on<\/a> a couple of fundies who read the shootings as the natural consequences of a godless culture. We declared him Carrion-Eating Dipstick of the Hour. For us non-victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, the status quo ante<\/i> had been regained, but the diversion had been a welcome one.<\/p>\n A few days ago, on the occasion of the Pope\u2019s first tweets, a professor at Santa Clara University named Elizabeth Drescher took a skeptical view of the whole enterprise. \u201cWill [papal tweets] have the status of magisterial teaching, functioning like official encyclicals,\u201d she asks in an article for the Silicon Valley Mercury News,<\/a> \u201cor are they passing commentary? Something in between? Entweetcyclicals?\u201d <\/p>\n