We have ourselves a situation

He says, "Ya want a gun? I'll give you one."
She says, "Boy, you talking crazy." - Bob Dylan

A few, brief late-to-the massacre observations about Virginia Tech.

First of all, I think it's necessary that we admit the possibility that sometimes a lone nut is just a lone nut. Mental illness is not always induced and simulated, and people can be complex and screwed-up enough in their own right to imagine reasons for going to the slaughter.

Further, as Lisa Pease wisely comments, "all official narratives are always just stories." So, when we come to episodes like V Tech, perhaps it's legitimate for us to deconstruct them as episodes. We should ask, Who wrote this?, and Is the storyteller also the director? We should try out different scenarios, and see which makes the best sense of the action and the characters. We have an interpretive edge because we know other scenarios exist. Most viewers - and let's admit it; that's all most of us are to such scenes - are content to be told what they're watching, and don't own the responsibility to interpret events, or even to remember what they've seen before.

I'm not going to argue the case here that Cho Seung-Hui was a mind-controlled assassin. Kevin at Cryptogon has already done it. I won't say, this is what happened, but I will say, especially thanks to what else we know of America's shadow history (and not just America's), that this is a plausible scenario.

So, admitting this account into our circle of probabilities, let's then ask, Why? What could be the motive here? And perhaps not just here, but for other eruptions of violence that may only appear random.

The most frequently cited I've seen - usually from theorists on the right who like to say left and right is a NWO hoax - has been provocation for crackdown. (Or, Look out - they're a-comin' for our guns!) In this scenario, Dennis Kucinich is one unlikely head of the Beast. "Kucinich is seemingly willing to entertain the notion that 9/11 was carried out by a ruthless gang of bloodthirsty Neo-Fascists within our own government," writes Paul Joseph Watson, "yet he thinks we should all hand in our only means of defense against such thugs when the men in black ski-masks come knocking." To some, Kucinich represents confirmation: "Conspiracy Planet's previous assertion that gun control extremists will use the latest so-called 'school shootings' to move along their anti-American agenda to disarm US 'civilians' has proven to be correct."

I don't see that. But then, neither do I envision the Libertarian's American nightmare of over-governance , martial law and mass detention. What I see instead is federal authority withdrawing from civilian oversight and replaced by for-profit contractors because it has better things to do than improve the lives of its subjects; things which usually make them worse. And maybe not incidentally so.

The occasional slaughter and ineffectual response of authorities presents portraits of order breaking itself down, and creates the impression We're on our own. Such episodes provoke the purchase and the secreting of firearms by citizens, and not their removal by the state, however scary Dennis Kucinich may seem. So perhaps, as in New Orleans, the point is not a crackdown, but a crack-up.

Why? America is an unsustainable venture, but its ruling class means to survive well beyond the exhaustion of its public wealth, oil and water. This may now depend upon how well it induces and exploits the misery of its people, even as it extricates itself from the expectations of its alleviation.

Just a scenario.