The blog calms down.

I have not found any way of making the recent Virginia tech massacre an interesting link to a historical optic. Out of respect and because I think all media are milking this story until it will be an empty carcass, I am leaving my blog relatively empty this week. Have fun with the interminable analyses of ''Do video-games cause school violence? Could this have been prevented? Were middle-easterners involved in any way? Should we arm all students for their own protection? Should we ban negative thoughts?''. These questions and more are all part of a very fruitful media spinning that misses the simple point: it happened and the victims and families must deal with it, preferably without cameras being thrust into their faces.

To provide a very small historical tangent, the first recorded example of ''school violence'' is widely documented to have occurred on July 26th 1764 in Pennsylvania. The ''Enoch Brown school massacre'' involved the tomahawking and scalping of a schoolmaster and his twelve students by some Delaware Indians. Without condoning the action, they were retaliating for the genocide of their people and the invasion of their land. Nothing to do with our recent tragedy that was retaliation for causing teenage angst.

The most fitting end for our troubled shooter would be in good old Roman fashion, a Damnatio Memoriae. This process would remove this person from common memory and therefore from human existence. We will need to tell the media that this is preferrable to flooding his image and story on every possible medium known to man.

With respect.

(Pictured: Stalin's excercize of Damnatio Memoriae with a collegue that fell out of favour: Before and after)

End.