Va Tech

Some thoughts, on officially the next day.

1. I've written on Irish Trojan and elsewhere, there's something fishy about how long it is taking to release the name of a deceased suspect.

With every passing hour, the chance grows that this kid is a) Muslim, b) connected to terrorist groups, or c) both; and no one wants to cop to it.

If there';s another explanation, I'm listening.

2. I always tell people a story (probably apocryphal) that I've heard about the USC Film School. Thanks in no small way to the largesse of Messrs. Lucas, Spielberg and Carson, USC, two decades ago, opened a film school that was essentially a small studio plunked down in the middle of campus. In the intervening twenty-plus years, thousands of students have passed through, hoping to make a sufficient enough mark to find their way in Hollywood--producer, director, screewnwriter, studio exec. Some, like my friend Cinco Paul, have succeeded.

The old saying goes: a writer needs his pen and paper, a painter his brush, canvas, and oils--and a filmmaker needs his army. As someone who has seen the effort involved in producing so much as ten seconds of usable film, and then sat in editing rooms watch directors and editors work for five and six hours at a time so the punch will coincide with the sound of the punch, I can attest: making even a fifteen-minute student film requires mental and psychological patience and strength that most people simply do not have. Making a film is tough--not like how studying for physics is tough, but like how shoveling coal while reciting state capitals is tough. The strain can be enormous.

So it was in 1992 that a group of seniors struggled to bring in a Cinema 480 (read: major senior project) in on time. As the deadline approached, they abandoned their living spaces, brought blankets and pillows to their work space at the film school, and literally lived in the post-production room, living on two and three fitful hours of sleep at a time. They ate out of the vending machines, or sent some underling PA across Jefferson Boulevard to Burger King. They slaved in this fashion for a week, and then finished. And . . . in a scene one of them might produce on celluloid one day, the director and his editor went out to the mini-bungalow to the long, motel-style balcony. It was late afternoon. Exhausted, elated, they stood there for a moment. Then the editor turned to the director.

"Uh," he asked, "do you smell smoke?"

A few hundred yards away, the Rodney King riots had been raging for three hours.

The points here are three:

*The notion that the university could have warned the studentry harkens back to the "Why didn't Bush leave the classroom" question on 9/11. Well, yes, he could have, but to what end? This past afternoon, a woman on CNN, here presented as an expert, wondered why no email was sent to students--a email that would have been helpful to those students who were online, checking their e-mail, and refreshing the page at precisely that moment. As a tool for instant communication, e-mail is wildly overrated, to be hardly worth the effort. Ninety percent of the students at that time were in class, having breakfast, or asleep.

*Colleges of any substantial size (anything over 10,000 students) resemble wholly contained communities more than any other entity of learning. Outside of cable news (which is available to anyone in America with a TV and fifty bucks a month to spare), there simply is no instant distributor of campus information on the order of a town crier or Paul Revere, electronic or otherwise. Those film students are metaphors for the college community. There are very few places of public access more given to isolation than a library's stacks. Or a field house locker room at 10 am. Or the elaborate grounds and interiors of a building heavily endowed, but housing an unpopular major. (There is no finer building on the USC campus than the Philosophy Building, and as far back as when I was a freshman, in 1983, its library had long since been given over to evening faculty receptions and to rent by movie and television enterprises wanting to evoke the Ivy League. Certainly there were few enough students to inconvenience.) Were I a college student, I would no more expect university security to alert me of a problem on campus than, as a citizen out in the real world, I would expect the Houston Police Department to bang on my door with news of a double homicide committed five blocks away. And as for Va Tech's warning horn--to what end? To draw students from the very classrooms that provided their safety? Suppose UT had employed a horn in response to Charles Whitman. How many more students would have died?

This is the frustration people face when other people--with no notion of what they write about--write anyway.