one thing about us. when something like vatech happens, we mourn for three seconds. then we try to figure out who to blame, and go to 24-hour coverage of that question. obviously, after the first shooting these cops and officials had a chaotic situation and a plausible theory. they didn't move that slowly, and i don't think we can know whether their decisions were reasonable; probably, they were, more or less. it's funny about powerful people like college presidents or presidents of the united states: one of their basic functions is to be scapegoats, even in unaccountable insane disasters. you'd have to say the gov response to katrina was pathetic and idiotic. but on the other hand people started blaming bush before the rain stopped: for the state of the levees, for global warming that caused the hurricane etc. this may be why anarchism is actually impossible: because then we won't have the sacrificial victim by which we make sense of our senseless world. we want an agent we can identify and spit-roast, even if we have to generate an extremely strained story to do it, even if we have to hold them to standards that we ourselves could not possibly meet. a related sort of example: without hitler to fantastically absorb the responsibility of millions of germans for the holocaust, they'd never have been able to look themselves in the mirror after 1945. it's as though one person or a little cabal executed millions.