Orlando Shooting Reaction Has the Feel of Eternal Recurrence

[Valin]

National Review:

It is an impotent ritual.

Jonah Goldberg

June 15, 2016

 

Friedrich Nietzsche, that great sage of despair, asked, “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it . . . ?’” Nietzsche called this idea of eternal recurrence “the heaviest weight.”

 

In the wake of the slaughter in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and even more injured during an attack early Sunday on a gay nightclub, it seems many are all too eager to carry a similar load. As soon as news broke, pundits and politicians returned to dog-eared scripts to repeat lines memorized long ago.

 

President Obama, who has spent his presidency yearning for the reality he wants rather than the one he has, once again downplayed any suggestion that this was another battle in the war on Islamic terror he does not want to fight.

 

“Over the coming days, we’ll uncover why and how this happened,” the president promised, referring to a killer who called 911 to proclaim his allegiance to the Islamic State and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” amidst the mayhem.

 

(Snip)

 

Meanwhile, many on the right — not to mention a Republican presidential candidate — immediately turned an atrocity into an argument for a ban on Muslim immigration. Such a ban would not have stopped a killer born and raised in the United States, but it would surely encourage more potential “lone wolves” to believe that America regards Islam itself as the enemy. Indeed, banning Muslims as if they were all part of an undifferentiated blob of terrorists just happens to echo the Islamic State’s propaganda.

 

(Snip)

 

It’s enough to make you want, as Nietzsche imagined, to “throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus.”

 

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The "good" news is by this time next week this story will be forgotten...until the next time, then we can do the same dance all over again