"A National Orgy of Mawkishness"

Christopher Hitchens comes off as a bit callous in this piece in Slate, but I think it needed to be said. The Virginia Tech shootings weighed on my mind last week, and although the torrent of media coverage was driven by the same genuine underlying reaction of shock and sadness, the communal long-distance grief did not take long before it started feeling uncomfortable. This was most noticeable when Steve was in the living room watching ESPN a few days after the shootings and I heard the sportscasters giving a heartfelt minute-long eulogy for the victims. With all this attention, there's the problem of the madman getting exactly what he wanted (which will in turn only encourage future madmen), but what Hitchens was getting at (among other things) was the fact that everyone seemed to want to get in on the grief in an over-the-top manner. It would be alarming if people weren't upset about the shootings, but in the media echo-chamber, there seemed to me to be a competition for who could express the most sadness, to the point where it was almost self-aggrandizing. (Or perhaps I'm just exerting too much energy trying to detect lack of sincerity/cynicsm.)