By now, everyone has heard about the 33 people who were killed and the 26 who were injured at Virginia Tech.

A man shot two people dead at a Virginia Tech dormitory in Blacksburg, Virginia, on Monday morning. Two hours later in another part of the campus, a man killed 30 people before killing himself, police said.

Police said they were still investigating the shooting at the dormitory when they got word of gunfire at the classroom building. They arrived to find the doors to the building chained shut from the inside. They forced their way in and followed the sound of gunshots to the second floor where they found that the attacker had killed himself.

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Aside from the tragedy itself, what’s disturbing to me is the manner in which this has been covered. During the televised execution of Don Imus’ career, the mainstream media nearly seemed to forget that over one hundred Iraqi civilians are dying every day as a direct result of our actions and inactions. It took a pointless massacre on our own soil for the media to pretend like they cared about human life rather than ratings. For fear of sounding unsympathetic, no newscaster would dare state the obvious - that the death of 32 innocent civilians would be considered a good day in Iraq. Bombings and kidnappings are merely treated as filler in between important stories like the Anna Nicole paternity suit. That changed yesterday because the innocent lives lost were American lives.

Likewise, the massacre was treated as an isolated incident. School shootings seem to be happening with increased frequency and brutality, so the factor tying them all together is obviously growing in influence. This will not be the last, nor will it be the most bloody. Yet, no reporters raised the question of why. Why does this keep happening? Could it have anything to do with our value system? Could the same societal attitudes which allowed us to create Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and the Iraq War in general also have played a role in the indiscriminate death of our own citizens?

In recent times, a fairly new phrase has emerged to describe the fusion of the military and entertainment industry. It’s called “Militainment”. Not only are the images sent back from Iraq selected and presented in flashy 10 second blurps, but so too are our normal forms of entertainment becoming increasingly transfused with death and destruction. Most of us are not perceptive to it, and would rather our children take in images of “bad guys” getting shot up on television than to hear the f-word come from the same box. In fact, the US Army not only supplies our televisions with palatable content, but has an active hand in creating video games to train and desensitize the youth from the time they’re old enough to pick up a controller.

As with Columbine, you have to wonder why this story is so unique when so many students are similarly gunned down in our inner-city schools without a glance in their direction from the mainstream media. Does the unconventional nature of this case make it anymore tragic than any of the drive-by shootings which occur daily in our country? Or perhaps it’s newsworthy because it occurred to “regular people” instead of poor Americans and Iraqis. The two latter groups are expendable to our government, our media, and ourselves.

I made the decision not to watch any of the 24-hour news channels yesterday, but the typical debate going on around the internet was over gun rights. Before we even knew anything about the shooting, conservatives were using the incident to support a pro-gun ideology. Idiotic rhetoric such as: “Just think how many of those students would’ve been alive had they also had guns” was being spewed everywhere. Like 9/11, this tragedy was used to advance a political agenda. The bodies of slain students were used like chess pieces before any facts were even released to support such a viewpoint.

So rather than examine this event for what it really was, the natural product of a violent and repressive jingoist culture, it was dramatized into a soap opera to glaze over the fact that we’re perpetuating a “Culture of Death,” of which our government is the leading example from New Orleans to Baghdad.