A Tarantino free post about violence and hateful, spiteful onlookers

I want to briefly re-visit the horrible quadruple murder in Farmville, VA, and specifically this Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the victims to which I linked below. I'm sure more of the truth will come out later--truth which may undermine the following--but from what the article says, one can easily imagine the following scenario:

 A teenage girl decides to rebel against her minister father and her criminologist mother by dabbling in the horrorcore scene. What stronger statement could a teen make? Grinding music about cannibalism and murder is about as far away from Christianity and a commitment to prevent violence against women as you can get. Criminologist's mother makes a judgment call--rather than forbid any further exposure to these people or their music, which may inspire a backlash (running away, delinquent behavior) she will try to demystify this scene by chaperoning her daughter's trip to a horrorcore festival. But things went terribly wrong.

Now that may not be the way things went down. And that may or may not be the way you'd handle the situation. But whether it went down that way or not, and whether that scenario is at all understandable, there's no excuse for this reading of the situation buried in the comment thread:

I hate to blame the victim here, but, come on, taking your child to a concert featuring bands named “Stitch Mouth”,  “Dismembered Fetus”, and “BodyBagz”?  That is clearly irresponsible parenting if not child endangerment. How do you just expect a child to ‘grow out of it’ if you don’t steer them in the right direction? It sounds like the mother was probably a liberal (she was a college professor), and had that mentality that evil doesn’t exist and that she didn’t want to ‘interfere’ with her child… give me a break!

"I hate to blame the victim here," but truth be told I can't wait to get in my licks! This commenter knows a lot about the situation. (S)he knows how the victim votes; (s)he knows the victim is a laissez-faire parent, and (s)he knows that the victim was far too sentimental about human nature for her own good. Wow, that's a lot more than I know.

And this is par for the course for any newspaper's web site. Blogs are notorious for flame wars and trolls, but blogs are an episode of Barney compared to the general American public opining on hapless schmucks who wind up featured in their hometown daily.

I swear, there's a ton of people out there who enjoy the newspaper with their coffee because they could no more face the day without feeling smug than they could without caffeine. They don't read the newspaper to learn anything. They read it because they can. Reading the paper and not showing up in it is proof positive you aren't one of the stupids who's getting what's coming to you.

I'd love to live in a world like that. If the world were really like that, I'd drop my aspirations to work in higher education in a heartbeat. I'd buy a Sarah Palin 2012 pinup calendar. I'd lock my home-schooled kids in a basement, pop in a Jonas Brothers CD, hit "repeat all" and tell them to do their math while I cleaned my guns. And I'd sleep like a baby.

But we don't live in a world where everybody gets what's coming to them.