Tag Archives: South Carolina

What’s left to say about mass murder

In my reporting career, I have covered seven American mass murders – one in 1989 in Stockton, and the rest in the last decade.

One was a guy parking his SUV in front of a commuter train (25 dead). The rest were committed with guns, usually by dylann-roofderanged drifting people – all men, five of them white – who had remarkably easy access to high-powered guns.

I don’t know what more there is to say about these events. Seriously. They’re now so common that they have devolved into babble-fodder for our politico-cultural wars on the toxic battlefield of 24-hour cable news. Such a network, I suspect, could plan its profitability around the certainty of a boost in viewership from a couple of these events every year.

Somehow, despite all the talk, we never get around to doing anything about it.

We talked a lot but did nothing meaningful after Tucson and Aurora. Then 26 kids were shot to death at an elementary school and we did nothing. We did talk a lot, though.

People nowadays fall into rote after these events, saying profound things that have devolved into cliches from overuse.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out …” That’s a deep, poetic thing to say – that my thoughts and prayers I’m sending out in hopes they will soothe you and bind your wounds, that I am feeling for you and hope that in doing so it will lessen your pain. Yet it sounds trite any more.

I used to think that seven mass murders was a large number of mass murders to have covered in one’s reporting career.

Now another lost and drifting lunatic kills nine people in a church. A guy who by 21 is going nowhere, who apparently at one point had been abusing Suboxone (a heroin-addiction treatment). This time the guy has a racial animus.

Terrorist? I guess. Probably. Who knows?

“He looks bored,” one little girl I know said, upon seeing his mugshot. That’s sounds about right. His dad, bugging him to get a job, may have given him a gun for a 21st birthday present. Who does that? And why? To give him some direction in life? I don’t have the slightest idea why someone would do that.

(NOTE: It was later reported that Dylann Roof had, in fact, purchased the gun himself that he used in the church.)

I don’t know what to say any more about people who do these killings, or legislators who won’t do anything about these events, or 24-hour cable news babble, or dads who give their lost sons guns for presents, or a country that so easily moves on.

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CULTURE: the ex-Heritage USA, seeking the ghosts of Jim and Tammy Faye

I’m in Charlotte, NC, and decided to dip over the line to visit the former Christian fun-park empire of the fallen PTL televangelists Jim and (now-deceased) Tammy Faye Bakker.

Planned as a Christian alternative to Disneyland, Heritage USA included a magic castle – “The King’s Castle” is what the broken neon lights appear to say. The castle is fenced off and has patches missing. A sorrowful end to a funpark built by an organization that made a killing praising “Prosperity Christianity” — God wants us to be rich, or something along those lines.

The grounds have a 20+ story tower that was supposed to be a condo or something for Christian elderly, I guess. It was never occupied and remains vacant, crumbling slowly amid tangled legal problems.

In the parking lot in front of the castle, a man sat in a folding chair as his son, in a helmet, practiced bike riding. He told me the property is now owned by MorningStar, a nondenominational ministry.

The man said the county will probably one day have the towers knocked down – ditto the King’s Castle.

He was reading as his son rode. His books:

Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-year Coverup and Bigfoot: the True Story of Apes in America

There was a MorningStar women’s conference going on when I visited the hotel. The women were on stage talking about prophetic Christianity and raising children with the Lord. I walked the hotel and an indoor mini-Main Street, a la Disneyland, with shops in quaint Americana style, and a blue-lit ceiling.

The hotel itself is in fine condition, with colonial-style everything.

Surrounding the Heritage property are subdivisions battling for buyers’ eyes — with houses in “the low $170s” to “the $250s” – some offering “0 down payment (see agent for details).”

The streets I drove looked recent, with grown trees having just been transplanted and patched of lawn just installed. There were many children. The houses were what I want to call clapboard – slats of wood, with a bit of stone façade up front.

If I get time, I’ll visit, in Charlotte, the Billy Graham Library and something called the Rod of God Ministries.

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