The Copycat Effect

by Michael A. Hoffman II

Copyright ©2007. All Rights Reserved

I am besieged by persons requesting further analysis of the Virginia Tech massacre and a full-length analysis is in preparation. Meanwhile, a comment on the case as it has unfolded thus far. Many persons have written to ask what I meant by the term, "magic Number 33 Blacksburg funerary rite." Well, we have had several of these, most spectacularly King/Kill-33, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

By "funerary rite" I mean that America is haunted by death this week. Of course we should be haunted by the deaths in Iraq every day, but obviously we are not. The CIA/Mossad inspired Shiite/Sunni fratricidal extermination machine is operating at full throttle, sending the Arabs out of this world at the minimum speed required by the Zionists and the neocons (although they always hope for more). They can't kill "Amalek" fast enough, but most Americans don't care. It's business as usual. After all, those are not "Jews" dying over there. Arab blood is mighty cheap.

But we reap what we sow and Cho served up those desserts in Virginia, though I do not in any way condone, excuse or mitigate the horrible crime committed in his slaughter of the innocent, quite patently orchestrated by the same dark forces that are overseeing the carnage in Iraq. I am only observing a fact; that it takes a massacre of Americans to put America in a "funerary" or thanatos mode, to haunt our asylum as it were.

So death has come to our house. What does that signify?

It signifies that all of a sudden I am getting ten times the e-mail I normally receive.

It signifies that we have had our spines tingled (all 33 segments) and we are, for a change, awake and on high alert. The near presence of death tends to have that effect.

Even those most contumacious of all sleepwalkers will have to admit that college campuses are on high alert across the nation; that something almost went down in Rochester, New York; that the fuse is lit, the human time bombs are ticking.

We are, in this third week in April in the seventh year of the new millennium, "getting the fear" as Charlie Manson called it, and fear--except of God-- is what the devil loves best. Violence, especially the kind that is accelerated in the Videodrome, is contagious.

We are alert, we are awake but we are also full of fear. Most any psychologist can tell you that in such a state people are highly susceptible to being imprinted and conditioned.

"In what way?" you ask. In many ways that I will enumerate in my treatise, but the one that concerns us most immediately and with greatest impact right now, is what my colleague Loren Coleman terms, "The Copycat Effect."

You can bet your bottom dollar that the Cryptos put Cho Seung Hui on national television, instead of just publishing a transcript of his statements, in the hopes that more candidates will come forward, guns and hammers in hand.

To understand this portion of the psychodrama, I recommend that you read Loren's prescient book, "The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines." Here's the relevant URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Copycat-Effect-Popular-Tomorrows-Headlines/dp/0743482239/ref=sr_1_3/104-5421219-4259102?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176997440&sr=1-3

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