The fallout from the murder of nine decent, innocent people by a craven lunatic in Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was too predictable.
If you believed the enormity of the horrific tragedy -- its scope matched only by the awe-inspiring love, dignity and compassion of the slain churchgoers' families -- called for serious soul searching or finding a root cause, you would be sorely disappointed.
America did what America too often does.
Cynical opportunism. Political grandstanding. Cheap sanctimony and exploitation fueled by ignorance. Guns and the National Rifle Associated are the problems, some said. No, the Confederate flag is the problem. Nah, it is racism among a people with it embedded in their DNA, the president said, discounting more than a century of racial advances.
If you were from Mars, watching the aftermath, you likely would wonder why Americans are so easily distracted by shiny things; so easily flim-flammed.
Slavish politicians stampeded to klieg lights like parched cattle to water. Republicans, forgetting Abraham Lincoln was one of them, jostled for camera position with self-righteous Democrats who prayed nobody would remember their party defined racism for more than a century -- and still does. They fought to see who could prostrate themselves before the media first; who could be most politically correct; who could first demand the evil Confederate flag -- actually, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia battle flag -- be swept from the South Carolina State House grounds and into the "dustbin of history," as if that would fix things.
Not to be outdone, governors and representatives dashed to distance themselves from Dixie, vowing to scrub the Stars and Bars from their states' license plates, DMVs, flags, monuments and history -- ensuring it would become a symbol of resistance.
Rectangular Clinton-Gore Confederate flag campaign pins from 1992 resurfaced to embarrass Hillary's campaign, along with a circular Confederate flag pin bearing the two's likenesses decked out in Confederate uniforms, with "Sons of the New South" emblazoned on them. Apparently, Democrats liked the flag back in the day. They even hoisted it atop the South Carolina State House dome in 1962.
Our president was so shocked at the mindless carnage that he used the occasion to pimp for gun control, using his favorite communication tool -- the whopper. "We as a country have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries," he said.
Obama then jetted off to Hollywood before the nation could even catch its breath. He sought solace and advice on gun violence from the entertainment industry that wallows in gore while promoting conflict resolution with automatic weapons and explosives. Oh, and while in mourning there, he attended a $33,400-a-head fundraiser and one later at Democratic National Committee event.
It turns out, gun researcher and lawyer John Lott says, that mass shootings do occur in other advanced countries -- a lot -- and "many European countries actually have higher rates of death in mass public shootings," with Norway posting the highest.
Meanwhile, Walmart, Amazon, eBay and Sears announced they were stripping toxic Confederate flag merchandise from their shelves. It was a strange, self-serving retail mea culpa. (Odd, the flag never bothered them before.) At the same time, mind you, an Amazon shopper still could buy Nazi swastika stickers or Mao Zedong's little red book of quotations or a Cuban flag -- don't they still have political prisoners there? -- or flags from countries where they behead homosexuals and stone women for being raped. If looking for old-fashioned violence, the Bible or the Koran remained available.
The hypocrisy was breathtaking.
The problem with rushing to don our hair shirts is that we take our eyes off the real problem -- people killing people.
It would be easy to lay it all off on the untreated mentally ill. Make no mistake, the kid who prayed with the welcoming church victims before shooting them is a seriously sick psycho. Recent mass shootings might lead a layman to connect mental illness to such killings, but a recent study published in the American Journals of Public Health by Vanderbilt University's Dr. Jonathan Metzi and Kenneth T. MacLeish concludes that is misguided and that mental health screening is not predictive of such violence.
So, what do we do? How do we spot it; how do we stop it? It is not about guns. It is not about racism. It is not about a flag, for crying out loud.
It is about a dark, malevolent hatred in some hearts. Pretending it is something else is a convenient distraction -- a shiny thing -- and it blinds us to finding answers.
Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communications.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com