In Norway, a blond young man who might have stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad kills scores of people, most of them kids at a lakeside camp, to call attention to his 1500-page online rant, some of it plagiarized from the Unabomber.
His politics are beside the point, as were those of the lunatic who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head last January, killing six in Tuscon, including a nine-year-old girl.
For such random slaughtering of innocents, the medium is the message: In the era of the Internet, 24/7 cable TV and semi-automatic guns for everyone, mass murder is a form of expression available to the kind of people who, less than a century ago, might have been handing out pamphlets or just muttering in the streets.
As we celebrate freedom of expression, people like Anders Behring Breivik remind us of the price we pay for having the power to turns words into lethal body rhetoric and, in sane societies, might shock us into tempering our use of language.
MORE.