If you’re checking in from somewhere else . . .

Please pray for my city. This is our worst hour, and it has come just in time to mock a season of joy.

It would seem that in this place — built up a century and a half ago from the hills on a harsh and unforgiving northern prairie — the joy of our Savior’s coming and the horror of his execution on the cross will be united rather vividly this year.

What Child is this who, laid to rest
On Mary’s lap is sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing;
Haste, haste, to bring Him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

So bring Him incense, gold and myrrh,
Come peasant, king to own Him;
The King of kings salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.
Raise, raise a song on high,
The virgin sings her lullaby.
Joy, joy for Christ is born,
The Babe, the Son of Mary

Here’s what we pray. Here’s what it means.

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

THE PRAYER to St. Michael the Archangel used to be recited after every Mass in the Catholic Church. It still is in some places, and we often take its words for granted.

Until. . . .

I don’t know that we often grasp what that means — or, at least, what it can mean — when we routinely recite “be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil” or “. . . Satan and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.”

Today, in Omaha at Westroads Mall, Satan and all the evil spirits were on the prowl. It is not a pretty picture we receive from the Omaha World-Herald story today:

Renee Toney was working in the gift wrap area behind the customer service counter when the gunman came off a third-floor elevator and began firing shots into the ceiling.

“He was moving very fast,” she said. The shots “were very, very fast, I would say closer to 30 (shots) in all.”

A supervisor called for everyone to go into a stockroom behind the customer service area, and she rushed there, the others just feet behind her.

But she was the only one of her immediate co-workers to make it to the stockroom.

“None of them made it out,” Toney said. “I was up front, and everybody except me was shot. It’s a blur. I don’t even know how I got to the stockroom. I was the closest one to the stockroom. Within seconds, they were shot right behind me.”

A supervisor later told Toney that the man had said, “Open the safe.” One of the employees moved to open the safe, Toney said. “She never made it to the safe. He shot her before she made it.”

When police later arrived and ushered Toney out, she said she saw blood all over the floor and as many as six bodies, some on top of each other.

Mickey Vickroy, who was wrapping gifts at customer service but out of sight of the service counter, said she heard gunshots and some yell, “Gun!”

About a dozen customer service employees ran back into a storage area.

Roxanne Philip, another customer service worker, said the gunshots were so close that it sounded like they were being fired right next to her. She said she took cover and was scared “because I thought I would be next.”

Philip said she never saw the shooter, but as she left the customer service area after police arrived, she saw that a woman on the other side of the customer service counter had been shot and appeared to be dead. She said she thought her boss had been shot because she heard him moaning.

Chuck Wright, a Von Maur employee, said a co-worker who also worked in customer service described hearing the shooting break out and people running. The co-worker saw what appeared to be a customer who had been shot and heard a co-worker in customer service yelling for help.

Someone yelled, “Hold on, Fred, we’ll get to you.”

Another co-worker of Wright’s described standing on the second floor near the escalator and looking up toward the commotion. She then saw a man with a gun lean over a third-floor railing. He then shot a man standing next to her in the head.

LET US PRAY. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. . . .

50 years later: Just a meanness in this world

From the Omaha World-Herald:

The 19-year-old shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His body was found on the third floor of the Von Maur at Westroads Mall.

It was the deadliest shooting spree in Nebraska since Charles Starkweather’s 1958 rampage.

DID YOU CATCH THAT? “It was the deadliest shooting spree in Nebraska since Charles Starkweather’s 1958 rampage.”

This month and next mark the 50th anniversary of Starkweather’s killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming, spanning December 1957 and January 1958.

I don’t know what, if anything, that means. It’s eerie as hell, though.

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my soul’d be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world

– From “Nebraska,”
Bruce Springsteen, 1982,
based on Starkweather

Death . . . the final solution

A troubled 19-year-old had some scrapes with The Man, some of the final bad moves of his tortured time on Earth. Then he got fired from Mickey D’s.

THAT, APPARENTLY, turned out to be the last straw for the teen authorities identified as Robert A. Hawkins — male, Caucasian, of Bellevue, Neb. KETV, Channel 7, has the details:

Hawkins, 19, had been arrested on a couple of misdemeanors in November and was due in court this month. One charge included minor in possession of alcohol. He was arrested on Nov. 24.

Sarpy County deputies said they are getting a warrant to search Hawkins’ home in the Quail Creek neighborhood in Bellevue.

The woman who owns that house at 4302 McCartey Drive, who only gave her first name of Debra, said Hawkins had a lot of emotional instability. She said she thought he was turning things around. She said he had just learned that he was fired from McDonald’s.

Debra said Hawkins was coming out of his room Wednesday morning when she last saw him.

“He said he’d gotten fired and was pretty upset and said, ‘This is the only way,’ and we tried to talk to him,” Debra said. “He was just a very troubled — I had no idea that he was this troubled. I don’t know if it was because he got fired from McDonald’s.”

Debra said she saw Hawkins with a gun last night and thought he and her sons were going hunting, which they did quite often.

At 4:30 p.m., Rollie Yost, in the Sarpy County Sheriff’s Office, said shortly after the shooting, Hawkins’ mother walked into its office with a note that “could be interpreted as suicidal.”

Yost said Sarpy County is working with Omaha police.

A friend of Hawkins, Shawn, told KETV NewsWatch 7 said Hawkins had been on antidepressants. He was staying with friends in Quail Creek, the friend said, and he said Hawkins had recently begun bouncing from job to job and making “some bad judgment calls.” Shawn said he was shocked to hear it was the man he calls “Robbie.” Shawn said he had heard through the grapevine on Wednesday that Robbie was suicidal.

Shawn said he last saw Hawkins a few months ago.

A KETV.com user e-mailed this:

“I went to school for seven years with (Hawkins) and he seemed to be a suicidal kid. During school, he would talk about killing or something along those lines.”

WAS IT HAYWIRE brain chemistry, or was it a devil on his shoulder telling Robert A. Hawkins “Kill, kill, kill”?

Does it even matter? Whatever the source of the madness, the result was pure evil. The fires of Hell billowing up to Earth and into our lives.

Innocent lives snuffed out as quickly as rifle rounds could tear through flesh and bone. Death was the final solution for Hawkins, and he decided it would be the final solution for eight other Omahans he didn’t know from Adam.

It seems to me that death has become our No. 1 solution for everything today.

Even for “an awesome kid,” as related just now by one of his friends to a TV reporter keeping vigil outside the house where Hawkins crashed during his last days.

The friend found out this afternoon that his buddy had become Death, destroyer of worlds. TV viewers learned that this caused the lad to be “beat up about it for a while.”

But then, in the span of a few hours, came the realization that “Life goes on, and I’ll get through it.”

Mass murder by your good bud. No biggie.

I REMEMBER reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in ninth grade, it must have been. It comes back to me in times like these, all the more as our society becomes all the more like “The horror”:

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror–of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision–he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

“`The horror! The horror!’

“I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt:

“`Mistah Kurtz–he dead.’

(snip)

“`His end,’ said I, with dull anger stirring in me, `was in every way worthy of his life.’

“`And I was not with him,’ she murmured. My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.

“`Everything that could be done –’ I mumbled.

“`Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth–more than his own mother, more than — himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.’

“I felt like a chill grip on my chest. `Don’t,’ I said, in a muffled voice.

“`Forgive me. I–I have mourned so long in silence–in silence. . . . You were with him — to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . .’

“`To the very end,’ I said, shakily. `I heard his very last words. . . .’ I stopped in a fright.

“`Repeat them,’ she murmured in a heart-broken tone. `I want–I want — something — something — to — to live with.’

“I was on the point of crying at her, `Don’t you hear them?’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. `The horror! The horror!’

“`His last word — to live with,’ she insisted. `Don’t you understand I loved him — I loved him — I loved him!’

“I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

“`The last word he pronounced was — your name.’”

OUR NAME.

Mental illness, or demons, or just plain garden-variety despair, or just plain meanness all have been constants in the human experience. What is relatively new is efficient means for maximum annihilation of those around us, as well as the mainstreaming of maximum annihilation as a way of getting our “15 minutes of fame” on our way out of this vail of tears.

The horror. Our horror.

Immense tragedy makes you do odd things

I am one of those people who notes the little absurdities and oddities amid great tragedy, how sheer urgency and a little panic makes people do odd things.

This is one of those moments and — though I’m skating along the thin edge of propriety amid the horror of the previously unthinkable — I did want to note one bit of media pretense and stodginess crashing to the ground and breaking into a million pieces. Because when it all hits the fan, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

Like use the word “blog.”

This happened at the Omaha World-Herald, which has been notoriously suspicious of this Internet thing . . . particularly the phenomenon of weblogs. In fact, “blog” (a.k.a. “live update,” when the paper absolutely, positively had to commit blogging) was that Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.

Until today, when immense tragedy pushed the trivial and the petty to the side, as old media and new did what they had to do. Today, instead, all of us were forced to focus on the Big Things in life.

And death.

Lone gunman, police think

The full horror of what hit this big small town — hit it out of the blue this Christmas season, evil descending upon unsuspecting shoppers at the area’s biggest mall — is just starting to sink in as authorities begin to sort out just what the hell happened in Omaha this afternoon.

Right now, police say they think the shooter acted alone, then killed himself. At least 14 people were shot; nine are dead, including the gunman.

Asked about the camo-clad man arrested at a Westroads Mall transit center, a police spokeswoman said officers were rounding up anyone who fit early descriptions of the gunman. If the bus-stop man actually was trying to hide under a bench, and why, we don’t know.

ALL WE KNOW is the cops think the shooter was alone. And dead.

According to one television report, the mass shooting may have been a murder-suicide writ large. From KETV, Channel 7:

At 4:30 p.m., Rollie Yost, in the Sarpy County Sheriff’s Office, said shortly after the shooting, a woman walked into its office with a note that “could be interpreted as suicidal.” Yost said the note is believed to be connected to the Westroads shooting. Yost said the note contained information from a 19-year-old man.

Yost said Sarpy County is working with Omaha police.

A REPORTER on KMTV, Channel 3 spoke of the enormity of what he’d just witnessed just now starting to hit him. I think the same is happening right now for most of the 425,000 residents of this relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful city on the edge of the Great Plains.

Stuff like this doesn’t happen here. But now it has, and we have to deal with it.

Merry Christmas.

Newspaper: Nine dead at Omaha mall

The Omaha World-Herald reports nine dead in the wake of a shooting spree at Omaha’s Westroads Mall. Police just confirmed this.

VARIOUS TV REPORTS still have one gunman dead inside Von Maur department store, and at least one suspect arrested outside the mall, apparently after attempting to hide under a bus-stop bench.

The suspect arrested fit the description of the shooter — a black man wearing a camouflage jacket. Police are saying the shooter is among the nine dead.

All hell breaks loose a mile down the road

A sniper’s gunshots shredded “peace on Earth and goodwill to men” in an Omaha mall filled with Christmas shoppers today, not long after President Bush flew out of this Midwestern city.

SHOTS STARTED ringing out in the Von Maur department store at Westroads Mall about 1:30 this afternoon . . . roughly. The Omaha World-Herald is reporting five dead and at least a dozen wounded.

Various television reports say either one or two suspected gunmen have been arrested, with police radio traffic indicating there also might be a gunman dead inside the store, shot by his own hand. Naturally, all is chaos at the moment, all reports are pretty sketchy, and no one knows precisely what we’re dealing with, here.

I do know this: One gunman equals a nut; two equal a plot. And where there’s a plot, there might be an incident of terrorism. Maybe.

May God have mercy on the souls of the dead, and grant peace and consolation to their families. And may He grant healing and peace to the wounded.

People are stupid

In case you had any lingering illusions that people might be smarter than they actually are, you need to read this post.

That means you, dear.

YES, Mrs. Favog, Kellie Pickler really is as with it as a sack of sand — it’s not an act — and her number is legion. And apparently quite a few short-bus riders live in and around Rayville, La.

Here is a story from Tuesday’s edition of the Monroe News-Star and neither they, nor I, are making this stuff up:

A Rayville man was sentenced to more than four years in prison after he helped his wife pose as a CIA agent and they swindled more than half a million dollars from friends and family.

Brent Eric Finley, 38, of Rayville, was sentenced Monday in federal court in Monroe to serve 51 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

His wife, Stacey Finley, was sentenced in August to spend 63 months in prison and both are ordered to jointly pay restitution in the amount of $873,786.94. Both were convicted on wire fraud charges.

U.S. Attorney Donald W. Washington said the case began after officials received information that the Finley’s had devised a scheme to defraud their friends and family of money.

The couple reportedly convinced numerous people that Stacey Finley was a CIA agent and with her contacts she could schedule a medical scan of the victims’ bodies by satellite imaging that would detect any hidden medical problems.

After the medical problems were detected, the Finley’s convinced their victims that secret agents would administer medicine to them as they slept in exchange for payment.

F*** The Golden Compass

I don’t want to hear another thing about the evils of the flick aimed at making your kid an atheist — namely The Golden Compass.

Oh, no. I’m not defending the film. Philip Pullman has been quite explicit in what he’s all about. To wit, “My books are about killing God.” And The Golden Compass is based on the first in a trilogy of Pullman’s God-killing books.

If you’re a Christian, and you have kids, and you send them off to see The Golden Compass, that’s what you’re getting.

“My books are about killing God.” And about portraying a fictionalized, twisted version of the Catholic Church in a horrible light. That’s what I’m saying.

Still, it’s a free country, and New Line Cinema is free to make toxic films about toxic subject matter — just as Americans are free to poison their minds and their souls. Willingly or ignorantly.

Free will reigns supreme. Free will . . . a gift to mankind by the deity Phil Pullman thinks he can “kill,” because He’s already dead or, more precisely, never existed.

BUT I’M NOT HERE to talk about that. I’m here to rip the boycotters a new one.

Like I said, I don’t want to hear another thing about The Golden Compass. Especially from Christians.

Why is that?

That’s because being against stuff is not enough — our faith is no mere negation of whatever peeves Christians at the moment.

That’s also because Christians — and their denuded culture — have been too dense, shortsighted, narrow-minded and intellectually sclerotic to come up with much that’s any better for the past 20 years, ever since Walker Percy penned his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome.

Even then, I’ve had a Catholic bookstore manager tell me a priest once warned him not to stock those “dirty” Percy novels. Ah, Jansenism . . . the heresy that keeps on puckering you up, Buttercup.

Likewise, when Flannery O’Connor was still cranking out masterpiece short stories, all the little old ladies wanted to know why she couldn’t write something “nice.”

Well, Christians can’t create stuff that’s uniformly “nice” and inoffensive because that inevitably leads to a flaccid catalog of mediocre crap. Propaganda for Jesus, as it were. And if Jesus needs an army of hack propagandists to do His bidding, He isn’t worthy of our worship.

CHRISTIANS ARE OBLIGED to illuminate the truth, which will lead to the Truth.

I say “obliged” quite deliberately. We are “obliged” to be witnesses to the truth, which often neither is nice nor inoffensive, because He Who was Truth hung on a cross until He was dead to ransom our sorry asses out of a Hell of our own choosing.

And I guess — so far as our sins ended up being the death of Jesus . . . each and every one of us, Christ killers all — Philip Pullman really is “killing God” with every book he foists off on a lemminglike public. But he couldn’t — and can’t — stop Easter Sunday. The tomb is still empty.

Mr. Pullman is obliged to create art which reflects the truth. Instead, he spins clever tales of the Big Lie.

Christians are obliged to create beautiful things, provocative works, great art that is true to themselves and true to the Truth. Instead, by and large, the world gets vapid junk in the name of Jesus.

FRANKLY, I think crap for Christ is way worse than broadsides against Christ. With broadsides against Christ, at least you can consider the source.

But when you have Christians’ cultural defecations in Christ’s holy name — Left Behind, anyone? Or those truly pious and truly awful “classic” Catholic films on EWTN? — it’s easy for people to get the idea that Christ is shit. Philip Pullman couldn’t pull that one off in his wildest atheist dreams.

Of course, you won’t be hearing a recitation of this particular rant on Catholic radio. Or on your local evangelical “praise and worship” station. Or on the Catholic News Service wire.

See, I said a bad word. I wasn’t being pleasant. Some superannuated citizen might be taken with the vapors . . . no matter how therapeutic those vapors might ultimately be.

Walker Percy, pray for us.

Flannery O’Connor, you pray, too.