‘Dave . . . my mind is going. I can feel it.’

As was obvious to anyone who tried to log into the Omaha World-Herald’s website, Omaha.com, during Wednesday’s chaos in the Big O, the newspaper was having itself some HAL 9000 problems.

No word yet on casualties at 14th and Douglas.

The media watch blog of the alternative City Weekly took keen notice as well, linking to a West Coast media exec’s scathing blog entry about Omaha.com:

The problems the Omaha World-Herald’s online portal, Omaha.com, has had in handling large amounts of visitor traffic have been well documented. But now, more than just Nebraskans are taking notice.

“Reflections of a Newsosaur” is a blog written by Silicon Valley CEO Alan D. Mutter. The former city editor of the Chicago Sun-Times later became the second-in-command editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Today, he is a managing partner of Tapit Partners, a two-man, think-tank that helps business owners create successful companies.

In a post titled, “Flat-footed in Omaha,” Mutter takes the paper to task for problems he says were not technical, but editorial.

“The poor coverage evidently was caused by a lack of contingency planning on the part of editors, web producers, reporters, photographers and all the other people who are responsible for rapidly, thoughtfully and accurately gathering the information and visual assets necessary to tell a story like this in the age of multimedia.”

FOLLOW THE LINK if you have a strong stomach, because the keelhauling to which Mutter subjects the hometown rag would make even Dick Cheney squeamish.

Thing is, the World-Herald didn’t need no Blue State techno guru to hit it with the painfully obvious. I already did.

Back in May.

IT’S NOT THAT I’m comfortable with blowing my own horn — or even particularly looking to do so. It’s more a plea for recognition that maybe one or two of us here in Flyover Country might have a couple of brain cells to rub together, too.

Yep, we do obvious as well as anybody.

Uh huh.

Teen-age Baghdad?

Click on photo for KFAB audio.

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s mall massacre in Omaha, some things are starting to emerge from the haze of chaos and the numbness of shock.

FOR EXAMPLE, it’s really starting to look like something is seriously not right in Robert Hawkins’ “posse.” The problem, however, in what seems to be a Bellevue, Neb., feedback loop of whack is not that there are kids out there who have issues.

The problem would appear to be that there are kids out there with issues immersed in an absolutely pathological culture — one, as I said earlier, obsessed with all the wrong things. Not even a day after Hawkins massacred eight people, then himself, at the Von Maur at Westroads Mall, another one of his circle has been arrested on felony counts.

From a story by Jason Kuiper in the Omaha World-Herald:

A 17-year-old Bellevue boy was arrested after being accused of threatening a girl whom he said made comments relating to Wednesday’s fatal shootings at Von Maur.

David S. Horvath, of 3016 JoAnn Ave. in Bellevue, was taken into custody Thursday afternoon and brought to the Sarpy County Juvenile Justice Center.

Bellevue Police Chief John Stacey said officers went to Horvath’s house Thursday to investigate a girl’s report that Horvath threatened her for making disparaging remarks about his close friend, Robert Hawkins. Officials say Hawkins shot and killed eight people at Von Maur at the Westroads Mall on Wednesday afternoon before killing himself.

Stacey said officers arrested Horvath on suspicion of making felony terroristic threats. The officers also confiscated two shotguns and a rifle from the house, he said.

THERE IS SOMETHING of a striking comparison to be made in all this. If what Robbie Hawkins did Wednesday is fundamentally no different from what a jihadi terrorist does, then how is what his buddy is alleged to have done much different from what Iraqi sectarian militias do?

Just asking the uncomfortable questions, here.

It’s terrorism, is what it is

What’s the difference between Robert A. Hawkins and an al Qaida terrorist?

Nothing. Except, perhaps, that the al Qaida terrorist has access to better technology for even more efficient slaughter than can come from the barrel of an old Russian assault rifle.

Perhaps the difference is that — unlike the al Qaida bigs who direct the foot soldiers of international terror — Bellevue, Nebraska’s high-school dropout and homegrown suicide shooter just was too damned stupid to graduate to suicide bomber. After all, you have to know how to wire up a bomb vest and have the scratch to buy the TNT or plastique.

And it’s hard to come up with that kind of money when you can’t even hold down a job at McDonald’s. So stealing Daddy’s rifle it was.

But why does a mass murderer — an all-American Terrorist Without a Cause — do it?

Michael Kelly looks for an answer in this morning’s Omaha World-Herald:

But why at all? Why do some become mass killers?

“More often than not,” [James Alan Fox, criminal justice professor at Boston's Northeastern University] said, “they see themselves as victims of injustice. They seek vengeance against people they blame.

“They tend to be loners and losers, people who failed at work or at home. They externalize blame. A lot of us, when things go wrong, blame ourselves – whereas these individuals always blame someone else.”

Sometimes, he said, it starts with a specific grudge – a job or relationship gone bad, and a desire to get even. Along the way, the shooter may kill others.

They tend to use guns because guns create distance. “It’s a lot easier to stand back, pull a trigger and shoot people without having any contact with them.”

AND MAYBE an explosive suicide vest was just too icky for a depressed, demented American youth who wanted to “go out in style.”

Robert A. Hawkins was a terrorist just as much as is Osama bin Laden. Osama’s a big leaguer; Robbie Hawkins was a rookie-league screwball pitcher. How do you like your newfound fame, kid?

I can appreciate that Hawkins was a sad, tormented and pathological young adult. I can. So were Hank Williams and Janis Joplin, but they still managed to leave behind much beauty in this world and killed no one but, ultimately, themselves.

And let’s not forget Vincent van Gogh.

Robbie Hawkins’ legacy is death, panic, mayhem, gore and heartbreak. Thousands of years of human tradition and theology tell us mayhem and death are the province of the Evil One, and modern psychology can offer no treatment — no effective prophylactic — for the demonic.

Robert A. Hawkins, age 20, was a sick young man. A sick young man who listened to the devil inside. A sick young man for whom self-murder just wasn’t good enough.

No, he had to take eight others with him on his way out.

I grieve for the hell Robbie Hawkins’ life became, just as I weep over the hell on earth he brought to innocent Christmas shoppers and salespeople. I will not, however, make excuses for what he did — what he did to eight fellow humans, what he did to their families and friends, what he did to this city.

This city . . . Omaha. My home.

With great difficulty, I pray that God has more mercy on Robbie Hawkins’ tormented soul than Robbie Hawkins had on a bunch of innocent people he knew not from Adam. But that doesn’t change what Hawkins decided to become Wednesday afternoon — a terrorist. Albeit one without a clue.

WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY that has fetishized sex, violence, death and materialism. None of the above can fill the void that haunts our being. None of the above can give adequate meaning to young lives like the one Robert A. Hawkins threw away in that Omaha shopping mall.

Americans are quick to mock those young, Islamic terrorists who embrace suicide, murder and carnage for the greater glory of Allah — and the chance to screw themselves silly in Paradise with 72 hot virgins.

But at least they kill — and die — for something, no matter how warped.

For what did Robbie Hawkins — and all his youthful predecessors like Harris, Klebold and Cho — kill . . . and die?

For what?

No, it wasn’t a bad dream

Alone in the night

Terrors, and other dark thoughts, come in the night.

They lurk in the shadows, waiting for the witching hour, consolidating their dark forces for the assault on the lonely human soul. Yes, terrors come in the night.

WEDNESDAY, terror also came in the day to Omaha, my home — to this stolid yet quirky city on the Missouri River. A tormented, 20-year-old loser screwed up one time too many, then listened yet again to the demon on his shoulder, the one telling him he was human excrement and to do something about it.

The Omaha World-Herald today quotes what that devil was whispering in Robbie Hawkins’ ear, which he faithfully copied onto his suicide note: “I’m a piece of shit, but I’m going to be famous now.”

Infamous, actually.

He took his father’s old Russian SKS semiautomatic assault rifle. He took a couple of clips and some ammo, too. He taped the clips together, so he could reload in the blink of an eye.

Then he drove his used Jeep Cherokee to Westroads Mall and shot up the Von Maur department store. He blew away eight innocent human beings, then he blew himself to Kingdom Come.

Or somewhere.

BUT THIS POST isn’t about young Mr. Hawkins and his Final Solution to a life gone south. This post is about the terrors that come in the dark of the night to a mostly tranquil city of 425,000, where the big news a couple of days ago was the Nebraska Cornhuskers’ new football coach.

Well, that was the big news, until. . . .

Nebraska has seen nothing like this since the days of Charles Starkweather, who 50 years ago set out on a killing spree so notorious that it inspired Bruce Springsteen to write an entire gothic, folk-rock masterpiece of an album. But it took Starkweather a whole month to do what he did.

Omaha is reeling as I write this in the wee, dark hours. Christmas trees stand as blinking affronts to bereft families in houses that are one person emptier than they should be.

Spouses are dead. Friends are gone. Children are orphans now, in the black of this December night.

Terrors descend on a bereft, shell-shocked city. And we need someone to talk to. We need the light of a candle — figurative, literal, metaphorical . . . I really don’t give a good g**damn — because we are just too bloody tired, and heartbroken, to curse the darkness anymore.

BACK IN THE DAY, I remember when one (or more) local radio stations would stand in the gap, helping beat back the terrors for a sleepless city. A city that dares not sleep for fear of what it might dream.

Oldsters like myself remember reassuring voices in the night — friends as close as the radio on the night table. They were there, in the air, soothing our frayed nerves with good music.

They were there, taking calls from the wide-awake and brokenhearted (and even letting some of us talk it all out over the air and into the ether) when tragedy visited in bygone days.

They. Were. There.

When. We. Needed. Them.

The voices in the night were there when madmen shot the Kennedys.

They were there when a madman shot Martin.

They were there when Elvis died, and when a nut named Chapman killed John Lennon.

They were there through all manner of local calamities, storms and crises. But that was then, in a land called Back in the Day.

TONIGHT, for some unfathomable reason, I turned on the radio. On one of our public stations, the news . . . from the BBC. I switched the wireless to AM and tuned to KFAB, the blowtorch of the Midwest — the station generations of Omahans listened to to see if the morning’s snow canceled the day’s classes . . . back in the day.

I remember back in 1988, when Omaha had been lashed by a line of hellacious storms, including at least one tornado. Much of the city was dark. The wife and I were struggling to salvage the contents of our fridge.

Our light came from wax, a wick and a flame, and our link to the world was a battery radio. It was tuned to 1110 AM. The DJ was informative, the music was middle-of-the-road, and the turntables ran fast . . . then slow . . . then fast . . . then slow, for the emergency generator was a bit hinky.

In these small hours, I sit here trying to make sense of the madness that came to my city Wednesday. And when I tuned to dependable ol’ KFAB — now just another brick in the Clear Channel wall of suck — hoping against hope to hear a friendly voice in the night, I heard. . . .

Nothing.

THE TRANSMITTER was on, but nobody was home. Not even George Noory, who usually at that hour is chasing the spacemen on Coast to Coast A.M. Nope, at 1:07 a.m., there was complete dead air.

And complete dead air at 1:17. And 1:27. And 1:37, except for the ID and commercials that ran right on schedule at 1:32.

We’re on our own. It’s just us . . . and those terrors in the night.