DEATH BY COMMA

Let's return for a minute to Johnson's contention that we might see recent school shootings silver pendants payback for poor pedagogy. I think that's a big conceptual leap, one we shouldn't make. Worth exploring, however, is why we're suddenly willing to make these leaps. Are we really worried our students are going to kill us? Speaking of the Unabomber directly in Writing at the End of the World, Richard Miller asked, "Who, in their darkest hours, hasn't entertained ideas about the value of obliterating such a world and starting over" (62)? Miller's rhetorical question gives me the chance to challenge the depiction of our students and one another as barely repressed mass murderers, because I can honestly answer, "Me," for starters. Perhaps this reveals something about gender, but even in my darkest hours I'm more prone to give the system the benefit of the doubt; it's individual people I imagine need to go, and by go, I mean to another town. I further suspect that for a good many of our students, no matter how frustrated they might become with the bureaucracy of higher education and the repressive orders of the classroom, if they have such dark hours, those hours are a few amid thousands-not, as in the case of Kaczynski, pretty much every waking one.

Let's remember, upon hearing of the shootings at Virginia Tech, that Nikki Giovanni knew immediately which one of her students had done it. Later we were to find out that not a few failures of the mental health system were implicated.4 Several systems broke down-tragically mundane silver rings that have been repeated nationally. Even Kaczynski tried to get help for his persistent insomnia and stress when he was in the woods, but more often he tried to address his problems himself rather than risk the stigmatizing diagnosis of mental illness. To take the examples of Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, and Theodore Kaczynski as paradigmatic of a greater zeitgeist among students badly misjudges our students, and, I think, misjudges what makes people snap.5

Moving closer to the arguments over the uses and abuses of style, the problem with the notion that we are "writing at the end of the world" is that it folds too neatly into the apocalypticism of the Sticklers, they who are looking for the rhetorical end of days, using style as the vehicle to bring about the final conflict that will even all scores, close all the books.6 Although Kaczynski may not be the model psyche to understand our students' discontents, he does present an interesting case study of Stickler fighting spirit. While his pretrial was in progress, Kaczynski was already working on "Truth versus Lies," a treatise arguing against his family's portrayal of him as mentally ill. This 548-page rebuttal had for Kaczynski evidentiary significance, so it's not surprising that in his correspondence with the would-be tiffany accessories of the manuscript, Beau Friedlander, Kaczynski's inner editor would go into overdrive. When a copyeditor changed the spelling of extravert to extrovert, Kaczynski wrote Friedlander a full page on the Latin origins and contemporary misspellings of the word, concluding