I knew Hitchens would come through

He tackles the media and public reaction to Virginia Tech in Slate. Is there a more bracing writer alive today?

Warning: If you are the sort of person who watches Nancy Grace and fights back tears as she drones on about poor Laci and little Conner, DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK .First, it is a little above your reading level. (OK, a lot above your reading level.) Second, what parts you do understand will just make you mad.

Why do we have these TV-driven sob-fests? The networks put them on because they are easy. “Emotional vampires” some one called the reporters. That is right but only partly right. They feed on the sadness but they are also drawing out the raw emotions for an audience that sits happily transfixed as they wallow in their grief.

Who are these people? And why do they do this?

It was my friend Adolph Reed who first pointed out this tendency to what he called "vicarious identification." At the time of the murder of Lisa Steinberg in New York in 1987, he was struck by the tendency of crowds to show up for funerals of people they didn't know, often throwing teddy bears over the railings and in other ways showing that (as well as needing to get a life) they in some bizarre way seemed to need to get a death.

Let me float an idea here. What if the public grief is not an end, but a means? A cover charge, so to speak, to get in on the big media event. Cry, build an impromptu shrine, drop off a teddy bear, and suddenly you are in some twisted way, part of the story.

Maybe the grief junkies are bizarre little narcissists.

Just a thought. Not a comforting one.