Nashville

 Dear Nashville bomber(s): Americans are not frightened by 'terror attacks'. They are entertained. It's like any other entertainment, only better, because it's real. Americans live for such entertainment because it interrupts their otherwise dreary lives. We have long lived without the looming threat of nuclear holocaust, by which we had been, as Walker Percy once said, continually enlivened--enlivened, encouraged by the thought that 'all of this'--the day by day drudgery, the numbing routine, the dulling sameness--might suddenly end and free us once for all, make life simple and essential again, a life wherein we would live by our wits and from the original abundance of the earth unfettered and unlocked. Hunters and gatherers once again. We no longer have 'the' bomb, and so we live on the occasional scraps, such as you have unintentionally offered. Do you think that we receive or learn any intended lesson? No, we do not. Sorry. Your motive is quite meaningless, of no interest whatsoever. We simply marvel at the destruction for its own sake, and envy those who were close enough to experience the event and still live. Haven't you ever wondered why disaster movies are so reliably popular? We cannot live with this clockwork world of ours unless we constantly see it in flames, or flooded, or plagued, broken and scattered, if only in our dreams. As the author of this event, you are nonetheless irrelevant. You blew up with your own bomb, either literally or figuratively, and now we await the next. The thought that you may have died with your own bomb is pleasing. The thought that you lived and can eventually see the electric chair is more pleasing yet, for it would provide one final crumb of delight.