News

Have we had enough yet?

Enough of the macabre and heretofore unthinkable details of the stabbing, decapitation and defiling of Tim McLean, the 22-year-old carnival worker who lost his life on a Winnipeg-bound Greyhound bus last week when a man apparently went berserk and - well, I'm going to try not to repeat the details.

It now makes me nauseous to read them, let alone regurgitate them.

Yet since news of the murder first leaked out last week, I've mentioned "beheading," "stabbing" and even "eating the corpse" in conversation with friends and family, as if I were reading aloud from a Hannibal Lecter novel and not passing the time of day.

The details of this crime have consumed, fascinated and brutalized us, leading us in one dark direction (he was totally calm as he stabbed him) or another (but why couldn't the other passengers have done something?). Mini disquisitions on the depravity or deficiencies of the human spirit.

We seemingly couldn't get enough of the incessantly repeated eyewitness reports, preceded by that slightly officious "and we must warn you, what you are about to hear is extremely graphic" proviso, which probably made more people rush to turn up the radio than to turn it off.

Almost 10,000 of us clicked on a link online to hear an unauthorized-for-release, 80-second radio transmission between RCMP officers racing to the scene, codenaming the suspect "Badger" and saying over the crackle: "Be advised he's got a pair of scissors with him" and "he's hacking off pieces and eating it."

What on earth, I wonder, does all this say about us?

Obviously, we're addicted to gory details - there's nothing new in that, except perhaps the fact that the Internet now affords us endless opportunity to trade in them. On Thursday, the tenor of many conversations about the bus murder involved people trying to top each other with these details, sharing gorier and gorier bits under the guise of talking about the news.

But since then, the tone for many conversations has progressed to a sense of shame or guilt about our prurience.

Since Thursday of course, something profound has happened to this terrible story to affect our reactions to it: Both victim and accused have been named, and been given a human history.

In the case of the victim, Tim McLean, friends and family have come forward to say this was a lovable human being. One close friend perhaps said it best when she pleaded through tears in one radio broadcast for people to remember who Mr. McLean was and "not just the way he died."

And the man accused, one Vincent Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton? Doctors who've never met him have been talking to the media about "paranoid schizophrenia," and one forensic psychiatrist speculated in the Winnipeg Free Press that the man probably heard voices that urged him to "do it, do it" (adding a little bit of shrink porn to this prurient mix).

But here's a piece of news I found really disconcerting: "Police have confirmed only that McLean was stabbed but have not released details of the horrifying killing."

In other words, all that we've read, heard and talked about over the past few days has not been officially confirmed or laid out coherently. Which may be one reason so many people continue to compulsively speculate, in the media and in private, about the crime.

For me, at least, fatigue has set in: I feel unable to take in any more details of the actual crime, although I still want to know why it happened.

Yet I suppose now that I've asked the question of what our reaction to this crime says about us, I should at least try to answer it.

Our reaction - the horror, the fascination, the embarrassed wish for more details, the desire for revenge and even our questioning of the behaviour of others on the bus - all of it says the same thing, nothing more and nothing less.

It says we're human. It says we're capable of being shocked. (Thank God.) It says we're struggling to understand such disparate realities as mental illness or crowd behaviour or the nature of random, senseless events.

We've placed ourselves on that bus - or shudderingly worse and infinitely more probable - imagined our grown kids, and other young people we love, lolling in their seats, iPods on, unaware of the danger sitting next to them.

So a story like this, in all its horrific detail, with all its disturbing questions, reminds us not only that we're human, but that we are all fiercely consumed by the struggle to stay safe in a world that keeps confounding us.