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Don't Mess With Me Motherfucker Fifteen years ago. You might expect me to say something like “it seems like only yesterday,” or “where does the time go?” but to tell you the truth, it seems like an entire lifetime has gone by since that crisp autumn day in Iowa City, Iowa. On November 1st, 1991, frustrated University of Iowa graduate student Gang Lu, shot and killed four people from the University’s physics department, then walked two blocks, gun in hand, to another building where he shot two more people, killing one and paralyzing another. At the time, it seemed almost impossible. Iowa City has always been known as a very earthy and passive place, where being a peace-lovin’ hippie has never really gone out of style. In the weeks after the tragic events, the story became familiar. Gang Lu was talented physics student and something of a goofy mascot at a local sport called the Sports Column. When he failed to receive an award for his PhD dissertation and the award was given to another student. He decided to exact revenge. When I think of myself as I was then, Gang Lu and I couldn’t have been more different people. Lu was an academic star working on a doctoral degree in a foreign country. He was competitive and determined to succeed. It occurs to me that his parents must have been very proud of him. I was a twenty-one year old college sophomore on academic probation, living only one hundred miles from home, in a dank basement apartment with dirty dishes in the sink and a pot pant growing in the closet. At the time, I thought that I was desperately trying to find myself, but looking back now it seems more probable that I was trying to lose myself. In any case, it was right about this time that it became clear to me that whatever I was doing, I could do it best with a guitar. As different as Lu and I were, each day as I read the lasted information about the shooting in the Daily Iowan, I could not help but notice that I could relate to him. In 1991, the United States fought a staggeringly brief war with Iraq. That year the winner of the Academy Award for best picture was The Unforgiven though Terminator 2 was the highest grossing film.
The power of the gun was in the air that year and killing had never looked more glorious. In some ways (in a very small universe), it is the one song, out of hundreds that I’ve written, that is bigger than I am. I wrote that song when I was in a very popular band called Sheltering Sky and it was our flagship song. It was the one song that people knew, even if they had never heard of our band. For a while after the record was released, it was like a sixth member of the band. And it was the most famous member. Even now, I’m not exactly sure that I’m proud of it. There is part of me that worries that I somehow exploited a tragedy, that I exposed an unsavory side of myself by singing and dancing while those around me were grieving from great loses. I tell myself that I did what I do I write songs and try to make people think and I could no sooner turn away from it as it came to me than I would a song about something more redeeming. In truth, I am sure that it was too soon after it happened when the record came out. About that, I have some regret. I also had concern that I have made myself some sort of accomplice-after-the-fact to Lu. Some might suggest that by writing a song that treats a man capable of doing such harm with empathy people will think that it somehow serves as a validation for what he did. They may be right, but that’s not want I was trying to do. I was trying to explore the way he felt when he was driven to do something that, I’m sure, he never dreamed he would do. He must have felt as if he had no other choice. I imagine that he, like myself in that autumn of 1991 was either trying to find himself or lose himself, and in unfortunately America it’s often more difficult to get a guitar than a gun. |
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