Three days after the bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 170 at the Boston Marathon, President Barack Obama flew to Boston to deliver a speech at an interfaith service for the victims and survivors.
This marks the fifth time that Obama has delivered such an address following mass killings, beginning with Fort Hood, Texas in November of 2009 and including Tucson, Arizona in January 2011, Aurora, Colorado in July 2012 and Newtown, Connecticut last December.
The corporate media, which has cynically dubbed Obama the "consoler-in-chief," hailed his latest speech as "inspiring," "powerful" and "moving." It was all they wanted to hear and in no way conflicted with their efforts to frame the events in Boston within the reactionary narrative of the "war on terrorism," turning them into another justification for war abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home.
In reality, it was painfully evident that Obama was working off of a template, engaged in a national ritual that is utterly routine, banal and insincere.
Almost invariably, he begins these speeches by invoking "scripture."
"Scripture tells us," were the first words out of Obama's mouth after he rose to address the crowd from the pulpit of Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
"Scripture tells us, "Do not lose heart,'" he began his remarks to a prayer vigil for the 26 victims of the Newtown school massacre.
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"Scripture says that "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.'" he said at the start of his speech following the Aurora theater massacre that killed 12 and wounded 58.
"As Scripture tells us, 'There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,'..." he declared at the beginning of his address to a memorial service for the victims of the Tucson mass shooting.
The next disaster that prompts Obama to invoke scripture, he might consider the following, from Proverbs 6, which declares "six things doth the Lord hate," first among them, "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood." One could hardly ask for a more concise description of the American president.
Obama's biblical quotations are generally followed by thumb-nail descriptions of the victims and a hymn to the indomitable spirit of the American people. The survivors are then assured that they are not alone, when in fact they will be quickly forgotten by the politicians and the media as the next massacre and the one after that takes place.
When it comes to explaining the source of these terrible events, why they have happened, the president offers nothing beyond references to senseless "evil."
As he declared in his Tucson speech, "Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding."
This "evil" is presented as a malady that has befallen its victims from out of the blue, something aberrational in an otherwise stable and healthy society.
Far from being exceptional, however, mass shootings and other forms of violence are a quintessential American event.
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