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Running Head: "Still Shocking, But No Longer Surprising"
"Still Shocking, But No Longer Surprising":
The Anomaly Paradox in Newspaper Coverage of the 1997-1998 School Shootings
By Russell Frank
The Pennsylvania State University
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Russell Frank, College of Communications, Penn State University, 106 Carnegie Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802-5100. Electronic mail may be sent to [log in to unmask]
"Still Shocking, But No Longer Surprising":
The Anomaly Paradox in Newspaper Coverage of the 1997-1998 School Shootings
By Russell Frank
The Pennsylvania State University
Abstract
This paper brings together Tuchman's "what-a-story," Fishman's "crime wave dynamic" and Gans' identification of small-town pastoralism and social order as "enduring values in the news" in accounting for similarities among newspaper stories about five school shootings that occurred in 1997-98. The juxtaposition of Tuchman and Fishman sheds further light on one of the fundamental paradoxes of journalism: A series of similarly anomalous events is considered more anomalous than a single anomalous event.
Key Words: Newspapers, Crime Waves, What-a-Story, Typifications, News Values
"Still Shocking, But No Longer Surprising":
The Anomaly Paradox in Newspaper Coverage of the 1997-1998 School Shootings
Studies of "the manufacture of news" (e.g., Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1980; Fishman, 1981; Cohen & Young, 1981; Berkowitz, 1999) take uniformity as a given - different stories about the same or similar occurrences will evince similarities in structure, style and theme - and work back through the manufacturing process to account for the uniformity. These studies rest on three assumptions:
1. News organizations are stakeholders in the status quo.
2. Editors are attracted to occurrences that threaten the status quo.
3. Editors are likelier to recognize an occurrence as a threat to the status quo to the extent that it resembles threats to the status quo that the news organization has covered in the past.
4. Reporters tend to rely on official sources when reporting on threats to the status quo.
The first three assumptions account for consistency of news judgment among assigning editors. The fourth assumption accounts for consistency in the information obtained by reporters assigned to the same or similar stories. In this article I would like to test the applicability of these four assumptions to a selection of newspaper stories about reactions to the succession of shootings at suburban and small-town schools during the 1997-98 academic year. I would specifically like to see how well Tuchman's (1978) notion of the "what-a-story" and Fishman's (1981) sketch of "the crime wave dynamic" can account for similarities among school shooting stories - and how well Gans' (1980) conceptualizations of "small-town pastoralism" and "social order" as enduring values in the news account for the school shootings receiving the what-a-story and crime-wave treatments. Finally, I would like to comment on what I see as an over-emphasis of the role of official sources and an under-appreciation
of the dynamics of storytelling in discussions of the manufacture of news.
1. Data and method
Newspaper stories cited in this article were selected in the following manner: Beginning chronologically, I searched the Nexis newspaper database for 10 days' worth of coverage of each of five school shootings that occurred during the 1997-98 academic year, beginning with the date of the occurrence. The idea of using the 1997-98 school year as a frame suggested itself when I read New York Times reporter Rick Bragg's (1998b) story about the shootings in Springfield, Oregon:
Since the doors of the first yellow school bus swung open at the first morning stop last fall, at least a dozen students and two teachers have been slain by schoolmates around the country, in lunchrooms, in schoolyards, at morning prayers. (A8)
The advantages of thus limiting the discussion are that it focuses on the incidents that occurred closest together in time; it bypasses the enormous corpus of stories about the massacre at Columbine High School, and it separates the relatively high-casualty events of 1997-98 from the less-sensational shootings of 1996 and 1999. The shootings at schools in Bethel, Alaska (two dead, two wounded), Conyers, Georgia (six wounded), Deming, New Mexico, (one dead), and Fort Gibson, Oklahoma (four wounded) seem to occupy a sort of second tier of school shootings compared to the incidents at Pearl, Mississippi (two dead, seven wounded), West Paducah, Kentucky (three dead, five wounded), Jonesboro, Arkansas (five dead, 10 wounded), Springfield, Oregon (two dead, 24 wounded), and Littleton, Colorado (15 dead, 23 wounded). By this grim standard, the shootings in Edinboro, Pennsylvania (one dead, three injured) have more in common with the 1999 shootings. I include it simply because of when it occurred and because, as we shall see, the incide
nt gave the lie to speculation that school shootings were a uniquely southern phenomenon.
I have left out coverage of a school shooting in Fayetteville, Tennessee (one dead), on May 19, 1998, on the other hand, because my Nexis search showed only briefs or mention of Fayetteville in stories about Springfield, which occurred two days later. When two blockbusters happen at the same time, one tends to get covered at the expense of the other, as happened when Pope John Paul II visited Cuba during the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 or when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited North Korea during the presidential election recount battle in Florida in 2000. Littleton seemed to raise the newsworthiness bar for subsequent school shootings. The enormity of the events at Columbine High School led newspapers to treat the shootings in Conyers, Deming and Fort Gibson as little more than the aftershocks of a major earthquake. A chart of my Nexis search shows the correlation between coverage and casualties:
Site
Coverage Dates
Search Results
Wounded
Killed
Pearl, Miss.
Oct. 1-11, 1997
8
7
2
Paducah, Ky.
Dec. 1-11, 1997
64
5
3
Jonesboro, Ark.
March 24-April 3, 1998
509
10
5
Edinboro, Pa.
April 24-May 1, 1998
43
3
1
Springfield, Ore.
May 21-31, 1998
180
24
2
It is important to keep in mind that any Nexis search will turn up briefs, editorials, columns, letters to the editor and often, identical wire service stories and syndicated columns that appeared in multiple newspapers. For the purposes of this study I was only interested in those columns and longer stories (more than 500 words) which a) linked the present incident to previous incidents, b) took up the anomalousness of the incident, or c) discussed possible causes of the incident or the series of incidents. The use of a 10-day time frame for the coverage of each incident follows Berkowitz's (2000) tracing of the arc of the what-a-story from incident, through "shock at the tragic intervention of fate in our lives" (p. 130), to the rituals of closure - return to the normal school schedule and memorial services -- which typically occur within 10 days of the shooting.
Like Berkowitz (2000), I ground my examination of these stories and columns in a tradition of inquiry that Altheide (1996) calls qualitative document analysis, "the major emphasis [of which is] to capture the meanings, emphases, and themes of messages_" (p. 33). It is worth noting that there is an emic dimension to this approach insofar as it replicates the Nexis searches that the reporters themselves typically perform. When we recognize similarities among newspaper stories we are not just seeing professional news-gathering and news-writing routines independently yielding similar stories; we are seeing the overt influence of each story on every subsequent story.
2. School shootings and news values
Hall et al (1981) single out "an orientation to items which are 'out of the ordinary'" as "the primary or cardinal news value" (p. 336). At the same time, they note that the journalist's job is not merely to offer the audience "a jumble of random or chaotic events," but to make sense of those events, to "bring them within the horizon of the 'meaningful'" (p. 337).
Sense-making begins with a process Tuchman (1978) calls "typification." An assigning editor discerns a resemblance between the anomalous occurrence at hand, and others the newsroom has covered in the past. The strategies that were used in covering the previous stories are then deployed to cover the new story. Tuchman shows how even a "what-a-story" (I would substitute the less awkward term "blockbuster," which I have heard in newsrooms where I have worked) like President Johnson's surprise announcement that he would not seek re-election in 1968 will be "typified and thus made routine" (p. 62).
Fishman's (1981) study of crime waves delineates a counter-process whereby routine stories are framed as instances of some larger phenomenon. The mugging of an elderly New Yorker becomes more newsworthy when it is seen as "the latest instance of the continuing trend in crimes against the elderly" (p. 102). Here is a fundamental journalistic paradox: An incident that, by itself, is not especially anomalous, becomes so when linked to other similar incidents. A wave of crimes against the elderly violates social norms in a way that an isolated crime against an elderly person does not.
A school shooting is inherently more newsworthy than a mugging because it is more violent and will probably involve more witnesses, if not more victims. A perceived wave of school shootings threatens the status quo to the same degree as a wave of crimes against the elderly: A civil society expects to be able to protect its most vulnerable citizens from harm. Parents need to feel confident that they are sending their children to a safe place. Thus, unlike the crimes against the elderly in New York in 1976, the school shootings of 1997-1998 were individually handled as what-a-stories and collectively handled as instances of a crime wave. What is remarkable is that the school shootings began receiving the crime-wave treatment so quickly. Fishman counts 89 stories of crimes against the elderly over a six-month period. In USA TODAY'S account of the shootings at Heath High School in West Paducah - the second in the series -- reporter Paul Hoversten (1997) noted that "the Kentucky shooti
ng came just two months after a bloody rampage at a high school in Pearl, Miss." The New York Times sounded a cautionary note in a story headlined "Despite Recent Carnage, School Violence Is Not on the Rise" (Lewin, 1997). The story acknowledges that the shootings in Pearl and West Paducah "seem to signal a rising tide of school violence," but cites research by the National School Safety Center showing that less than half as many students had been killed at school in 1997 as in 1993. In the same day's Times, Bragg (1997) raised the issue of whether what happened at Pearl inspired what occurred at West Paducah. But the story goes on to quote a classmate of the boy charged in the shooting who, in Bragg's words, "doubted any connection."
Still, the similarities among incidents were too striking to ignore. USA TODAY (1998) hyperbolically characterized the Jonesboro shooting as "the third mass killing in a public school in the past six months." Here too, the foregrounding of the connection among incidents is counterbalanced by data showing that "aside from high-profile horror shows, schools are still safe." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch took the connection a step farther, sending a reporter back to West Paducah to see if the shooting in Jonesboro had "reopened wounds" (Williams, 1998). Bill Duryea (1998) of the St. Petersburg Times offered driving directions from Paducah to Jonesboro as his way of linking events in the two towns. A month later, in a story about the shootings in Edinboro, it was enough for USA TODAY reporter Rick Hampson (1998) to merely invoke the names "Jonesboro and Pearl and West Paducah." No boilerplate copy with the dates and the number dead and wounded from that town was necessary. "Suddenly," the paper editorialized a day later, "a troubling coincidence looks like a terrifying pattern" (USA TODAY, 1998). For a story about the Springfield shootings, Bragg (1998b) interviewed people in Pearl, Paducah and Jonesboro.
The killings, Bragg wrote, seem to be part of "a new national trend." Peter Hermann (1998) of the Baltimore Sun called Springfield "the latest in a series of shootings by students at schools across the nation." Ellen O'Brien (1998) of the Boston Globe described Springfield as "a familiar scene to many Americans: Blood-soaked and shellshocked teenagers leaving schools where their classmates have declared war on them, stunned and confused adults saying they never saw it coming. With five deadly shootings at schools in small towns across the nation in the last 15 months - the latest Thursday in Oregon - the images are still shocking, but no longer surprising to many."
Burns and Crawford (1999) cite a welter of statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, the National School Safety Center, the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Department of Education and The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics to support their argument that the school shootings were "idiosyncratic events and not part of any recognizable trend" (p. 155). "Ironically," they say, "the shootings may have received such intense coverage because of the infrequency of these occurrences rather than their frequency." Crime waves, says Fishman (1981), are really media waves "that may or may not be related to something happening 'on the streets' or in the police crime rates" (p. 100). Noting that New York Police Department statistics actually showed a slight decrease in crimes against the elderly during the period of the crime wave, Fishman goes on to say that his purpose was not to call attention to the disparity so much as to use the crime wave stories as a wind
ow on how news judgments and reporter assignments get made in the newsroom. Once editors have perceived a connection or "theme" among disparate occurrences, Fishman writes, they are likelier to commit resources to any given instance of the theme. Pearl was the first of the school shootings to receive the what-a-story treatment. Part of what was identified as familiar about the coverage of subsequent shootings was the media invasion:
For the third time in five months, it happened this way: First, students were inexplicably gunned down at the one place thought to be a sanctuary within the community, the local school. Then, frantic parents made a mad dash for the schoolyard, a frantic media horde hot on their heels. Then, residents reacted with horror, to the media as much as to the shooting. Finally, parents, residents
and media all came together and asked why, one of many questions officials couldn't, or wouldn't, answer. (Moehringer, 1998)
3. The Heartland Angle
Reporters were quick to note similarities not just among the crimes, but among the settings. The teen who shot up Heath High in West Paducah, wrote USA TODAY's Deborah Sharp (1997), "joined an exclusive but troubling group: students stalking small-town classmates." Sharp's story quotes Bill Modzeleski, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Safe and Drug-Free Schools program, who addresses the supposed anomalousness of school violence in rural or suburban or "heartland" settings: "It's shocking when it happens in West Paducah, more so than in a Detroit or Los Angeles, because we don't expect it."
A Kansas City Star story about the Jonesboro shootings begins thus: "Larry Salinger thought he had left violent crime behind when he moved to Jonesboro, Ark., eight years ago" (Avila, 1998). "Most of us don't feel something major is going to happen here," says Salinger, a criminology professor at Arkansas State University. "But you know what's odd? These things seem to happen at small schools more and more." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Jonathan D. Silver (1998) also finds a source who moved to Edinboro "to escape the crime and violence of New York," only to discover that " 'kids are dying everywhere.'" Here is how an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story about Jonesboro begins:
It can happen anywhere. And it does.
Long numbed to the violence of the inner city, many Americans still react with shock when violence shatters the serenity of small-town life. (Timms & Drew, 1998, p. 6A; see also Harrop, 1998)
In the Star story, John Devine, director of a safe-schools project at New York University, confirms that kids in suburban and small-town schools are as susceptible to "drugs, guns and troubled family relationships" as their counterparts in the city. Nevertheless, in story after story, residents say, "It isn't supposed to happen here" (Bragg, 1998a; see also Williams, 1997a).
From Edinboro, USA TODAY'S Rick Hampson (1998) reports that "random violence had again stabbed into the heartland" - in this case, a "college town of 8,000, where violence once meant a few bar brawls and where the small-town school violence that exploded in Arkansas and Mississippi and Kentucky once seemed impossibly remote." The violence in Springfield, writes the Sun's Peter Hermann (1998), fit the pattern of the other school shootings: "It happened in the most unassuming of places."
What does it mean to characterize a town as "a good place" (Hampson, 1998) or "a good and decent" place (Bragg, 1998a) or as a place of "easy-going innocence" (Williams, 1997)? Where do reporters get the idea that violence does not happen in small towns?
Crime statistics, misleadingly used, provide part of the answer. "Although juvenile crime is going down in the cities," writes USA TODAY's Hampson (1998), "it is going up in the countryside. A USA TODAY analysis of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports found that juveniles in rural areas were arrested for murder and manslaughter at a higher rate in 1996 than in 1990." That may be, but as Daniel Akst (2000) wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "many more people are struck by lightning each year than die by violence in school." (p. W17)
The best explanation of the news media's crime wave and what-a-story treatment of the 1997-1998 school shootings is that the incidents violated two sets of what Gans (1980) refers to as "enduring values" in the news -- "small-town pastoralism" and "social order." In his discussion of social order, Gans defines two broad categories of news: disorder stories and leadership stories. An inveterate categorizer and sub-categorizer, Gans divides disorder stories into stories of natural, technological, moral and social disorder. It is not clear whether crime stories belong with the stories of moral disorder or the stories of social disorder because in marked contrast to Tuchman (1978) and Fishman (1981), Gans makes only passing mention of crime stories. His primary interest is in the coverage of the kinds of disorder that the press saw as threatening "political and social disintegration" (p. xx). In the 1960s and '70s, such threats were thought to be coming not from any routine criminal a
ct, but from political protest (against the Vietnam War and racial injustice), counter-cultural movements (hippies) and official abuses of power (Watergate).
Though Gans never returns to the subject of small-town pastoralism, there is a clear connection between stories detailing "the cohesiveness, friendliness and slow pace" (p. 48) of small towns and stories of social or moral disorder. While the idealization of small towns is an enduring value in American life, Gans writes that increasing news coverage of urban decay in the 1960s heightened "the desirability both of nature and of smallness per se" (p. 49). In other words, amid the social disorder of the 1960s and '70s, small towns, at least as journalists depicted them, stood as beacons of order. And when urban crime eclipsed political activism and counter-culturalism as threats to social order in the 1980s, that beacon shone brighter than ever.
This is what made the shootings in small-town schools seem doubly anomalous. The routinization of urban crime heightened the anomalousness of small towns: They became islands of safety in a dangerous world. But when the 1990s brought word of violent crime in small towns, it meant that even our safest places were becoming dangerous. Schools especially, as J. R. Moehringer (1998) of the Los Angeles Times observes, are "the one place thought to be a sanctuary within the community."
Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts (1999) rightly detects a racial dimension in the insistence upon the anomalousness of small-town violence:
It might be instructive for the rest of us to confront the implied supposition that there are certain places in which youth violence is not supposed to happen. This is, after all, not the first time we've heard that said. To the contrary, we heard it after school shootings in other places, other small enclaves, that had somehow been deemed unlikely: Pearl, Miss.; West Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark.; and others. Not supposed to happen here, folks cried_ (p. E1; see also Hutchinson, 1999)
The unspoken message, Pitts says, is that such things are supposed to happen in the city - and in late 20th-century America, our ideas about the city expanded to include the understanding that it is the place where people of color live. Columnists Froma Harrup (1998) of the Providence Journal-Bulletin and Tony Stewart (1998) of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette berate their colleagues for what Stewart calls their "apple-pie-in-the-oven" portrayals of small towns. Harrup turns small-town pastoralism on its head, suggesting that small-town violence is not anomalous at all, but the result of "exurban isolation."
4. Explaining the Inexplicable
"A tragedy occurs somewhere in America," writes Seattle Times television critic Kay McFadden (1998). "Journalists crowd in, first to explain what happened, then why." As Vincent, Crow and Davis (1997) point out, explanations are reassuring. Once the authorities know what caused the tragedy they can set about preventing future tragedies, or at least putting in place better procedures for coping with tragedies that cannot be prevented. The first attempts at making sense of school violence included three motifs which would recur in the coverage of subsequent incidents. The students suspected of conspiring in the shootings at Pearl High School "had a penchant for wearing black clothing," according to The New York Times (Sack, 1997). Police said they may have been members of a satanic cult. "I killed people because people like me are mistreated every day," Luke Woodham wrote in a notebook he kept prior to the shootings (Sack, 1997).
To the problem of bullying and nihilistic cliques, coverage of West Paducah added the possible influence of the mass media. "The revelations" that shooting suspect Michael Carneal had talked about doing "something similar" to the violent school takeover depicted in the movie, "The Basketball Diaries," wrote Atlanta Journal and Constitution reporter Mike Williams (1997b), "are sure to renew the debate over the violent content of movies, television programs and rap music." Carneal, Williams wrote, "dressed in grunge fashion, with baggy jeans and old shirts." But he associated with a group of kids who "dress in black, paint their fingernails black," according to a local school board member (Bowles, 1997). Bragg (1997) reported talk that Carneal was an atheist.
When two boys shot up their high school in Jonesboro less than four months after West Paducah, Los Angeles Times reporter J.R. Moehringer (1998) wrote that the crime "seemed to follow a familiar pattern," but that pattern was more than just one of school violence. The shootings in Jonesboro, "seemed to obey the rules of a strange new ritual emerging here in the rural South" -- this despite the fact that the "first" school shootings took place in Washington state and Alaska. The Jonesboro shootings touched off an outpouring of columns blaming school violence on the "gun culture of the South" (Pompilio, 1999).
When, a month after Jonesboro, Andrew Wurst, 15, opened fire on an eighth-grade dance at a gym in Edinboro, all talk of the "southern-ness" of the crime wave quickly ceased, to be replaced by columns that pinned the blame on "bad parents, cliquish students, ignorant school administrators and do-nothing police_the pernicious influence of the Internet, video games, violent movies, and_the prevalence of guns" (Seigal 1999, p. 85). Friends of the 14-year-old Edinboro suspect said "they nicknamed him 'Satan' because of his affection for the shock-rock band, Marilyn Manson" (Bucsko and Kane, 1998). In a story on the Springfield shootings, Boston Globe reporter Ellen O'Brien (1998) interviewed an attorney involved with the families of victims in Jonesboro, who said, "It's going to be hard for the national media now to pin it on a Southern gun culture."
Inevitably, the reporters had to include their own output among the possible causes of school violence, though the print journalists seem to prefer blaming their counterparts in television. "Attention is attention and this is the ultimate attention-getting," the principal of Heath High School in West Paducah tells Rick Bragg (1998b) after the shootings in Springfield. "I mean, getting your picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek. That is going out in a blaze of glory." A Seattle Times story quotes from a message scrawled from a paper bag and hung on the Thurston High School fence that blames the media for sending the message that "it's all right to go shoot out a school because the media wil make you famous in 15 minutes" (Postman, 1998). Also after Springfield, a New York University psychologist raised the "copycat" issue in an interview with Tamar Lewin (1998) of The New York Times: "There is a kind of contagion with these events," said Richard Gallagher. "When they get a lot
of attention it's as if the barrier that kept it from happening gets broken." Chicago Sun-Times editor Nigel Wade became something of a journalism hero when he attempted to reduce the risk of a copycat crime by keeping the Springfield shootings off the front page.
Perhaps the sign that the cycle of coverage has exhausted itself is when the columnists turn their gaze upon the coverage itself and condemn "the rush to judgment, the rush to explanation, the rush to speculation" (McFadden, 1998). In the end, all the "emphatic guesses (Leo, 1998) seemed to cancel each other out, leaving only the bafflement of those directly affected by the shootings. "Why did he do it?" asked a teen in Pearl. "There's no answers. Just a bunch of blank minds" (Bragg, 1997). "The main question is, why," Sheriff Frank Augustus told USA TODAY reporter Paul Hoversten (1997). "That question is not going to get answered." In Springfield, the school principal told citizens at a City Hall vigil, "We might as well stop asking why. We will never know" (Hermann, 1998).
The news media's failure to provide reassurance in the wake of the school shootings draws our attention to a limitation of constructionist studies of news production. These studies expect the reporter to behave as a member of a bureaucratic institution who obtains information from members of other bureaucratic institutions and writes an account that, in Tuchman's (1978) words, "legitimates the status quo" (p. 5). Examples are drawn from the work of beat reporters. Routine crime news, says Chibnall (1981), is essentially police news; that is, the reporter rarely gets a run-down on a crime from the criminal himself, but from those whose job it is to apprehend the criminal. Similarly, Hall et al. (1981) identify three types of crime news -- police statements about a case, the state of the war against crime, and trials - all of which rely primarily on official sources. Yet what story of natural or man-made disaster, or heinous crime does not include a story about the witnesses or the
neighbors or the survivors or the grieving loved ones as part of the package? The very predictability of such stories suggests that they too are part of the newsroom strategy of routinizing the unexpected. While I can hardly argue with Gans' (1980) numbers when he asserts that reporters rely far more on "knowns" than they do on "unknowns" (pp. 8-13), I believe that those numbers reflect the dominance of beat reporting at most news organizations but do not adequately account for the dynamics of reporting stories that lie outside the work of routine beat coverage.
The reporters who covered the school shootings made the requisite calls to the experts, but the real story was not the anomaly of school violence but the anomaly of school violence in small-town America. To tell that story, the reporters went looking for local sources who were willing to express their dismay that such a terrible thing could happen in such safe place. They may even have cast aside reactions that would not help them highlight the anomalousness of their tale. It may be that constructionists, with their preoccupation with the press as a bureaucratic institution, overemphasize what Schudson (1989) calls "the conservative, system-maintaining character of news" (p. 267) at the expense of its storytelling function.
5. Conclusion
Constructionist studies of news go a long way toward accounting for similarities among the stories different reporters write about the same events, as well as similarities among the stories that the same reporters write about different events. Tuchman's study of the dynamics of the what-a-story, Fishman's study of the crime wave dynamic and Gans' inclusion of small-town pastoralism and social order among the enduring values that inform journalistic practice are particularly helpful in accounting for similarities among stories about the school violence that occurred in 1997-1998.
Among those similarities, however, was an emphasis on the inexplicable (and therefore unpreventable) nature of each incident, both individually and as part of a series. That emphasis on the anomalous throws the constructionist paradox into bold relief: On one hand, the anomalous is a cardinal news value. On the other hand, the news media's role is to offer reassurance that the status quo will withstand the assault of the anomalous. Resisting all attempts at explanation, the school shootings remind us that sometimes, the act of imposing narrative form on shapeless experience is about as much sense as we are able to make.
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