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Pondering the Queen's Day Attack

As Slate's foreign editor, I'm always aware of the odd and sometimes iffy news priorities the media invokes when deciding what "foreign" stories to cover. And because I'm prone to guilt (despite being neither Catholic nor Jewish), I spend a lot of time wondering why I'm more interested in one place than another—even when, all too often, the stakes, the body counts, and the atrocities are much more mind-boggling in the place I just can't get all that excited about.

I mumble all this psychobabble because I'm currently obsessed with the developing story of the vehicle that drove into a Dutch crowd gathered to greet Queen Beatrix on Queen's Day, a national holiday. As Britain's Daily Telegraph put it:

Witnesses said that the black Suzuki Swift appeared to deliberately target an open bus carrying Queen Beatrix and her family. ... The car swerved across police railings, where crowds of people were waiting to see the queen pass, and slammed into the foot of a stone monument, where it came to a halt, its bonnet crumpled and scraped.

Thus far, there are reports of four people dead and 13 injured, and authorities seem to have agreed it was a deliberate assault.

Still, four people dead? What's that compared with the body count in the Democratic Republic of Congo? What's the horror of having a car drive at you when you're waving at the monarch (even a cute, right-on one like Beatrix) compared with what civilians are being put through in Sri Lanka? Am I just reacting this way because I've been in a crowd like the one in Apeldoorn, whereas I've never, say, gathered firewood like the women of Darfur (a task that leaves them prone to all manner of horrific abuses by marauders and Janjaweed militias)?

Or perhaps it's a gay thing. Queen's Day is a very gay holiday in the Netherlands. Could this morning's incident be a homophobic attack? Yes, that's my excuse, I'm watching out for my people. OK, guilt gone.