4/25/07: Yes, Virginia, There is a Sanity Clause
Last week a terrible event sent shock waves rolling through a nation. On Apr 16, Seung-Hui Cho, a severely disturbed So. Korean student, strode into a girls' dorm at Virgina Technical Institute in Blacksburg VA and murdered a young man and woman. An hour later at a building across the campus, he expressionlessly went from room to room like a black wraith. He lined up and shot over two dozen more people, a number of which were women. Then he leveled the gun at his own face, squeezed a round off, and entered immortality.
Now without overly politicizing the incident, and trying to take a tack on it that perhaps no one else has, the first item that attracted my attention was the murder of the girl. Who was she? News reports talk about her bright smile and her easy, outgoing nature. But that's extremely surface--it really doesn't say anything about who she was. All I heard from the news was person after person saying how weird and creepy Cho was. No one said one bad word against the girl. If she was a loose or immoral girl, would we have been treated to interviews from ex-boyfriends who would attest to this? I think not. Was she and her male companion who died with her perhaps in the throes of passion when Cho entered her room, gun cocked? We don't know. We don't even know if she and Cho had a relationship, in even the loosest sense of the word. I haven't even heard anything about the dead girl in days--the last thing was that the police were checking her and Cho's phone records to see if he might have told someone about his scheme, a la a B-movie villain--which (being an old newspaperman who knows how to read between the lines) means they're trying to figure out if she and Cho were having a secret affair that ended poorly. They can't say this, of course, because, no matter what, you can't bash the girl. If she had led the guy on and then shut him down, he's still a creep, and she's the innocent victim of a bad relationship. If the tables were turned and she had shot Cho, then it would come to light what a creep and a pervert the guy was, and she'd be lauded. If she had gone on a rampage and killed thirty men, pausing only to spout the requisite crackbrained feminist slogans, she'd be a goddess.
The case, at least initially, had all the earmarks of a Sweet story: a man betrayed by an unfaithful or immoral woman seeks a violent, ugly retribution. In "Smitten With Her", his name was Ernest Mentero. In "The Second Mrs. Pecker" it was James Pecker. In "Virago" I called him Leslie Heische, and in TIRESIAS, Antonio Mitcheson. My heroes--a man who loses his lover because of a deep personal revelation and falls in the arms of a diseased strumpet, a cuckold who poisons his wife and marries her sister, and two gun-wielding stalkers. So too, was this a quintessential Sweet setting: a small town, a college campus. In Cho's diseased mind this girl deserved death. If it had stopped there, it would have been at least understandable, if no less tragic. But it took an ugly turn when he shot another thirty innocents, most of which made no mistake worse than not sleeping in that morning. I imagine he didn't even know their names, nor they his. What was Cho's connection to this girl, if any? Were they ever involved?
Then it took an even uglier turn when it came to light that between killings Cho mailed a press kit of sorts to NBC, containing a dozen or so photographs of himself, many of him aiming his weapons of choice at the camera, and a ranting, angry videotape. In it he spewed forth a garbled, furious gospel of hate against a world he felt was against him. This video manifesto has been played ad nauseum on NBC, drawing much criticism for its sensationalism of violence and the granting posthumous fame to a psychopath, to say nothing of inspiring future psychopaths. Indeed, only two days later a student in Florida was taken into custody when he was found mapping out a plot to top Cho's record. This ambitious young man's scheme would take the death toll to three digits.
I believe the free and easy pace of college breeds these angry, lost individuals like mushrooms in a dark cellar. Buffets three times a day! Free no-questions-asked sex with hot girls who randomly phone your room for the purpose of propositioning you! The promise of a career after graduation with virtually no training! No wonder a college student's perspective gets screwed up so badly! They come out of four years of an academic Neverland with nothing to show for it but a mountain of student loans, a thickened waistline, and a few nifty new prejudices.
What do we know about Cho before he arrived at V-Tech? We know he was seen as deeply troubled, even suicidal, by his parents, neighbors, and peers. He was the prototypical "quiet" type. High-school peers tell of snide comments and verbal abuse (e.g. "Go back to China"). One report tells he was in counseling for a time. I know from experience that most of these college counselors are nothing more than mind-numbed bureaucratic drones from judicial affairs who work in cubicles little bigger than a refrigerator crate, wear ugly cheap suits, probably drive ugly, cheap little cars, and don't really give a damn about you. If you actually are smart enough to outline a plan for them to help you get to the root of the problem, they don't want to go to the trouble, usually brushing you off with an "I don't think that's necessary". Trust me, there is no one who can compliment you and make you feel like crap at the same time like a j.a. dean. I think they go to special courses to learn that skill. So there's one piece of the puzzle: pushed into the shadows because of the "lock-em-up-shut-em-up-dope-em-up" mentality of our society, which puts a Band-Aid (TM) on a bleeding stump and sends you on your way, he simply marinated in his own madness, forlorn and helpless.
I maintain that people like Cho are not born; they are made. I must wonder about this guy. Did he ever enjoy a moment of happiness? Did he ever truly belong? Did he have a girlfriend, or someone he thought could be a girlfriend? Did he pursue extracurriculars? His teachers point to his extremely disturbing short stories, full of blood and violence...but I know some small-press pulps who publish that sort of thing frequently, and none of these authors ever took up a gun against their schoolmates. If he had had the proper outlet for his creativity, he might have actually been a productive and useful member of society--or maybe his blowup would have happened two, five, ten, or twenty years down the line. My mind returns to my first theory: some sort of loss as the impetus. After three years perhaps the bloom was off the rose for Cho. Maybe his perfect job dried up, his perfect ten girl left him, and those sumptuous meals were making him fat and gassy. The future after college looked bleak. So all that was left for this fartknocker was to go out in a mad blaze of glory less than six weeks before graduation.
Folks knew what the guy was. His final tantrum against the world was years in coming. So why did no one step in and take action? Well, ostensibly college is the ultimate bastion of tolerance, accepting any sort of perversion and deviant behavior quietly, saying nothing for fear of offending someone, though ironically being the most intolerant and conformist institution outside of Stalin's gulags. You can pee in the stairwells and have sex with a goat in your room, but you can't say or print anything critical of those who do such things. If Cho had made an anti-gay comment within a hundred-yard radius of a homosexual staffer, student, or townie who might be coincidentally passing by just then, the University might have stepped in and done something about him. But he didn't, so his frustration and his lunacy quietly festered as he stalked young women, penned his creepy stories, and mumbled his way through English 101 or simply sat quietly with that blank, unsettling stare.
Here's another puzzle piece: poor communication and poor policing of entry points into campus. I have long expressed the need for better security on college campuses--stiffer checkpoints at main roads, regular patrols of side roads, screening incoming calls to dorm rooms. The Small-Minds in administration usually cry budget woes or make mumbled references to George Bush's wiretapping program and the Nazis. However, there were at least ten open ingresses to the V-Tech campus, and early on it was thought, before it was learned it was a student who did this, that an outsider had simply walked in and shot up the joint. The security at Arkansas State is no better. What's to stop a disgruntled ex-student or disturbed townie from simply walking in and writing his own bloody sequel to the Virginia slaughter? I should note I myself was banned from campus in 1999 after my dispute with my former bosses escalated, and I was threatened with arrest if I ever set foot on campus--of course, I am not the violent type; I'm more of the "lampoon my enemies mercilessly in print" school of retribution.
Which reminds me: the first installment of "SweetTart" hits webstands this Friday, and part 2 is scheduled for May 25. This is the one based on my experiences in the newsroom, and it's a lot of fun to draw for me. Basically the worse someone hurt me, the uglier they are as they come out of my pen...so on one hand you have the heroine, who looks pretty cute--and on the other, you have the copy editor who looks like a jug-eared version of The Joker, and the faculty advisor looking like Jabba the Hutt f--ed Mimi Bobeck from THE DREW CAREY SHOW. I've still got another half a dozen pages to finish, so adios for this week.
Posted by Fekul_the_Baby 04/25/2007 10:52AM PDT
