"He ranted against rich people, old white men and the culture of corruption.
Of course we're going to sue. That little rascal stole our talking points."
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Posted on 04/17/2007 7:58:26 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
AOL News has obtained two plays a classmate says were written by Cho Seung-Hui. Ian MacFarlane, the former classmate and current AOL employee, provided us with the plays. A note from Mr. MacFarlane and links to the works appear below......
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbloggers.aol.com ...
Small attempt at humor. If I was running their English Department, I wouldn’t want any more of this guy’s works to be made public.
As far as the quality of the writing, technically, it is difficult to judge. Most of it is dialogue, so liberties with the language may be attempts at character. The attempt to portray character through angry words is an immature writer at work. Character comes out through action, and there is very little action in either piece. It's a common mistake.
A friend of mine teaches business at a university in New Jersey. On occasion, we'd have a couple of beers and he'd read some examples of what his students submitted for grades. I think he was trying to get me to come up with a creative way to say 'F.' Some of it is uproariously funny; I would have repeated at least a year of high school if I wrote papers like that. Grammar, spelling, and syntax are alien concepts to many students who were raised in English speaking households. But none of it rises to the level of anger in these two examples. I wonder what his other writings are like.
I imagine “McBeef” is being shopped around Hollywood as I type.
I’m also curious about the note, isn’t it 3 or 4 pages long? I wonder if that’s what he was doing in the couple of hours before the shooting, writing and re-writing.
How do you know what Cho was taught? He most likely is to some extent familiar with the ten commandments. It almost sounds like you’re inferring that anyone exposed to a certain teaching, ie. “thou shalt not kill”, absorbs and conforms to that teaching. What about rebellion amongst young people, especially to conformities and parameters “taught” to them by anyone. It is unfair and unrealistic to blame the University, or any other, for that matter, for warping the values and beliefs already instilled in him before enrollment.
I understand after reading most of these posts that people seem to want someone or something to blame for this, and that’s a natural human response. The problem is that the issues and debates surrounding the arguments on this comment page alone arouse more anger and perhaps even hatred that may be misdirected, and the last thing we need in this tragic time is more hate being manufactured and aroused by the bellows of speculation and hasty conclusions.
This page is supposed to be comments about two plays that we know very little about. I have my own theories and inferences, but there’s not enough information here to conclude ANYTHING except our opinions of the content and the quality of writing of said works.
Does anyone have any idea when Cho composed these works? This information is critical, especially in relation to the psychiatric speculations regarding aspergers and such posted above. Let’s wait for more information and keep an open mind...
Well said friend.
I do not claim to know what they did or did not do, nor what they did or did not know. You make it sound as if they raised their child to be a notorious mass-murderer. I seriously doubt that.
At some point people start making their own decisions and this guy was in his 20s and a senior in college. Many people are raising children and holding down a job or two by that age.
He is responsible for his own actions, and blaming his parents is crap, not that they will not feel the shame and horror of his actions. Doubtless shallow thinkers looking for someone to point a finger at will blame them for his own adult actions.
But, this is America, and if you can't blame someone, how in the Hell can you sue them? Right?/sarc
This is why he was going to graduate. Most liberal arts professors are relativists, afraid to pass judgment on content lest they appear too judgmental. So they grade the grammar. This particular student was smart enough to have figured out the language without understanding anything about the nuances of the culture that the language is a part of. I'd be curious to know what his GPA was. I suspect it was in the mid 3's, which would shed quite a light on the nature of today's higher education system.
There are a lot of students out there who want to be the next Quentin Tarantino, and there are plenty of communications professors willing to push them in that direction. This kid's writings were no more shocking than a typical Tarantino script. The difference is pretty much in the the writer's having no depth of understanding as to what drives the characters to violence.
The line that separates "art" from "fart" is very, very thin these days.
In high schools public *and* private across the country, freshmen were (and probably still are) required to read a book that involved a malicious and perverted father raping his daughter, then burying in the back yard the baby that she bore. She later went on to marry an abusive man, and found "rescue" in becoming a lesbian. Sorry for the shocking details - but this has been put forth to 14 and 15 year old kids as "literature."
Now we're shocked that an English major generates more of the same for class assignments?
Very insightful commentary. Apparently he did have a reactionary response to just about every interaction. Most people don’t react with a Glock, thank God.
mark for later reading
Has anyone reported where he went to High School? I heard he spent some of his childhood in Detroit. Debbie Schussel has pictures of someone who looks just like him taken by a woman in Indonesia (home of largest Muslim pop. in the world). She refers to him as Ismail because his real name (Cho....) is too difficult to pronounce. He is smiling large in this picture. Other pictures of girls in head scarves.... following the dots..................
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He went to high school in VA. In fact, the same high school as one of his victims (the girl whose brother, sister and father were interviewed yesterday, can’t remember the name, but she was beautiful and a dancer.)
I think the Detroit connection is where the families entrance point on his Green Card was listed. I never read that he actually lived in Detroit.
I do realize that excessive authority to haul people off to mental hospitals can be abused. I think the key issue is “privacy laws”. These laws are really in direct conflict with the First Amendment, and have the effect of preventing anyone from putting all the pieces of the picture together. This works against both those individuals who really need to be locked up, and those who are the target of a vindictive or unreasonably nervous person. If all the pieces of information about this young man could have been freely passed around between professors, administrators, counselors, police, and staff at the mental hospital where he was once taken, I’m sure it would have become clear that he was severely and dangerously disturbed, and needed to have responsibility for his mental health and his every day actions taken out of his own hands. In your case, free exchange of information would probably have had the opposite outcome — with assessments of the few who imagined you were really dangerous (or said so because they wanted to get rid of you for some other reason) offset by many more assessments that you were no threat at all, and that those who were “out to get you” had some other concealed agenda.
For example, I seriously doubt that there was anything like this to pass around about you, but I also seriously doubt that this information about Cho had been freely passed on to anyone and everyone who was in a position to take action:
It emerged today that at one stage students were so scared of his behaviour that only seven out of 70 turned up for class, forcing lecturers to give him one-to-one tuition.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23393119-details/article.do
Just a lot of bla, bla, bla. Facts are, he did it. He didn't know right from wrong. Schools are to teach you what you missed or didn't get at home. And our public school systems don't do that any more.
Bush got it right at VT when only he mentioned a 'loving God'. Unsaid was that Islam does not have a loving God, nor do liberals, they are their own God.
Reagan and then Gingrich had it right in their attempt to dump the Department of education. It's long over due.
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