Posted on 04/21/2007 10:14:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Just before 5am on Monday, April 16, Cho Seung-hui got out of bed and walked to his computer. Perhaps he fiddled with his rambling 1,800-word self-portrait of a killer as the insults and grievances that he had been nursing for years coursed through his head.
High on his list were his classmates from Westfield high school, who jeered at him to “go back to China” without bothering to check his nationality. Two of them — who happened to attend Virginia Tech — were going to pay later that day. Then there were the college girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning.
“By a name, I know not how to tell who I am,” he had written to one of them. He understood literature, he could have thought, while they didn’t have the brains to recognise that he was quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Spurned by them, he had to make do with a fantasy girlfriend, a supermodel who called him “Spanky”.
On the way to the bathroom Cho bumped into his roommate Karan Grewal. As usual, Cho didn’t try to speak to him or even nod hello. He swallowed his antidepressants, put on his contact lenses and applied his spot cream. As he picked up his weapons, a Glock 9mm pistol and Walther P22 handgun, and twisted back his black baseball cap, he clearly did not want to be remembered as the kid with acne.
Watching just a few minutes of the rambling manifesto of paranoia answers the question which the US has asked itself for three days: why did he do it?
At 7.15am, campus police were alerted to a shooting at West Ambler Johnston residential hall, a two-minute walk from Cho’s own hall. Witnesses heard screams and the eerie “pop pop” of a semi-automatic weapon before finding the bodies of a young man and a young woman sprawled on the floor in the hallway between the men’s and women’s dorms.
The dead girl was Emily Hilscher, 19. Perhaps there was something about her that reminded Cho of another girl he had fancied — the one he had sneaked into the women’s dorm to see but, as a roommate recalled, “When he looked into her eyes, he saw promiscuity”.
Was Ryan Clark, 22, her boyfriend? Cho didn’t know but he shot him anyway. Deprived of sex himself, he regarded those who were getting it with malevolence. “All your debaucheries weren’t enough . . . to fulfil your hedonistic needs,” he had ranted on his pre- prepared “martyrdom” video.
He went back to his room and recorded one last QuickTime video clip. It was 7.24am, according to his computer log. “This is it. This is where it ends. End of the road. What a life it was. Some life,” he said agitatedly.
But Cho wasn’t finished yet. He still had more scores to settle and fame to seek. He downloaded 28 video clips onto a DVD, which showed him posing with his weapons like the star of a Quentin Tarantino film or Lara Croft, and set out for the post office, past the police cars that had arrived outside the dorm. By the time he arrived it was 8.45am.
It was tax-filing day in America, but as a student he didn’t pay any. The queue in the post office surprised him, though he waited his turn patiently as he rehearsed his next acts of violence in his mind. He posted his multimedia manifesto to NBC News, went back to his room, grabbed his weapons and set out for more killing.
This time he would target professors as well as students. He walked across the campus to the teaching block at Norris Hall, where he chained the front doors so nobody could escape. He may have remembered some lines from Mr Brownstone, a play he had written: “He gave me a D, when I only forgot to turn in two homeworks.”
As he gunned down Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French lecturer, science professor Kevin Granata and Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, he may have thought again of the professor in his play who “ass-raped us all — isn’t that what teachers do?
“I wanna watch him bleed, the way he watched us bleed”. Now he was fulfilling his own prophecy.
As for the students, they could forget his sympathy. He fired at them again and again, scattering their flesh across the floor. Most of his victims, girls and boys, were shot three times. Sometimes he would return to check whom he had killed and who was merely playing dead. His face was blank, but his emotions were seething.
As he said in his video, “You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats, Your gold necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs . . . You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing.”
The baby-faced Cho was 23, an adult by most people’s reckoning. In any other era it is doubtful he would have thought of himself as a boy or described his fellow students at Virginia Tech as “brats”. Trapped in the perpetual adolescence of the student, he has become a new monstrous poster child for boys who would rather kill themselves and others than grow up.
Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.
Cho swallowed his medicine, but it failed to stop him carrying out the biggest mass murder by a lone gunman in American history. By the time he turned his gun on himself, 32 students and teachers were dead — more than twice the number killed by the Columbine high school students in 1999.
Colin Goddard, 21, whose father is British, was one of the last students to be shot before Cho killed himself. He remembers the horror he felt as Cho entered his lecture room at Virginia Tech and began firing calmly and methodically at the class. “He had on boots, dark pants and a white shirt. He just started walking down the rows of desks, shooting people multiple times. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t demand anything. He was just shooting.”
The scene at Virginia Tech was hellish. Some students managed to save themselves by jumping from the windows, but those left behind died without knowing what Cho’s grievance was or why they were being punished for his rage.
Yet in death and murder, the silent Cho found his voice, railing at the perceived ills of society and slights to his deranged ego. From the blunt message he posted on a college web forum warning, “I’m going to kill people at Va Tech”, to the mountainous last testament of writings, photographs and video clips sent to NBC, rarely has a killer been as loquacious or left so much evidence of his twisted mind.
“That’s got to be more than he’s spoken, ever,” one surprised graduate student said. “I thought, ‘Well, he does talk’.”
Cho’s parents were hospitalised by shock when they heard of the killings, but some relatives have begun to speak out. Cho’s sister Sun Kyong-Cho said: “This is someone I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn’t know this person.” But in Seoul some family members described Cho as alienated even as a child. After watching the videos of him posing with his weapons, his furious 82-year-old grandfather said, “Son of a bitch. It served him right he died with his victims.”
Kim Hyang-Im, Cho’s mother, was the second of five children, who was obliged to look after the younger members of her family. At 29 she was still unmarried. Fearful that she would become an old maid, her parents fixed her up on a blind date with Cho Sun Tae, 10 years her senior. “Her husband was very serious and quiet and careful with money. He was not very friendly to his mother-in-law and father-in-law,” Cho’s 85-year-old aunt recalled.
Cho’s father scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand bookstore in South Korea, where they lived in a cheap, rented apartment. When relatives invited them to America, they were thrilled at the chance to “provide a better education”, the grandfather said.
The family was already worried about Cho, then eight years old. Soon after arriving in America he was diagnosed with autism. “He was very quiet and only followed his mother and father around but never showed any feelings or emotions,” his great-aunt said. His parents were too poor and busy trying to scrape a new life together to get specialist help for Cho.
They opened a dry-cleaning business, like many Korean immigrants, and moved to a two-storey cream town house in Centerville, Virginia, just outside Washington. In fulfilment of her parents’ dream, Cho’s sister went to Princeton University and now works as a contractor for the US State Department on the reconstruction of Iraq.
Cho chose to study English in at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, a sprawling residential college in the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. It is hard to fathom his rage at the “trust fund” brats with golden necklaces, vodka and cognac and “everything you wanted”, when among his victims were many immigrants like himself, who were proud of making their way in America.
But this carefully manicured campus — home to 26,000 students who called themselves Hokies — was no place for a social misfit. Even Cho used to wear the uniform of the mini-city: an orange or maroon T-shirt or sweatshirt with a baseball cap. Paglia, who has taught in American universities for 35 years, describes America’s residential campuses as vast “islands of green and slack conformity where a strange benevolent and tyrannical paternalism has taken over. It’s like a resort atmosphere”.
Paglia believes the school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. “There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.
“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”
Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.
“Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.”
The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic”, as can be seen by the sad spectacle of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears flashing their lack of underwear during a night on the town. “It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”
The former Virginia Tech student who posted two of Cho’s hate-filled plays on the internet recalls that Cho fitted the “exact stereotype of what one would typically think of as a ‘school shooter’ — a loner, obsessed with violence and with serious personal problems”. But the plays show he was preoccupied not just with girls but with paedophilia and sodomy.
In Richard McBeef, a drama about child abuse, a stepson rants, “I will not be molested by an aging, balding, overweight pedophile [sic]stepdad named Dick”, before threatening to shove the television remote control “up his ass”. It concludes: “I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick.”
Dr James Gilligan, a former prison psychiatrist who teaches at New York University, believes that misogyny and homophobia are a central component of the make-up of violent criminals, who often fear they have homosexual tendencies.
“An underlying factor that is virtually always present is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood and the way to do that, to gain respect, is to commit a violent act,” he says. “It is tremendously tempting to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”
It is not simply an American phenomenon. In Cho’s video manifesto, there are unmistakable echoes of the home-made martyrdom videos of the young male jihadists circulating on the internet.
Cho began working out in the gym weeks before the killings, and the video pictures sent to NBC reveal a bolder, more muscled character than the images of the shy young student released when his name was first identified.
Dressed to kill in black and tan, Cho borrowed the vocabulary as well as the iconography of Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers by hailing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the two teen killers at Columbine — as “martyrs” of the same vengeful cult of death.
On his arm Cho had etched in red ink the nom de guerre Ismail Ax, a possible reference to the son whom Ibrahim (or Abraham) prepared to sacrifice in the Koran, sparking a torrent of speculation on the internet about his religious motives.
Others suggested that the student of literature was merely thinking about an American novel called Ishmael about a young boy growing up outside Washington, just as he did. But Cho was also explicitly drawn to Christian symbolism and its own veneration of martyrdom.
“Do you know what it feels to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?” he railed on video. “You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your whole lives. You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.”
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes the common denominator between the terrorist suicide bomber and the suicidal mass murderer is their sexual frustration and gender. “It really is young men between 15 and 30 who are responsible the vast majority of crimes, although it is politically incorrect to say this too loudly,” he says.
Suicide bombers and the Virginia Tech killer, Fukuyama suggests, “fall into the same demographic of young males, a lot of whom are unemployed, without a clear place in the social hierarchy. These guys have the most to gain and the least to lose by martyrdom”. And often, he adds, they are upset about girls “whose attention they can’t get”.
Fukuyama believes that Cho’s case is “fairly unique” but “the maleness is important”. In his essay Identity and Migration, published by Prospect last February, he writes that radical Islamism should be understood in the context of identity politics.
“We have seen this problem before in the extremist politics of the 20th century, among the young people who became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Baader-Meinhof gang.” It is not specifically tied to radical Islam, he insists.
Yet Cho’s ethnicity may have prevented the university authorities from intervening in his life, Paglia suggests. Voicing a theme that conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh have taken up with gusto, she wonders whether political correctness about his background and culture may have led them to make excuses for him.
“He was Korean and so people were hesitant to declare he was abnormal in American terms,” she says. It is no accident, she believes, that the two female lecturers who were most suspicious of his behaviour were themselves not white.
One professor, Nikki Giovanni, known as the “princess of black poetry”, was the first to raise the alarm about Cho’s writing. It did not feature hardcore violence; but it was weird. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to rip your heart out’,” she said. “It’s that, ‘Your bra is torn and I’m looking at your flesh’.” When female students said they were scared of him, she wanted him out of her class.
Giovanni reported her concerns to Lucinda Roy, a British professor of literature who was then head of the department. She was so disturbed by Cho that she contacted the university police and went on to give him individual lessons — after devising a code word which, if ever used, would be a signal to her assistant to call security.
“You seem so lonely,” she told him. “Do you have any friends?”
“I am lonely,” Cho replied. “I don’t have any friends.”
The lone gunman is a familiar figure in American mythology. “In American culture you always have the rough-edged loner, the anti- establishment figure which goes all the way back to the silent films and westerns and continues through Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Marlon Brando,” says Paglia.
In Cho’s case, there were echoes of Taxi Driver, the story of a stalker. The promiscuity that Cho saw in women was “a huge warning sign”, Paglia believes. “You want them, you want the status of being seen with them, you’re driven towards them and at the same time they are contaminated, they are dirty. That’s exactly the mentality of the stalker and assassin played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. There is an apocalyptic impulse to destroy everything and to purify the world.”
In a twist to the debate on masculinity, some commentators have complained that the terrified Virginia Tech students were no Rambos when it came to defending themselves. John Derbyshire, a right-wing British writer based in America, wondered, “Why didn’t anyone rush the guy? Yes, I know it is easy to say these things, but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?” — a reference to the passengers fighting back in the 9/11 hijacked plane.
The columnist Mark Steyn took up the theme with an essay on the “culture of passivity” that is overtaking America. In his view, students are becoming so infantilised that they have lost their capacity to take responsibility.
“In a horrible world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself and others,” he believes. “It is a poor reflection on us that in those critical first seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor understood instinctively the obligation to act.”
Librescu, 75, forced his body against the door to prevent Cho storming his classroom, gaining time for some of his students to escape. He was shot dead. But there were younger heroes, too, such as Derek O’Dell, who was shot in the arm but managed to wedge his foot in the door and prevent Cho from re-entering the classroom.
Another student, realising that a friend was playing dead, was said to have deliberately drawn Cho’s attention to himself as the gunman searched the room for survivors — and sacrificed his own life.
“When someone opens the door of a classroom and begins firing with a semi-automatic weapon, there is no fighting back possible,” says Paglia. “All of this happened too fast for the young men or young women to rush the shooter and bring him down.”
Paglia is a defender of the constitutional right to bear arms in America. She is troubled, however, by the ease with which Cho bought his weapons. “The problem is not hunting guns but these semi-automatic weapons. He could not have cut down that many people so quickly or with such brutal efficiency without them. They have no use except for commandos, swat teams and paramilitary organisations.
“This is part of the plague that has come with the drug culture in the inner cities,” she says. “Cho’s use of semi-automatic weapons can ultimately be traced back to gangsta rap. It is a fabrication of urban life which is sold to teenagers trapped in the utterly sterile shopping-mall culture of the American suburbs.”
“Throughout most of human history men have been armed, but with swords not guns,” Paglia observes. As the weapons grow more deadly, even a solitary “boy” can commit the worst massacre in American history. This is the 19th such scenario in the past decade. Unfortunately it is unlikely to be the last.
I don’t think there is any mass murderer or terrorist who was born as such. Some may be born with violent tendencies or lack of inhibitions but I don’t think most that can be said of most mass murderers. I think there is value in understanding what core events planted the hate and opened the door to evil but I think we should never confuse our understanding for what was the plight for a lonely troubled human being with the excuse of their attacks on the innocent.
That is still the thing I don’t fully understand but of course the key step is when they generalize against the world....However would any of us say they are not right in their condemnation of it? That is what makes it especially difficult. We have a world were many of the safety mechanisms that once put in place a clear moral code, a safety valve for the pressures of the heart, where frustrations could be dealt with in prayer and one could find strength in their personal persecution and rise above it. The sense of something greater in the back of your mind and in your heart. So that no matter how angry, you knew the limits of your rage and where the line was.
Now we have psychologists and a priesthood of chemists who try to differentiate between a “chemical imbalance” and the manifest depression of a lost soul as if to suggest the whole brain and ever action and event does not have an effect on the structure and operation of our brain. They tell us that we are no different than animals when it is clearly obvious that the truth is otherwise whether one believes in a creator or not. I can not think of one chimp mass murderer in the history of the world though I’m sure some males rip just born chimps from their mothers and beat them against the rocks till they are dead so that they can copulate with her. I suppose this is a similarity the exception being that we are more clinical in the cold execution of that horror.
That coldness and the pervasiveness of mock concern and empty love will guarantee more and more mass murderers. Just as the madrases churn out more brain washed children aspiring to death. Is there any surprise that the up tick in the frequency of mass murder especially in relationship to schools begins with the 60s? It is ironic that those hedonistic principles of “free sex” and radical indiscriminateness denying the belief in concrete “right and wrong” has helped fuel the feelings of meaninglessness and emptiness in so many. That which was supposed to free us to be happy and without conscience has made so many of us unhappy without conscience.
I might observe, with a good natured chuckle, that something well and carefully written is worth an equally careful read. I chide myself for dashing off a series of hasty posts. I say what I mean, but..... always regret my own lack of care.
You are right in there being no excuse for "attacks on the innocent". It seems that again and again it is the innocent who are destroyed. They always make an easy target. Essentially people like Cho are cowards.
Your statement echoes one of the ideas contained in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," (published 1932). The ideas that took root in the 1960's did not emancipate, they eventually destroyed.
“What is being indicted in this article is the educational system and the feminist dominant social norms that screw up our young men over and over again by not allowing them the outlets to be young men.
There’s a lot of truth to that. Cho was an extreme example of what happens, but many young men have problems they should have if we weren’t living in such feminist-idealistic pc dorky times...IMHO, after seeing what the system has done to a lot of young men who no longer have the freedom to be fully male in positive ways, where people the popular culture looks up to are almost all dysfunctional entertainers and sports figures, and nobility of purpose is pretty much not inculturated anywhere.”
Thank you, I’m disappointed nobody else has yet caught on to the fact that this is what the article is getting at. I especially like the line that describes studenthood as being stuck in perpetual adolescence. It really did feel like that to me in my college career, and after the first half of college I began hating it because it all seemed so meaningless, especially when much more important things are happening in this world.
C.S. Lewis spoke at great length about it also. I’ve not read Huxley’s book but I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. The idea that if only we got rid of the guilt and shame in relationship to sexuality we’d all be healthier and happier. I do believe that there have been benefits coming out of the 60s but at a very high cost. We needed the ability to let our hair down a bit and relax and instead we get a rancid distortion of human sexuality packaged as entertainment and enlightenment which it most surely is not.
We can largely thank Freud and his progeny for this.
Once again he’s a victim and we are the reason for his mental illness, There is one thing the administration forgot to do, they did almost everything else to accomodate him GET HIM A HOOKER! Some how I believe they thought about this. Sick and getting sicker folks
Our child was similarly picked on. I'm normally direct and blunt. Professional but blunt. I let the principle know it should stop.
We were informed that our home environment was likely the problem and that the school was requiring us to go to see a school paid counselor.
A friend was a psychologist qualified to do the review and told us all to come on down to his office. We did. He wrote a letter to the school to correct its behavior. In other words, telling the principle his school was the problem.
That put an end to their assault on our family but incredibly it did nothing to stop the abuse of our child by the other children.
I had warned the principle that I would get a lawyer. We did that. Turns out the school had another suit against it over the very same thing. I was called into the principles office and given assurances they would correct the situation.
It did get a bit better but still the hurt was there. And what was most apparent was that the teachers and the administrators were as childish as the kids were. I also wonder what would have happened if I had not had a friend to intervene on the sociological review.
I probably should have quoted your entire post - the bit I did copy could read a bit funny.
But on to your excuse about dropping the italics-to-quote-format. I suppose if you are merely being obstinate and not ignorant it is OK. Ignorant on FR is definitely a no-no. Obstinate is what all of us get to be from time to time...especially when it has been some years since we have done it.
FReepRegards, BJN
I am glad you were able to get the situation under control. My daughter only spent a year in public school (my son is autistic- in public middle school- and if he is teased, he is luckily oblivious.) She had a bullying problem that was not resolved in that year. The one time she fought back, she was disciplined. I have a real problem telling my child that fighting back is wrong. She is back at the private school now. The bullying still happens from time to time there, but the school is more responsive than the public school was.
It takes a lot of hits to the self esteem to be bullied. I grew up in a non-dysfunctional home, but I have had to work really hard on my self-esteem as an adult- and that is a result of school not my family.
I did see a good therapist (after I married someone who ended up a bully) that helped me see the kids who were so mean most likely had their own problems at home.
You being there for your child will negate a lot of the ill effects.
Talk about blaming hte victim! Blaming society for what these miscreants do is one of the oldest liberal tricks.
Can you think of that one kid that was outcast, picked on, left out, alone?
Yeah. I was one of those kids. There is no possibility that I would ever react like this sicko did.
I was also the kid that went out of his way to befriend the new kid, the unpopular kid, and the others who weren't "popular." So don't try to seel me this rubbish about how he did this because he was picked on.
Talk about blaming hte victim! Blaming society for what these miscreants do is one of the oldest liberal tricks.
Can you think of that one kid that was outcast, picked on, left out, alone?
Yeah. I was one of those kids. There is no possibility that I would ever react like this sicko did.
I was also the kid that went out of his way to befriend the new kid, the unpopular kid, and the others who weren't "popular." So don't try to sell me this rubbish about how he did this because he was picked on.
English degree? And a social misfit?
His job prospects mostly involved “would you like fries with that?”
Still, on the other hand, I think an accurate picture made in the article of some of the less englightening things about modern, nihilistic American culture, and particularly the weird state of life on our campuses, cannot be denied. This is what we refer to as American cultural meltdown. Eroding moral values, when combined with a powerful weapon, can bring about such grief...do the libs really even understand that they have made this bed that we all have to sleep in now???
AND
The Fear of God is a good thing. It is also the starting point of a happy life.
Very very true and THE reason why this behavior was rare in the past, despite many rural adolescent males possessing guns.
Uh, yeah, that’s it - he became a homicidal psycho because of missing manhood.
It’s one of those moments of truth for us, and our responses to it say more about us than about the madman. I figured, and it turns out that I was just about right, that this lonely, ostracized guy, paid these women a compliment, however clumsily he did it, and as is the custom in America of the Zeroes decade, they reported it as “stalking”. That is straight out of my corporation’s sexual harassment policy handbook. You may not, you are verboten to say to a woman co-worker that she looks nice today, or off to the re-education camp with ya, comrade. (And, oh yes, you’re fired, if she complains.)
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