I don't have much to add to the avalanche of coverage regarding the Virginia Tech shootings. Graduating from the University of Texas, and having the Whitman bullet holes pointed out to me by a far too enthusiastic sophomore during my campus orientation tour, I'm somewhat familiar with that sense of unease that comes from taking a daily trip over the site of a mass murder. However, I can't begin to imagine what the friends and families of the victims are going through, or how tough it'll be going back to class next week.
Anyway, big surprise, we found out the shooter was a bit of a loner. Even worse, he indulged in "twisted" writing:
A student who attended Virginia Tech last fall provided obscenity- and violence-laced screenplays that he said Cho wrote as part of a playwriting class they both took. One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw. Another was about students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who sexually molested them.
[...]
Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said Cho's writing was so disturbing that he had been referred to the university's counseling service."Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be," Rude said. "But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."
So, he wrote screenplays that aped the plots of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Sleepers?
I've lost track of the number of times I've been thankful for being born long enough ago so that this kind of thing didn't really raise a lot of hackles when I was young (or if it did, I wasn't aware of it). There were several of us in high school who wrote things that could charitably be described as "excessively murderous," though we tried to temper it with humor. Even so, I doubt we could do the same thing today without getting hauled in front of an army of therapists and fed hefty doses of chlorpromazine.
Can't say if it would've helped Cho.
EDIT: Having just read Richard McBeef, one of the plays in question, I have two things to add:
1. If this is the quality of writing coming out of our upper level university English courses, America is truly doomed.
2. Everything we wrote in high school had a higher body count than that, though our stuff usually included elements like invisible super soldiers and sentient flying doughnuts.
And they just kept a chainsaw lying around the kitchen?
after reading cho’s plays and listening to comments from people who came in contact with him that there may have been an incident of molestation in his life. There seems to be a lot of evidence to suggest this may have happened to him. It would explain the anti social behavior, and agression in which he showed. Also he would become psychologically fixated on women, perhaps to the point of stalking and voyourism. His inability to cope with real situations and people, such as avoidance, lack of eye contact due to shame. His striking out at male authority figues especially in his writings and lack of respect. His intolerance of others, the possibility he thought himself superior. The feeling of inadequacy, the fear of failure, and being substandard. The traditional school of thought that the first intended victim(a female)was out of reach, unatainable through perhaps a negative experience, was in itself a catalyst.
One of the writings in question is a play called Richard McBeef, and it is truly a masterwork. It’s certain to become a performance staple at elementary schools across the land.
Remember writing at colleges is judged on the creative writing department’s standards which means they grade on the students’ possible employment in another creative writing faculty. English departments and teaching English have ruined many a good writer.
On the creepy student scale, unfortunately, I have seen worse. This kid may not have raised many warning flags prior to this incident. It is easy for people to note, “oh, yeah that guy, I knew it!” now. On the creepy people on campus scale? I have worked with people who have definitely made this shooter look rather normal and banal.
That is really the thing. We hope mass murderers are monsterously strange so we can somehow predict or spot them. But the really frightening thing is just how banal they are. His roommates say he did odd things like “get up early.” Well, that is sort of odd for a college student, isn’t it. He liked violence. Well, so do a lot of young men. He stalked women. Why didn’t the police find him creepier than usual. They took him in because he needed counseling. Many college students do.
Was this shooter creepier than Charles Whitman? Well, he was a Marine and an Eagle Scout. Now you are really going to get comments.
History repeats itself… Other schools & Universities have increasingly become a place of target for psychopaths with guns! Most schools & Universities have a “lock down” policy
in the event of any type of violence. Did the officials at V-tech miss the past 10 or so years of violence in our nation? What about all of the class mates, roommates, teachers, professors, the women who had been stalked by Cho, his parents, friends, people in the community….Did anyone think of the warning signs? I know after Columbine many schools & universities across the nation spent time in sensitivity training & classes about warning signs, officials were warned to “lock down” thier facilities at the first sign of serious violence. What went wrong?
I don’t think that the answer is to blame, but I would say everything went wrong & the above mentioned people all had a responsibility to do something! I wouldn’t say they are to blame. The person to blame is the one who killed these innocent people, Cho. But, we should all take some time out of our day/week to think about the people we have known in the past, who, maybe weren’t “quite right”, or “picked on” by others… was there something I could have done? Reflect on the past, on history. NOW! Look I will look at my life in the present the “now”, co-workers, classmates, people I see in the community regularly… pay attention & do something if someone exhibits violent & introvertedly abnormal behavior! Don’t blame after the fact, but act, be proactive.
To the Virginia Tech officials,
I doubt that a violent action on campus will every be treated with such calm. You better put a “lock down” plan on the books in case of an emergency. If anyone is ever murdered on your campus again, classes better be cancelled & students stopped from entering the campus. If you can’t learn from the history of other schools, please learn from your own.
Sad for all…Jenn
English departments and teaching English have ruined many a good writer.
Uh, have you read the “play” in question?
Was this shooter creepier than Charles Whitman? Well, he was a Marine and an Eagle Scout.
He was also clinically depressed, had an abusive father, and suffered from a brain tumor, though no one is able to say how much that affected his behavior.
Not that there aren’t creepy Marines and Eagle Scouts, of course.
I teach 9th grade English, and yesterday I had my kids write briefly about this event, how they reacted, how much they worried about these things, what is a realistic level of precaution. And then we ended up talking about all of the issues raised, including gun control, security, the “slow response,” media coverage. I was encouraged by how level-headed and aware some of my kids are. I had kid after kid come into class today and want to talk about what they had seen on the news, how five minutes of facts could be turned into three hours of coverage.
I have only referred three kids to counselors for exhibiting behavior that scared the shit out of me (one last week), but never for any specific actions, which makes it very hard for anyone to do anything. I’ve had a few hundred students; you get a pretty good feel for who is just dark, who likes gore for the sake of gore, who likes shock value, and who is really really angry. It’s scary to watch day after day; most of you never see people like that, the truly anti-social emotionally crippled time bomb, because most of them don’t end up in the mainstream population.
One final note. In one of my classes we tallied up all of the school shootings we could think of, added them up, and just to be safe, doubled it. We came up with 130 (which it turns out is not too far off from how many people have died in school shootings in this country from Charles Whitman to present, 40 years). Then I wrote the number 114 on the board. That’s the number of people that die in automobiles every single day in this country (in 2005, anyway). Why worry?
Hmmm….
Cho wrote disturbing plays full of violence and bad grammar.
Pete writes disturbing blogs full of violence and bad grammar.
Cho grew up in an average suburban home.
Pete grew up in an average suburban home.
Cho moved from S. Korea as a child.
Pete moved from St. Louis as a child.
Cho harbored a seething rage against rich kids who made his life miserable.
Pete harbors a seething rage against directors who make his life miserable.
Cho’s father worked as a dry cleaner.
Pete’s father sometimes took his clothes to a dry cleaner.
Cho had a unnerving obsession with guns.
Pete has an unnerving obsession with movies about guns.
Cho was Asian.
If Pete doesn’t have his contacts in, he kinda looks Asian.
And perhaps most damning….
Cho has three letters in his name.
Pete has three letters in his name (not counting the double “e” twice.)
Now I don’t want to cast any aspersions here…
FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THE VICTIMS AND THE WORLD NO MORE PICTURES AND STORIES ABOUT CHO. LETS FOCUS ON THE VICTIMS AND STOP GIVING THIS MURDERER WHAT HE WANTED. THERE ARE MANY IMPRESSIONABLE MENTALLY UNWELL PEOPLE ON THE EDGE WHO GOD FORBID MIGHT BE CAPABLE OF WANTING TO DUPLICATE CHO’s RAMPAGE! WAKE UP MEDIA! HELP STOP THE MADNESS!
What comcerns me at this point is the COPYCATS. How many other criminaly insane, or just plain stupid punks are now going to seek this attention? This kid has now Matyered (spelled wrong) himself. WE are all in shock over this but there are many , too many, in this country who are saying “dude, that was soo cool”. Hopefully, out of all of this everyone will be a little more aware of “who” their neighbors are. Even then ,many times,
no one believes that their neighbor could of been a criminal. This is our safety zone, we rationalize all we see to keep it our safe zone. I found that when confronted with a new situation or a new person usually my first impression is the correct one. My mind hasn’t had the chance to rationalize or make excuses for anything. If you listen to people who were in contact with this kid at Virginia Tech this is what they were doing. They rationalized his behaviour. “we thought he was just quiet” , but as soon as something happened,reality set in “I bet it was him”. Do I think that the authorities at VT messed up ? I really don’t know. I do know that many folks that have been in counceling become very good at knowing what and what not say, and how to act in front of the councelors.
But when teachers have to invent a CODE WORD to use because they fear a perticular person is going to be violent, as they did with this kid, then something is not right. These are teachers, not psycho ward nurses. I think that what happened is going to make everyone more aware for a while. But as humans we will all fall back into the trap of rationalizing again.
I have to say after reading the McBeef thing, that if that’s what this kid was producing in College, that he was at least mildly mentally retarded. I wont leave out unstable, but the writing is poor, there is little plot and the ‘child’ in the play (supposedly 13?) speaks in a manner that doesn’t pertain to the appropriate age. Clearly you can see that this person had a troubled home life, at the very least, and little writing talent. Or if he had talent, it went right down the tubes with his logic and reasoning.
It’s hardly a wonder that he was able to slip by the radar…but it should have been nipped in the bud. That was NOT college level writing. I’m having a hard time believing it was truly authentic…
I attended CAPA (High School for Creative & Performing Arts High School) in Philadelphia way back in the late 80’s. We had three courses on writing (Imagination, Exposition, Journalism) and we were ENCOURAGED by our teachers to write the most way-out-there stuff and a handful of us succeeded. It’s very disturbing to me in that now this work is being disseminated and scrutinized to look for clues into the mind of a disordered individual, a connection to sociopathic behavior. After the wake of Imus, “free speech” is now being analyzed for signs of either racism or terror.
I made a crack on the Huffington POst a few weeks ago about just how long it will be before authors are beheaded and filmmakers are knifed in the back for the words and picture they choose to use. The irony was this had already occured (Theo Van Gogh springs to mind). Then with Cho, you have legions coming out of the woodwork to say they were disturbed by his writing - oh come on! They, and the news networks who foolishly spout off about this are worrying about the wrong thing. Now I present a list of writers who’s work was also deemed “disturbing”.
Ovid, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, the recently departed Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Philip K. Dick, Brett Easton Ellis …
While I’ve never been one to write murderous plots (just isn’t my thing) I had the same thought. I hope the investigators don’t believe this nonsense and will probe deeper.
I believe our media to be a bit shallow on this one with this sort of reporting being nothing more than something to fill mic time.