cho
been thinking about the cho kid…and how uniquely american the campus killing is, and how he’s expressing exactly what so many yankees seem to feel – isolation, alienation, humiliation….
the obvious solution to these problems seems integration. you know, if he had some mates there on campus he wouldn’t have blown everyone away…and yet, the response from the american media has been exactly antithetical to this kind of solution…
first they have a neurologist pointing out that “his brain made him do it”…what the fuck does that mean? of course his mind/brain was in a similar state to other killers, since they were doing the same thing…but how did his brain/mind get to be that way?…how did it become constructed into that formation trough internal and external causes?
also, there are comments by fellow students who describe his face as “evil” and say that he was “wicked” and so on…which is now further going to stigmatise the next lonely kid…instead of saying, let’s try and help these poor suffering tormented fucked up kids, it’s now like – ooo, watch out, they’re time bomb’s ticking away and we have to catch them and lock them up before they go off…i mean, the way they’re now accusing the creative writing teacher and counsellors because “they should have read the signs”…i.e. they should have recognised the face of satan when they saw it…
everybody feels so sorry for the victims, but nobody seems to feel sorry for this kid, and if somebody had, it might not have happened and then they would have had nothing to feel sorry about…
April 27th, 2007 at 4:00 am
Hey Anton
Yeah, Cho. Cho is now and will remain icon – forever stripped of personhood. But strangely it seems he iconicized himself, whereas ‘icons’ are traditionally crystallised as such by the abbreviating collective perception of audiences. What I mean is that it’s almost as if he never felt himself a person in his society, resisted integration into a social system that so obviously disgusted and disoriented him (no pun intended). As if he was a shadow, a quiet negation, and the process of iconicizing himself was literally one of making this mute shadow bold, shining in crimson neon and violent outline. These campous slayings are fascinating, and consummately American – like futile counter-nihilistic explosions aimed to highlight the subtle, grin-coated nihilism (depersonalisation/desensitization) of American ‘culture’ ..
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Cho epitomises American culture itself, so why the surprise at his actions?
May 5th, 2007 at 2:40 am
thankyoo and exactly.