I've been thinking a lot about Cho Seung-Hui this evening.
My chain of thought, to arrive at Cho Seung-Hui went something like this. I was watching Toyah Willcox performing I Want to be Free again, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that she was, in the video, trying to break out of a prison of her own making. Let me explain. She is depicted as being confined in some kind of cell with two representatives of normality peering in at her through a window. But this is, of course, a set – a film set. It is not actually a cell, but a stage that has been built for her. Presumably it cost money. Who was paying? It must have been the record company, Safari Records. I don't know enough about that company to be able to say whether they represented 'the establishment' in some way. But Toyah was also given a stage (or platform) to play at being imprisoned and escaping from that prison on Top of the Pops, The Kenny Everett show, and so on. You could say that society had accepted her. The stage they gave her was a safe prison cell from which she could escape safely. (And since the cell was counterfeit, perhaps her escape was, too.)
This reminded me of what Morrissey said in interview about the occasion on which he was questioned by the FBI:
I don't belong to any political groups, I don't really say anything unless I'm asked directly and I don't even demonstrate in public. I always assume that so-called authoritarian figures just assume that pop/rock music is slightly insane and an untouchable platform for the working classes to stand up and say something noticeable.
But what if the authorities do not allow this film set of a prison cell, in which members of the working class can safely rampage and throw plastic spoons about? Or what if someone can't even break into this film set of a prison cell?
That's when I thought of Cho Seung-Hui.
This is what I wrote in an e-mail to someone at the time of the Virginia Tech Massacre:
I've been kind of interested in the Virginia Tech massacre, too. Obviously, it's kind of unimaginable what it would have been like to be there and the whole thing is horrific, but when I read the newspaper reports and they focused on the writing of this character, which those around claimed was "surreal" and "morbid" and so on, I couldn't help feeling like I might have been Cho Seung-Hui in a past life or something. I mean, I feel like it could easily have been me. And there was something about a play or story he wrote in which a father (step-father?) was choked to death by his son – choked to death with a rice-crispie bar.
That's such an unexpected image. It's weirdly pathetic.
It occurred to me that perhaps the only difference between myself and Cho Seung-Hui is the fact that maybe I can write a bit better. I don't know why, but I feel confident that I am a better writer, even though I haven't actually read any of his stuff. And that this is the difference, and somehow the reason, or the most telling symptom of the reason, why I'm not doing the same thing he did. I mean, I have often and explicitly thought of writing as a kind of revenge, somewhat in the way you described in a previous e-mail.
I kind of feel that Cho Seung-Hui is basically Mizoguchi, from Kinkakuji, but maybe I'm projecting that. Anyway, I certainly feel I understand the idea of being a kind of total loser who feels himself in some way 'forced into this' because people are simply unable to accept him. There is no doubt he has now had an incredible impact on a great many lives.
I was prompted by my various thoughts on the matter to look up information on Cho Seung-Hui again this evening, and I finally got round to reading the play referred to in my e-mail – Richard McBeef. I've also now seen it performed. There are a number of versions on YouTube. I think my favourite so far is this one, though they all have their different virtues.
What do I think of the play? It's not the work of someone savvy with regard to getting published or garnering critical acclaim, but it is undoubtedly a work with resonance. I can imagine that some people who were taking the same class as Cho Seung-Hui were turning in assignments mechanically, or as a bit of fun. This is neither of those things. There is some matter there. This is a person with a desperate need to say something. I don't think I am able to say precisely what I would think of the work without the association of the massacre, but it has the fascination of a rancid piece of meat with flies buzzing around it.
My e-mail about is dated the 19th of April, 2007. At around this time a novella of mine had been accepted for publication, and at some later date, I was asked if there were any particular illustrators that I was keen on for the cover of the book. After some thought and research, I sent an e-mail giving the name of my first choice. I received an e-mail back telling me that, indeed, the artist would have been a good choice, but, unfortunately he had been killed in the Virginia Tech Massacre. I was shocked. How could this be? I visited the artist's website again. According to the website he was living happily with his wife and cat. For whatever reason, the website had not been taken down or updated since his death.
Ian MacFarlane, former classmate of Cho Seung-Hui apparently passed on Cho Seung-Hui's plays with a note to AOL News. This is from the note:
As far as the victims go, as I was heading to bed last night, I heard that my good friend Stack (Ryan Clark) was one of the first confirmed dead. I didn't want to believe that I'd never get to talk to him again, and all I could think about was how much I could tell him how much his friendship meant to me. During my junior year, Ryan, another friend and I used to get breakfast on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Shultz Dining Hall, one of the cafeterias on campus, and it was always the highlight of my day. He could talk forever it seemed and always made us laugh. He was a good friend, not just to me, but to a lot of people, and I'll miss him a lot.
I wonder what would have happened if Cho Seung-Hui had been a better writer, or had, in some way, managed to break into a film-set prison cell, where he could have safely pretended to wreak his revenge and get out.
There are all kinds of possibilities, I suppose. If he had been a really good writer, he might have been good enough to defuse his homicidal urges, but may easily have just ended up committing suicide when he was a little older, perhaps being forgotten, or if remembered, only by a very few. That would have been far more obliging of him.
This is also from MacFarlane's note, about Cho Seung-Hui's writing:
When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn't pressure him to give closing comments.
I do really wonder how my own writing would have been received by the same people. There is a question in my mind. I suppose it's indelicate, but it's only a question, and not a statement. I shall write it here: Was there, I wonder, anything of self-fulfilling prophecy in the worry that Cho was a shooter? Clearly he was regarded as very strange by his classmates. Then again, the way that MacFarlane expresses it, perhaps they did not worry enough:
While I "knew" Cho, I always wished there was something I could do for him, but I couldn't think of anything. As far as notifying authorities, there isn't (to my knowledge) any system set up that lets people say "Hey! This guy has some issues! Maybe you should look into this guy!" If there were, I definitely would have tried to get the kid some help. I think that could have had a good chance of averting yesterday's tragedy more than anything.
To complicate matters further I found a video on YouTube that suggested that Cho may not have been the killer at all. I can't seem to find it now. Perhaps I hallucinated it.
Addendum from Justin Isis:
We are not so different from the Aztecs; we give more attention to Cho killing people than we do to anything beautiful. Killing people to get attention says as much about the society that gives it media coverage as it does about the murderer. We already live in a factory farm, it`s called human society, and in it we are all abused and all eventually die. Why play by the rules of the factory farm? Wouldn`t it be better to blow it up?
Anonymous writes:I think you’re right that there was somewhat of a self-fullfilling prophecy here. Kicking him out of the class, for one, was a bad idea; especially without making sure he got some help. I can only imagine that angered and frustrated him even more, making him feel even more like a reject. Perhaps the best thing they could have done was give his work a first place prize in a staged literary competition to try and build his confidence some. But I’m not suprised things like this happen, this is just how the world is in the so-called civilizationed western nations. Ever been in the US? I imagine it’s not much different from that awful dungeon known as the UK. I’m actually surprised more shootings like this don’t happen. The culture here is so distant and self-centered. Almost everybody acts like a jackass. Then you have all these illegal wars being waged where innocent civilians are being murdered everyday for corporate profit. Ugh… I can’t say enough awful things about this place. I can completely understand why someone would want to learn a different language and move away. His parents should have kept him in Korea. Living in poverty would have been better than living in this place.
Hello. I have been to the U.S., yes. A few times, in fact. The U.S. and the U.K. are a bit different, but not as different as most British people would like to think. Having grown up in Britain, I generally find American optimism refreshing on the occasions that I visit, but there is also (yes) a strong sense of people not really caring about each other. I had the impression that it would be very easy to fall between the cracks in the U.S., and that no one would care if you did. Then again, I think if you do happen to have friends in the U.S., they are perhaps more likely to be proactive in helping you than friends over here, who are apt to think something like, “If a person’s going to hang themselves, there’s nothing you can do about it.”I’m not really sure what would have been the best way of handling the situation with Cho. Someone told me that they thought I was giving a misleading impression in this post, because Cho was not bullied, but psychotic. He did, as far as I can ascertain, have a history of mental illness:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seung-Hui_Cho#Court-ordered_psychiatric_assessmentHowever, I didn’t mention this in my blog post simply because I’m not sure what mental illness is. I think it can be a way of brushing things under the carpet, not thinking about them, simply to label someone mentally ill.In any case, he had problems of one kind or another. I suppose it would be responsible to assume that the massacre was preventable, in order to prevent similar incidents in future. The most general, blanket prevention for this kind of thing would be a society in which people cared about each other, but, of course, it’s hard to legislate for that kind of thing.