Lone gunman not just an American psychosis, say experts CHO Seung
Huis first victim was Emily Hilscher, 19. Perhaps there was something about
her that reminded him of another girl he fancied the one he sneaked into the
womens dorm to see but, a roommate recalled: When he looked into her eyes, he
saw promiscuity. Was Ryan Clark, 22, her boyfriend? Cho didnt know but he
shot him anyway. Deprived of sex himself, he regarded those who were getting it
with malevolence. After posting 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. At the teaching block at Norris
Hall, 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 several lecturers,
he may have thought of the professor in
his play who ass-raped us all isnt that what teachers do? I wanna watch
him bleed, the way he watched us bleed. As for the students, he fired
again and again, scattering their flesh across the floor, sometimes returning
to check who was playing dead. Humanities professor and author of Sexual
Personae Camille Paglia 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 Amist: he became addicted to the moment where impotence becomes
pre-potence. When relatives of Chos parents invited them to America,
they were thrilled at the chance to provide a better education, his
grandfather said. But Paglia believes few American schools are 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 social rat race, Paglia says. The
pervasive hook-up culture at college can be a source of resentment and
alienation for those who are left out. Young women now seem to behave like
men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very
confusing, and rage and humiliation builds up in boys who are spurned again and
again. The student who posted two of Chos hate-filled plays on the
Internet recalls that Cho fitted the stereotype of what one would 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 central components 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 ones manhood and
that the way to do that is to commit a violent act. It is not simply an
American phenomenon, he says. In Chos video manifesto, there are echoes of the
home-made videos of the young male jihadists circulating on
the Internet. Cho began working out in the gym weeks before the killings.
Dressed to kill in black and tan, he borrowed the vocabulary and iconography of
Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers by hailing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
the two teen killers at Columbine as martyrs of the same cult.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes the common denominator between
the suicide bomber and the suicidal mass murderer is their sexual frustration
and gender. Young males, a lot of whom are unemployed, without a clear place
in the social hierarchy ... have the most to gain and the least to lose by
martyrdom and often, he adds, they are upset about girls whose attention
they cant get. In his essay Identity and Migration, Fukuyama 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. The lone gunman is a familiar figure in American mythology.
In Chos 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 and at the same
time they are contaminated, dirty. Thats the mentality of the assassin played
by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. There is an apocalyptic impulse to destroy
everything and to purify the world. ©The Sunday Times, London
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