v-s.net v0.6

Thursday, 10:07 am in Politics & Current Affairs

For those wondering about the title, it’s from here.

So…  another day, another school massacre.  You must be living in a box if you don’t know about it, and if you haven’t heard the parade of usual suspect touted out as ‘reasons’ for Cho Seung-hui’s actions.  He was trouble.  He was anti-social.  He wrote violent plays and poetry.  It’s the exposure to violent images in the media.  It’s the decay of morality in this Godless, modern society…

You know what?  Bullshit it is.

Watching the news the other night there was something in my gut that went cold as soon as they mentioned “violent creative writing”.  It was the same thing that flipped – albeit less so, since I was far younger and much less aware – at Columbine the second anyone mentioned Doom.  The usual suspects.  Since Cho’s name was released to the press, two of his plays have started circulating on the internet, “Mr. Brownstone” and “Richard McBeef”.  Wiki has the links if you’re curious.  I was.  Curious and somewhat fearful, too, because violent creative writing is what I do, too.  Just like I play Doom.  Just like I’m somewhat anti-social and wear black and watch violent foreign films.  I think there’s a part of me that needs to prove something.  That it’s not enough.  That all those pundits who get rolled out every time this sort of thing happen with their glib explanations are missing the point, whatever that might be.  That it’s not playing Doom, it’s not exposure to violent media, it’s not being ‘different’, it’s not even a combination of all of the above.  It’s… something else.

So I read “Richard McBeef” and, in a perverse way, I was satisfied.  Because by description it was this horrible and violent and disturbing and perverse, the kind of thing no sane human could ever produce.  And on reading it was, well, it was shit, quite frankly.  And I’m saying that as both a writer and a consumer of violent literature.  It was hysterical and laughably badly-written and clichéd.  It had the emotional impact of direct marketing, and even the violence wasn’t particularly violent (a couple of people get slapped, there are some lazy accusations of paedophilia someone mentions a chainsaw).  As literature, it didn’t work.  Not only that, but I’ve seen the same sort of thing vomited up all over the internet by thousands of faceless babygoffs and scenesters and wannabe Miikes.  There’s a talent in visceral horror and I think, ironically, you have to be have a fair deal of empathy to pull it off.  Because it’s not just about the visuals.  It’s not just about screaming “Rape!” and brandishing a chainsaw; if you do that, you get Tarantino.  At best it’s slapstick gore, at worst it’s just… bad.  The writing itself is not the symptom; otherwise authors and directors and death metal bands the world over would be getting up, going out and annihilating their neighbourhoods and… that just doesn’t happen.

The one thing I could say about Cho’s writing was that it was angry.  And maybe comedic, though it was a dark, soul-less, gallows kind of comedy.  Maybe this is where all of Cho’s teachers and peers missed the point.  Lucinda Roy might be well-meaning but, if she’d had a teenage Stephen King or Poppy Z. Brite in her class, would she have tried to refer them to counselling too?  You don’t have to be a spree-killer in training to find the well-meaning but deluded meddling of parents and teachers naive, or the notion that somehow if only you’d fit in and be like everyone else you’d be okay offensive.

Some of us don’t want to be like everyone else.  Ironically maybe, we aren’t uncommon.  I’d bet most people reading this right now, in fact, are agreeing with me.

But we don’t want to be like Cho, either.  That’s the distinction.

I don’t know where it comes from, that line.  I suspect that if I did I’d be far more famous and far richer than I am.  But I do know it’s not in the consumption, or the production, of media.  Maybe media can be a trigger; a little push over the edge.  And maybe people who are… wrong might gravitate towards a certain genre.  Maybe…  but Charles Manson listened to “Helter Skelter”. No doubt you’ve listened to it too; do you want to kill anyone?

It’s too easy.

And guns are too easy, too.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for gun control.  I don’t believe a citizen has any place carrying any kind of weapon, and the notion that you need to be allowed to in order to protect yourself from the government is ludicrous (if a government truly needs overthrowing, then why would you need it’s permission in order to do so?).  As for self-defence… where were the armed students at Virginia, ready and willing to shoot down Cho as he locked them inside Norris Hall?

I’m all for gun control but… I don’t think it’s that simple either.  Certainly ready access to devastating weapons makes spree killings easier, but at the end of the day a gun is only a tool.  The old saying is true.  Guns don’t kill people, people holding guns kill people.  And, like them or not, there are thousands of people who own guns who’ve never killed another human being in their life, nor even seriously entertained the idea.  Just like violent media, guns are not the scapegoat.

It’s something else.  Some deadly cocktail in the human mind that waits and watches and then, suddenly, one day rears up.  Maybe that’s Cho’s greatest horror story.  Not “Mr. Brownstone” or “Richard McBeef” but the visceral splatter of student blood across the campus floor.  Of the terror that grips the human heart knowing that it could be anyone; the kid you sit next to in class who everyone thinks is shy, the man in the cubicle next to you whose laugh always sounds a little strained.  The human brain is very good at pattern matching – too good, really – and after It happens hindsight kicks in and everyone thinks, “Well, we should have known…”

But maybe you can’t know, because for every listed ‘symptom’ there are a thousand people who do the same thing, none of whom will ever have that time part in their brain click off with the resounding ricochet of lead against bone.  And that thought terrifies us.  Terrifies us so much, in fact, that we never ask what might be the real question of why these people do what they do.  Maybe it’s not them, because there is no ‘them’ for it to be.

Maybe – just maybe – it’s us.

• Tags » mourning
• Comments By » ~nounbeast [h], chynna (despair.nu)