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DAILY SHVITZ
The Witch Hunt Begins |
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 by Monica Osborne, April 17, 2007 |
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In the wake of every disaster, we always look for a scapegoat -- someone or something to blame, something at which to point our wagging fingers. Or, in struggling to understand why or how something catastrophic happened, we try to re-trace the steps leading up to the event. We assign new, enlightened meaning to old facts and moments. We grieve, we televise the mourning, and then the witch hunt begins.
After the Columbine tragedy people pointed fingers at violent video games and the music of artists such as Marilyn Manson, insisting that such things warp the minds of young adults and turn innocent children into homicidal maniacs. In response to such accusations, Manson wrote an incredible essay for Rolling Stone called "Columbine: Whose Fault Is It? In it, Manson implicates all of us in the death of the students at Columbine -- it's such a great essay that it's taught in composition classrooms all around the country (mine included). The main point: "America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on."Who will orchestrate the next witch hunt?: This rendering of Manson appeared with his essay in Rolling Stone.
So now I read on MSNBC that the gunman of yesterday's Virginia Tech shooting was a "depressed and deeply disturbed young man whose 'grotesque' creative writing projects led a professor to refer him for psychological counseling."
Fellow students in a playwriting class with Cho also noticed the dark and disturbing nature of his compositions. “His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” Stephanie Derry, a senior English major, told the campus newspaper, The Collegiate Times. “I remember one of them very well. It was about a son who hated his stepfather. In the play, the boy threw a chainsaw around and hammers at him. But the play ended with the boy violently suffocating the father with a Rice Krispy treat,” Derry said. Otherwise, Cho was a young man who apparently left little impression in the Virginia Tech community. Few of his fellow residents of Harper Hall said they knew the gunman, who kept to himself.
Okay, sure, that's a little disturbing, but I think this is just where the scapegoating process begins. Dark, disturbing creative writing projects do not a murderer make. Think of iconic Southern gothic writer Flannery O'Connor, whose stories include everything from girls with wooden legs being taken advantage of to small children being crushed by tractors and farmer's wives being gored by bulls. And what about Edgar Allen Poe? Surely we can think of countless examples of literary greats who were consumed with the idea of death. But, like I said, this is where the witch hunt begins, as we point the first round of fingers at school counselors and teachers who read his dark writing and did little or nothing about it.
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Monica recently finished her dissertation -- "The Midrashic Impulse: Reading in the Face of the Shoah" -- and is now a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish American Literature at UCLA. She has written for Studies in American Jewish Literature, More... |
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Anonymous
I agree with Monica's distrust of finding the easy scapegoat, but I'll have none of her equating Poe or O'Connor with the miserable non-entity who perpetrated the slaughter in Virginia.
To begin with, Monica "...can think of countless examples of literary greats who were consumed with the idea of death." The key phrase is "literary greats", which they were not by virtue of their obsession, but by virtue of the literary alchemy they performed upon it.
Monica may find it instructive to have a look at The Smoking Gun, which has reproduced the "play" mentioned in her post. I think she will find it of no literary, but significant clinical, interest. This is not because the author is obsessed with revenge and death, but because there is no other quality but that obsession-no grace, no force, no delightful or stunning turn of phrase, no peek into something larger than one own's window onto the world-in short, nothing that we look for in a work of literature. Instead, we have a barely coherent tantrum. If it were about something banal, it would merely deserve an F. Given its unrelenting and unalloyed primitive hatred in the absence of an iota of art, I don't think a call to the shrink would be too nannyish.
Anonymous
I don't think Monica is comparing Cho to the great authors of the Western canon. Her point, as I understand it, is that it is pointless to use writing with violent content ("artful" or not) as a predictor of future violence by the writer. Taken to extremes, as schools are wont to do, this could have the effect of stifling creativity in relatively psychologically healthy writers. No subject should be taboo in creative writing, with the exception of libel against identifiable living individuals, or the specific advocacy of violence (by the author in a non-fiction piece) against specific individuals or identifiable groups. Monica is one hundred per cent correct.
Anonymous
The third sentence in my comment above should read, "Taken to extremes, as schools are wont to do *after a highly-publicized tragedy such as Columbine*..."
Laurel Snyder
If I understand correctly, his writing teachers were concerned about him. And as someone who has taught creative writing, I'll offer that you *do* sometimes see in a student's work evidence of the fact that they're struggling. No topic/content should ever be taboo, but it is one job of teachers to try and be aware of what a student's work, in extreme cases, indicates about how best to help them. And universities should take such concern seriously when it comes froma reliable teacher.
I'm NOT saying a teacher should be expected to predict this kind of thing. Nobody could ever expect that, but I do think that creative writing can be a window into how someone is (or isn't) functioning.
xoL http://jewishyirishy.com
Laurel Snyder
I'm not disagreeing with this blog post at ALL! I'm just offering that while I'd defend writing and writing classes and the freedom to write anything to the end... I do think that being aware of what a student's work indicates is not entirely irrelevent to teaching/being part of an academic community, getting them help.
His writing wasn't a cause. But it may have been a symptom.
xoL http://jewishyirishy.com
DSW
Violent videogames. The lawyers are especially excited by this possibility.