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You’re Not a Rebel, You’re Psychotic!
By Michael Weiss / April 24, 2007
The Onion has a way with rubbing up against uncomfortable truths at the least comfortable moments. The satiric weekly's coverage of 9/11 was shrewd and hilarious, yet also oddly tasteful—a near-miraculous editorial feat in the somber weeks of late September, 2001. But if The Onion ever stumbled in its coverage of disaster, it was in "Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying," published four months after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris machine-gunned their classmates and teachers:
Thanks to stern new security measures, a militarized school environment and a massive public-relations effort designed to obscure all memory of the murderous event, members of Columbine's popular crowd are once again safe to reassert their social dominance and resume their proud, longstanding tradition of excluding those who do not fit in.
"We have begun the long road to healing," said varsity-football starting halfback Jason LeClaire, 18, a popular senior who on Aug. 16 returned to the school for the first time since the shooting. "We're bouncing back, more committed than ever to ostracizing those who are different."
The dubious subtext of this parody? The cool kids had it coming.
Let us at once agree that many teenagers are mercilessly tormented in high school, which is essentially an adolescent caste system where good looks, athleticism, and sociability determine one's status. You can choose your pop culture referent here, from Rebel Without a Cause to The Wonder Years to Freaks and Geeks. (John Hughes's contribution to the genre was to argue that money is also a factor, especially in economically mixed school districts.)
But now that a psychotic South Korean undergraduate has outdone Klebold and Harris for intramural violence, and even bucked the pattern of school slayings by perpetrating his on the campus of a college rather than a high school, we've been presented with two explanations of what went wrong.
The first is that Seung-Hui Cho was clinically insane and as such could have been preemptively "profiled." Nothing conditioned him into slaughtering 32 people with premeditation but his own diseased mind. Easy access to semiautomatic weapons enabled him to manifest his psychopathology on a disturbingly large scale, but he was a homicidal maniac to begin with.
The opposing line of thinking is a po-faced caricature of The Onion’s caricature: It runs that Cho was himself the original victim, the inevitable product of his cruel environment. His schoolmates baited him for his race, his shyness, his nerdy interests, his awful, tenebrous poetry, and more or less everything that made him different from themselves. So they had it coming. That Cho finally "snapped" (a quaint characterization of a very deliberate process) and demanded the lives of as many people in his immediate vicinity as possible—and that he tried to maximize that number by chaining the exits and studying his terrain to ensure the greatest carnage—should surprise you in only one respect: that it took him so long.
This is the view that has been taken up by Mark Ames, the editor of the eXile magazine and the author Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.
Here is Ames’s latest piece for AlterNet, adapted in part from his book:
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Columbine Haiku:
Bullies, like feces,
Emerge from the orifice,
Of family pride.
I guess you can add Camille Paglia’s name to the list of people who Mike Weiss demeans as “crackpot theorists” – here’s Paglia in a new article on Salon.com:
“In other news, my reading of last month’s horrific Virginia Tech massacre (which I discussed with the Sunday Times of London’s perspicacious Sarah Baxter) is that it is yet another warning, after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, that our present educational system is an insane pressure cooker, dangerous above all for boys, with their restless physical energy.
“High school (which has become just a frantic, callow rat race for brand-name college admission) is not an eternal principle of the universe. It was invented relatively recently — a point solidly made by Jon Savage in his interesting new book, “Teenage” (which I reviewed last weekend in the New York Times Book Review). Age segregation by grade, in my opinion, is a mechanistic atrocity that spawns ruthless social cliques, who oppress and enrage the losers in the provincial pecking order.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/05/09/scarborough/index.html
Michael,
When I suggested that you should “give up” I didn’t really mean it. I see that you took my words too seriously. You have every right to respond – don’t give up! I know there’s not much to say in the face of so much overwhelming evidence and argumentation, but surely you can come up with something? Don’t tell me a sophist such as yourself is at a loss for his words?
You wonder why there have not been more school shootings. Well, there have been. They happen all the time. Just because you haven’t paying attention doesn’t mean they haven’t happened. Do a Google search and find out for yourself, if you don’t believe me.
Have it your way. All of the bizarre workplace and shootings that have occured over the past 30 years are just a pure coincidence. They have nothing to do with the massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich, nothing to do with union busting, and the deterioration of workers rights…
Excuse me, but I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I didn’t really comment on Librescu. My feeling is that he appears to have performed a brave act. In the passage above, I was merely calling Michael out on his supposed interest (“I’d quite like to know”) in whether or not Librescu had done anything to add to Cho’s list of grievances. Weiss obviously doesn’t want to know, and the line for him was nothing more than what he imagined was a clever put down. It is perhaps reasonable to guess that Librescu had done nothing to Cho, but because none of us at this point know anything about the background of their relationship, one shouldn’t automatically dismiss the notion as an impossibility.
I was about to compose a serious answer outlining some chronological flaw or lack of historical knowledge (Texas, 1966 -this is a bit more than 25 years ago, if we live in the same year), but then your comment on Librescu just makes me think I really don't want to pursue this conversation.
“I’d quite like to know, then, how Liviu Librescu—the aeronautical engineer and Holocaust survivor whose only offense seems to have been shielding students and thus reducing the number of corpses Cho produced—did anything to add to the killer’s encyclopedic list of grievances.”
No you wouldn’t. Because even if he had done something to add to the list of grievances, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. This is not to say that he did, nor is it to argue that any of the victims ‘deserved’ to die. That is not argued nor is it implied in the “subtext” of Ames’ book either. And by changing the subject from a discussion of why these shootings are happening into whether or not the victims ‘had it coming’ you willfully miss the point.
You basically admit in your review that the only explanation for these killings is that the shooters are ‘insane’. So not only do you not offer an alternative explanation, you’re not the slightest bit interested in considering one. You share the unintellectual assumption that most Americans make by just conveniently passing it all off as the doings of psychopaths, and generally something not worth fussing over. If that’s the argument, that all of these workplace and school shootings that are so particular and new to America, should be dismissed as isolated acts of insanity, well, then, you might as well just give up. Pat Buchanan’s response to the VT shooting was that we have to become much more vigilant, mindful and intolerant of “aberrant” behavior, and just today some high school kid with a “4.2″ GPA was arrested for penning an aberrant creative writing essay. I suppose you’re all for this sinister movement?
I personally think the root cause of all this violence is the fundamental cruelty and lack of compassion that triumphs in American society. I have a foreign friend who was recently kicked out of an ambulance after confessing to the crime that he didn’t have health insurance. He had just been knocked off his bike, robbed and beaten up. Bloodied and bruised, he was denied medical attention on the grounds that none of his injuries were “life threatening”. This is but a minor example of course, but how can you justify a society where things like this happen on a routine basis and nothing is ever done about it?
Mark
I hadn’t seen Mark’s piece on Alternet. My bad on that one. And what can I say, I absolutely agree with him, even if you label it ‘perfidious nonsense’ – funnily enough, that denunciation doesn’t do anything to dissuade me. I’d like to once again emphasize the distinction between an explanation and a justification. That the horrible abuse Cho suffered in high school was a cause of his rampage should be OBVIOUS to anyone who can think at all. A recognition of this fact should precede all other discussion.
By the way, Francois, something to think about is the notion that guns have always been easily accessible in America, probably even more so in the past than now. And yet, these school and workplace shootings only began about 25 years ago. What changed? Is it just that more ‘insane’ people are somehow being bred these days?
Michael, I’d like to try to answer your questions as best as I can.
“I wonder how you account for that open solicitation to hunt down and then post the address of one of the Columbine survivors”
Well, I thought it was very funny, for one thing. Novel ideas are hard to come by in American journalism. It was a joke. Rocky’s address never got published, though it very well could’ve been. It might interest you to know that Rocky sent Ames a death threat as a result of that piece. Ames published it all on the eXile.
“or Ames’s comparison of Klebold and Harris to John Brown and Nat Turner”
This is where it gets tricky, I agree. However, I didn’t read it as a straight up comparison. I read it mostly as an attempt to demonstrate that just because society deems someone “insane” doesn’t necessarily make it so. I found his critique of words like ‘insane’ ‘evil’ and ‘weird’, unlike you, extremely compelling and genuine. Anyway, I don’t want you to think I’m ducking this question. I thought his argument on this point was plausible but not convincing. And I questioned him on this in my review. It’s an intellectual provocation, not really a conviction, that’s how I see it. I believe these rampage artists are reacting and responding to a fundamentally unjust society, but because that’s vague in comparison to a more specific menace such as the institution of slavery, this is an obviously vulnerable point. However, I think it’s reasonable to assume that most white Americans didn’t know what the hell to make of John Brown and Nat Turner, just as they are now extremely baffled by someone like Eric Harris. It wasn’t at all clear at the time that Brown and/or Turner were staging protests against the unjust practice of slavery, which is why their actions were considered “crazy” – when people don’t understand something or someone, they tend to dismiss them as madmen because it’s the easiest and most convenient thing to do.
“Indeed, you cite approvingly that fetid eXile contest to disclose the current address of Rocky Hoffschneider as though it were a tribute to Ames’s moral rectitude.”
I would never try to comment on someone’s “moral rectitude” principally because I don’t really believe in the concept of morality. We are all seriously flawed individuals who do and say a lot of stupid things. I think the bottom line here is that nobody was physically harmed by Ames’s article. As the former editor of comic magazine, I’m surprised you take so much offense to this one bit.
When Columbine happened, I was definitely not surprised. I saw kids getting abused in high school, and the whole thing sort of made sense to me. And millions of other kids understood it also. But these seditious thoughts are conveniently suppressed and ignored.
“You write that the “evil” he represented — as the stereotypical adolescent male of Middle American suburbia — was greater than that of what Harris did, so you’re saying that uttering vicious anti-Semitic taunts and shoving one’s girlfriend in a locker is worse than murdering 12 students and a teacher, and wounding 24 others. Do you still stand behind this proposition?”
Well, this is a distortion of what I wrote. But the answer to the question is yes. The Rocky Hoffschneiders of the world are still on top, and probably even gaining in strength. The Onion satire hit the nail on the head. Because instead of trying to learn from Columbine, Americans were content to just ignore it as the doings of a couple of crazies, and the non-debate about gun control and video games ensued. Like Cho, Eric Harris made his grievances well known, but they were automatically dismissed because taking them seriously would fundamentally challenge the norms of American society. It’s too much for normal people to wrap their brains around. Cho’s media package to NBC was deemed irrelevant to the police investigation! So even when the evidence was staring these people straight in the face, it doesn’t have an impact. And this just means that shootings will continue until underlying causes, rather than band-aid remedies, are addressed.
School and workplace shooters are most certainly ‘made’ rather than ‘born’. It takes years of abuse to set people off. Many of them are quite simply revenge killings, with fed up or terminated workers going straight after their bosses.
One thing you completely ignore is the fact that America is at the center of this phenomenon. Why do these shootings occur predominantly in America, and why now as compared to, say, 50 years ago? Canada has lax gun laws, and yet these events are virtually unknown up there. How do you explain this?
At the very least, Ames took these questions on, while great thinkers like Christopher Hitchens blew them off. Hitchens’ critique of the pseudo-sentimentality surrounding the VT shootings was spot on, but he completely dropped the ball by asserting that the thing was “random and pointless” and had “no implications beyond itself”. In other words, there’s no explanation for it. Yeah, right. That’s just not good enough for me, sorry. I’ve lived too long and seen too much to buy into that.
Grueter
Do you really think that community sanctioned cruelty is free?
And in severe psychoses leading to the murder of your fellow human beings and of yourself there's usually a host of contributing factors, including genetic and develomental. Why shootings are specific to America, the rest of the world seems to think, is because firearms are readily available here. Indeed, while there may not be so many shootings in other developed countries, you would have to evaluate the statistical incidence of other violent behaviours to judge whether there is any "American specificity" beyond the "method of choice." -This is also addressing an earlier comment by Peter.
Francois,
The question is, what was the cause of his ‘serious mental health’ issue? I think that’s what we’re debating here. Weiss seems to think that it doesn’t matter. I tend to think that it does.
Mark G
Wasn't Cho just a kid with very serious mental health issues whom should have been triaged out of society's mainstream for treatment before causing harm to others and himself? (I'm not entirely sure which of the above views this supports as I've only kind of skimmed through the arguments, sorry!)
"They had it coming" is the subtext of his essay, Mark, just as I state it was the subtext of that Onion parody (which had the good sense to at least avoid base moralizing in favor of satire). I wonder how you account for that open solicitation to hunt down and then post the address of one of the Columbine survivors, or Ames's comparison of Klebold and Harris to John Brown and Nat Turner, if you believe Ames is not attempting to justify school violence. Since you respond only to literal-mindedness, let me spell it out: Does he think Brown and Turner were villainous or heroic? And what corollary might we draw based on that answer?
You write in your review of Going Postal, as if channeling the sympathies of its author, that you identified with the Columbine massacrists. You and Ames go to great length to show with what demons they supposedly wrestled, and how these were brought to vivid psychic existence by bullies and taunters from CHS. Indeed, you cite approvingly that fetid eXile contest to disclose the current address of Rocky Hoffschneider as though it were a tribute to Ames's moral rectitude.
So let me inquire: What do you think should have been done to Hoffschneider by publishing, with the promise of reward, his whereabouts in a magazine? You write that the "evil" he represented — as the stereotypical adolescent male of Middle American suburbia — was greater than that of what Harris did, so you're saying that uttering vicious anti-Semitic taunts and shoving one's girlfriend in a locker is worse than murdering 12 students and a teacher, and wounding 24 others. Do you still stand behind this proposition?
"[Y]ou're not interested in an explanation for school shootings, as you openly admit in the Comments section." What I wrote was this: "I offer no alternative explanation to account for people like Seung-Hui Cho." How do you get from that to my not being interested? By definition, writing an essay that reprehends one thesis attempting to account for school shootings betrays a rather obvious interest.
"Ames hasn't even written anything about the Cho shooting, and yet you're already presuming to tell us what he thinks of it?" Actually, Mark, if you click on that AlterNet link, you'll see that your doyen of homeroom pathology has indeed commented on the Cho shooting, updating his sordid book in quick time — and I'm sure not with a whiff of opportunism — to mark the Virginia Tech atrocity. So much for your slavish appreciation of Ames's pioneering work, then.
"Furthermore, if you had read the book you'd know that Ames rejects the all to convenient "people who just snap" line of thinking. So not only do you irresponsibly pass off your guess of his view as fact, but you mischaracterize the view while doing so. Good work."
I may have used the word "snapped," but I in no way mischaracterized Ames's view that school shooters are "made" rather than born. The absence of the word "just" before "snapped" might have helped you better parse the characterization.
“His schoolmates baited him for his race, his shyness, his nerdy interests, his awful, tenebrous poetry, and more or less everything that made him different from themselves. So they had it coming.”
Stop right there, Michael. Did Ames write “they had it coming” – please, find the quote. What Ames provides is an explanation for the dozens of shootings that are so particular to America, not a justification. You appear incapable of noticing the difference. But then again, you’re not interested in an explanation for school shootings, as you openly admit in the Comments section.
You go on:
“That Cho finally “snapped” (a quaint characterization of a very deliberate process) and demanded the lives of as many people in his immediate vicinity as possible—and that he tried to maximize that number by chaining the exits and studying his terrain to ensure the greatest carnage—should surprise you in only one respect: that it took him so long.
This is the view that has been taken up by Mark Ames, the editor of the eXile magazine and the author Going Postal..”
Is it? Ames hasn’t even written anything about the Cho shooting, and yet you’re already presuming to tell us what he thinks of it? Furthermore, if you had read the book you’d know that Ames rejects the all to convenient “people who just snap” line of thinking. So not only do you irresponsibly pass off your guess of his view as fact, but you mischaracterize the view while doing so. Good work.
Unfortunately, I have to get going. Play time is over for the nonce. But I intend to resume my letter tomorrow. Chew on this for now…
Mark G
I offer no alternative explanation to account for people like Seung-Hui Cho, but I don't think dismissing Ames's perfidious nonsense means I've reduced the question of school violence to an "either/or" grammar. According to evolutionary psychology, our makeup is about 50% determined by genes, 50% determined by environment. That sounds okay to me. Saying that schoolyard bullies and bigots "incite" their own demise does not.
Ames, however, thinks he has cracked the case. The answer: American culture, that amorphous and protean non-concept whose definition no two people ever seem to agree on perfectly. The aim here was to show how Ames's dimestore sociology is worthless, and that he clearly glorifies mass murderers as pitiable victims. (That they may have once been is made morally negligible by their body count.) Moreover, those who lived through massacres are to be offered up for additional "justice" by the holding of vile editorial contests to publicize their whereabouts on the internet. The gray matter that can contrive such a scheme is the kind that maggots have been feasting on long and well.
Ames openly admires Klebold, Harris and Cho and paints them rather as Michael Moore does the "resistance" in Iraq — as revolutionary heroes. Exhibit A for what's wrong with "American culture," you might say.
Now you're welcome to compare the writings and speeches of John Brown to the good Dr. Kaczynski if you like, Peter, but I'm afraid prefacing the comparison with "Whatever one might have thought of [Kaczynski's] ideas" simply won't do. It's all about the ideas. How's abolitionism holding up, a century and a half on? Would you wager that Cho or Klebold's scribblings will be made the cornerstone of civilization or a program for sociopolitical reform at some future date?
Any violent hebephrene wandering through the subway can articulate a pretty cohesive plan for redeeming mankind, but I would not rush to find a kindred spirit for him in Thomas Jefferson or Montesquieu.
The arguments raised by Ames sound like nothing more than the age old conundrum of nature versus nurture. Impossible to determine, and more than likely some mix of both (in almost all cases of school gunmen).
Why “South Korean”? Why the last name first?
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