Cho

[Jenni Mansfield Peal]

Psychopath. Yes. Sociopath. Yes.

Cho falls into those two types.

And Cho's story was also a tragedy. For reasons of honor known only to his sick mind, Cho made people very small and then scrutinized them like a child with a magnifying glass, focused and enraptured until these distorted people formed masses that his peculiar imagination could understand as a type. Trapped behind the glass ever to his face, Cho, indomitable, studied them in their type characteristics.

They all gather together in classrooms. They walk the same routes at the same time every day. They are, insipid insects, ruled by bells and fashion. They have leaders and teachers who are at the head of the yearly regurgitation of insipid, smug, American and otherwise Superior Race, know-nothing brats.

Those lines of thinking are not the tragedy, they are comedy.

The tragedy is how certain kinds of idealists, for lack of creative imagination or for darker reasons, move and think in a world of types, not individuals. These minds find in the reading of history only explanations of the developments of types (read: Catholics, homosexuals, rich know-nothing brats of the Big Man Who Fucked My Mamma) rather than a rich trove of tales of individuals and cultures striving and failing. The type-ridden mind never meets a new person, because everyone he meets can be immediately designated to a type that is well-known and predictable. Those type-ridden, idealistic minds, if they are indomitable, may at some time grow angry, and like the lance of God, strike out against insipidity of type. More comedy: Cho may not have observed the irony of his own unpredictability in that insipid world – that he was the lone person for whom it was possible to be unpredictable. That is a clown’s comedy – what a sap, what a maroon, sez Bugs. Would Fudd be funny if he knew he was a clown? I don’t think Cho thought of himself as a clown, though he liked to dress up.

Cho knew nothing about his victims – he didn’t choose them as individuals to shoot because he had type-cast them. To say he didn’t care (as if he had assessed their worth and made a judgment) would be incorrect and beside the point. He treasured his victims and counted them toward his success during those hours, as he roamed the hallways of the college building like a rabid dog. He gained strength on their blood, no doubt, as young people often do. But their blood, the concept of the blood of his victims, was itself for him only a type of experience, predictable and possibly blase'. He had already encapsulated that experience, omniscient in his ability to sum up the reality he planned to create and the figure he would present, and sent it off on a video tape to a news station. So what was that last rampage like for him? Was he finally sickened and desolate when he put the gun to his own head?

We, the onlookers, can’t help but see Cho’s victims as individuals because they seem to have nothing in common but being at the same place and time with him while he was on a shooting rampage. Read the simple but sadly elegant letter composed by Cho’s sister in behalf of her family, a letter of grief and apology, in which she names every victim.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/cho.fa ... index.html
Without even seeing their faces you can tell they’re from all over the map, students at a great university, like Cho. And so we call them random victims, creating our own type category for them. A second irony: type-organized by Cho during life, type-organized by the on-looking world in death. But this is just an irony, not a tragedy. Who knows what dreams, aspirations, and private honor these students and scholars possessed, though, that they were prevented from waking up the next day to resume or complete? There me be other tragedies in their stories.

Cho did not originate the tragedy of an indomitable person mistaking people for types, either that of efficiency as seen in colonization or that of the sociopath like Hitler or Stalin.

And in that, too, is irony. As surprising as acts like Cho's are, similar ones are regurgitated periodically through generations for the same reasons, buoyed up by the indomitable human characteristics of narcissism and ignorance, based on predictable human thought processes that take root, grow, and occupy some people's minds. I'm an idealsit too - I believe in people's (mine anyway, and I am as much a type as anybody) ability and gradual inclination to notice and catch the narcissism, question the ignorance, and grow multicolored gardens of peacefullness and acceptance in their minds. Cho didn't do that.

How we now scratch our heads at irony, how we wail at tragedy. Comedy, though, is usually very personal, I think, just as much as the gradual process of looking beyond (or into) our own perceptions of insipidity to find who we type-cast into creating it.

Jenni Mansfield Peal