Posted on 04/17/2007 7:58:26 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
AOL News has obtained two plays a classmate says were written by Cho Seung-Hui. Ian MacFarlane, the former classmate and current AOL employee, provided us with the plays. A note from Mr. MacFarlane and links to the works appear below......
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbloggers.aol.com ...
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If there are hundreds of gore fest scripts being written by college students on the level of “Richard McBeef”, then we may as well resign ourselves to picking the vegetables Americans don’t want to pick.
I finally read the plays. Here’s one slant, but it’s just a slant, mind you.
My son has Asperger’s. He does not show lack of affect (frozen emotionless face). He talks with people. He doesn’t write sex-tinged violence. He finds these murders horrifying - he can’t imagine someone wanting to do this. Asperger’s does not lead to murderous impulses - just want to make that clear.
It could be a contributor to depression and alienation and is often co-morbid with other disorders like OCD. Some men with Asperger’s stalk women - creepily but harmlessly; they don’t know how to relate to women, so they track them but they’re not trying to scare them.
Cho may have had Asperger’s but I do want to stress that someone with Asperger’s is not more likely to be a murderer.
Mrs VS
A law enforcement official who read Cho’s note described it Tuesday as a typed, eight-page rant against rich kids and religion. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
“You caused me to do this,” the official quoted the note as saying.
Cho indicated in his letter that the end was near and that there was a deed to be done, the official said. He also expressed disappointment in his own religion, and made several references to Christianity, the official said.
“This case has nothing to do with gun control or lack thereof, and everything to do with the ADA and the other PC laws that have evolved in our country related to mental illness.”
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These laws are indeed related in this sense: they all flow from an obsession with building up the state as a messianic institution capable of healing every social ill by a self-refuting network of coercive measures in the name of liberty and human dignity. It is a perverse effort to implement the nightmarish vision of Jack Williamson in his 1940’s story “With Folded Hands”.
http://www.umich.edu/~engb415/literature/cyberzach/Williamson/human.html
Another example of the progression of this mentality was on display, oddly enough, in Taranto’s series on “Zero Tolerance” school practices:
Zero-Tolerance Watch
http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=44339&in_page_id=2
And we do mean “watch”! “A fifteen-year old boy in America was incarcerated for twelve days, wrongly accused of making a hoax bomb threat—because his school had forgotten that the clocks had gone forward,” reports Britain’s Metro Cafe:
Cody Webb was arrested last month, after Hempfield Area High School [in Greensburg, a suburb of Pittsburgh] received a bomb threat on their student hotline—which provides a range of information to students about the school—at 3.17am on March 11th. They believed they’d found the culprit when they traced the phone number they thought was responsible to Webb.
Unfortunately, they forgot that the clocks had switched to Daylight Saving Time that morning. Webb, who’s never even had a detention in his life, had actually made his call an hour earlier.
Despite the fact that the recording of the call featured a voice that sounded nothing like Webb’s, the police arrested Webb and he spent 12 days in a juvenile detention facility before the school eventually realised their mistake.
Webb gave an insight into the school’s impressive investigative techniques, saying that he was ushered in to see the principal, Kathy Charlton. She asked him what his phone number was, and , according to Webb, when he replied “she started waving her hands in the air and saying ‘we got him, we got him.’ “
The Metro Cafe Web site accompanies the story with a picture of a timepiece atop the caption: “Clocks: fiendishly complicated devices.”
Cho may have had Asperger’s but I do want to stress that someone with Asperger’s is not more likely to be a murderer.
Mrs VS
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I agree completely, and indeed the definitions of the various points on the “autism spectrum” are murky enough that I was careful to indicate that Asperger’s is only “an example”.
Murderous impulses are common to human beings, and the way they are amplified and acted out, or contained and suppressed is as variable as human beings are variable. Being aware of an individual’s capacities and inclinations is important to helping them acquire skills in self-restraint and other attributes of self-understanding. This self-understanding is a non-trivial problem no matter where one is on “the spectrum”. An interesting discussion of various modes of consciousness and means of recognizing oneself and others is found here:
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~probbins/knowingme.pdf
Here is some discussion by one who has apparently had some success at self-knowledge development:
http://iautistic.com/what-is-autism.php
http://iautistic.com/autistic-label.php
http://iautistic.com/autism-myths-theory-of-mind.php
http://iautistic.com/autism-theory-of-mind-revisited.php
Unfortunately, I read both of them. That was one sick individual. Obsessed with killing and homosexuality. If he had graduated, he probably would have ended up as a screenwriter in LA LA Land.
I also got the impression that these plays were written by a person who was not in control of the narrative. Everything was reactionary. Almost as if he had an underlying programming that forced a reactionary response to just about every interaction.
Writing plays isn't easy, and in most cases with which I'm familiar, it isn't a requirement for an English degree, The stilted dialogue and lack of depth make him an awful playwright, but his grammar and syntax appear to be at least competent, so I'd guess he could write acceptable, maybe even pretty good, papers and essays.
I read one of those scripts. My guess is the English Department has blocked release of the note.
I'm not a big fan of Alan Colmbs but his radio show tonight on the subject was good. He took it into a different direction, an introspective humans. Colmbs is good on these sort of issues no matter what you think of his politics.
Sorry for the ramble. Guess the weight of all this is sinking in now.
When I was in college, I sometimes screened submissions for the literary magazine. I was on the newspaper, and the publications folks were a pretty tight little clique, so we helped each other out. A whole lot of college poetry, fiction and drama writers use heavy-handed profanity and shock language, because the wannabes suddenly realize that they can.
In terms of quality, Cho's writing is awful, but that doesn't particularly stand out. What does stand out is the level of rage in them. If a teacher -- who has to wade through this crap every day, and knows better than I what is unusual enough to be frightening -- tried to call attention to him, someone should have listened.
Huh? It was found in his dorm room and it's evidence. How would the English department, or anyone at the school, have anything to say about it?
I guess this situation could be an extrapolation of the 'victimhood' mentality.
(When people take personal responsibility for their situation, blaming everyone else stops, more often than not, life improves, and the thought of a murderous rampage is ...well, unthinkable.)
Since this victimhood mentality is such a vital component of the liberal mindset, perhaps this offers insight as to the deep seated origins of their general hoplophobia.
No. I cannot imagine the horror they are experiencing. All I can do is offer my prayers for them.
I'll bet both the MSM and the University want to downplay the entire subject of the note.
Why? Because from what little we have heard about the note, the a-hole rails against RELIGION and RICH KIDS.
This is EXACTLY the crap he almost certainly would have absorbed in typical current English Literature teaching at a major American university.
Is someone out there scoffing? Try reading current issues of the leading academic journals for English Literature in this country. Learn what issues the members of the Modern Language Association seem to be obsessed with. You would not believe how much ideological garbage about race, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. pervades the academic climate.
Surely everyone will simply see through all the liberal/leftist b.s. that is spouted by these college professors, some will say? No, many don't. There are many, many ignorant students and weak-minded students and some simply disturbed individuals who grab onto all of this anti-American and anti-Judeo-Christian hatred that is peddled by these academics and make it their own gospel.
They need to release the note. Perhaps it's not full of the liberal political garbage about class and religion as I suspect. But we should know.
And by the way, I'm not "blaming" anyone but this a-hole kid for what he did. But just as the Unabomber was influenced by all of the environmentalist b.s. peddled by the liberals and leftists, we need to know if liberal and leftist propaganda influenced this kid so that we can better guard against its effects on others and better protect our families and communities in the future.
From an NYT article
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18virginia.html?hp “Lucinda Roy, an English professor, said Mr. Cho’s writing, laced with anger, profanity and violence, concerned several faculty members. In 2005, she sent examples to the campus police, the campus counseling service and other officials. All were worried, but little could be done, she said.
That's baloney.
I got banned from a university on the pretense that I was a "threat". Yes, I was angry and yelled at them. A university physician had abused his authority and stomped on my civil rights by having my driver's license suspended because I didn't agree with his diagnosis. (Which was later proved to be WRONG.)
The physician wasn't even my doctor, I had no appointment with him, and after the one time I did years before, I told the university clinic I never wanted to see him again.
The stupid university, ACLU, state, etc. didn't care about MY rights as an individual.
This is EXACTLY the crap he almost certainly would have absorbed in typical current English Literature teaching at a major American university.
Is someone out there scoffing? Try reading current issues of the leading academic journals for English Literature in this country. Learn what issues the members of the Modern Language Association seem to be obsessed with. You would not believe how much ideological garbage about race, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. pervades the academic climate.
I would have scoffed two or three weeks ago, but in my quest to understand why Ron Moore trashed Battlestar Galactica, I read all this Media Theory stuff from academic journals and was surprised at just how "liberal" and degenerate it was.
And, worse, there was no rational thought; it was just "bash the status quo" and be obtuse, otherwise it wasn't considered "intellectual".
Excuse me, but they raised the monster. They knew his warped character and did nothing. This wasn't a sudden snap one day. The guy had a history of weird behavior and disgusting writings. From everything we've heard about the creep, it shouldn't be a "shock" that he did any of this. Talking heads have asked neighbors about the family and no one seems to know them because they kept to themselves. Sounds like the parents's lawyer told them to rush to the hospital so they can claim "shock" and distress when they are questioned why they never sought treatment for their obviously highly distrubed son.
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