Comments on Why Aren't We Talking About What Cho Actually Said?

I'm also struck by how over and over we see interviews with classmates from college and now his high school(!) who candidly admit to having made fun of him and ridiculed him in his presence or to his face. It's quite shocking.

L. -- Jonah and I go way back, and we never talked about class. We talked in class.

excellent point, josh. i think you are right on with this.

Wow, thank you for saying this. I actually started thinking the same thing when they started playing the tapes on the news. It's interesting to see how the blame is quickly placed solely on mental illness when there is obviously something else.

Perhaps one reason we're ignoring what he said is that there doesn't seem to be much of a link between what he said and what he did. That is, he didn't shoot up the sorority/frat houses of rich kids, he shot students randomly, rich and poor.

Most crazy people who kill claim to have some reason, why should we take his rants any more seriously than a killer who said the dogs living next door told him to kill?

It's quite simple really, and it's a point Foucault made almost half a century ago now: in order to objectify madness and make the quasi-scientific discourse about madness the one that dominates the field of discourse, the utterances of the mad person are not treated as the speech of a subject but rather sympoms of a disease.
That his ramblings are intelligible is really not the point. The point is that they aren't taken to be motivations in the same sense as similar statements by those deemed sane are. So they are intelligible but uniformative. If they are anything they are data to be expounded on by experts in psychosis.
That's just the discursive formation we still live in when it comes to mental illnes.

Actually, I'm surprised we're not talking more about gender, considering that he was taking upskirt photos, stalking women, etc. Remember, Haq did something similar, with his weenie-shaking in a mall, Jonathan Rowan with his stalking and murdering his ex. These are, of course, three different violent acts, and there's plenty about class to discuss, but it's almost as though we don't bother wasting time anymore discussing how these guys start by dehumanizing women, then end up killing whoever gets in their way.

really how many kids in a 27,000 student public university go around flaunting their affluence? most are probably in the same financial situation as him. hell, his sister is a princeton grad. his outlook is very immature. the class issue is a critical one but his railings about rich kids or whatever are pretty infantile.
also, i havent seen any of the footage of college classmates admitting to making fun of him to his face, but even if they did, i've also read many accounts of people being very friendly to him.

Josh, have you considered the possibility that a) his class resentment doesn't fit with our typical assumption about the class status of Asian Americans, and b) we as a nation are not quite as comfortable talking about the racial component of that assumption as you seem to think we are?

Okay, I'll bite. What would "talking about class" entail, exactly?

He did this because he was mentally ill, not because of some deep-seated resentment of the upper classes. That's why it's pointless to focus on his words, unless it's in the context of trying to understand his mental illness.

What I haven't heard is any kind of discussion as to what kind of mental illness he had. Is it possible he may have had some form of schizophrenia? I'm hardly qualified to speculate but surely there are people that are. But it's typical that we remain largely ignorant of illness of the mind.

Focusing on his words or the videos he made does nothing but increase people's animosity; it brings us no closer to understanding the causes and symptoms of his mental illness, so that we might have a better awareness and understanding of how we could help these people before they destroy.

Judah -

Obviously if there wasn't such an unequal distribution of wealth in this country the killings never would have happened. Unless of course he was upset about Iraq or racism or the girl that snubbed him at the library or the aliens in his head.

If we can just address these issues, killings like this won't happen anymore!

Maybe because of the American dream. We see class as something that can and should be changed. Statistics may tell us that few escape the lower class, but we see this as the fault of the poor. We believe that in America, with the right motivation, anyone can be wealthy. So we are less sympathetic to cries of classism than cries of racism.
This explains why the media was not so quick to sympathize with Cho's complaints. I believe it would make more sense not to sympathize with any terrorist/madman's complaints, but when the cries of the madman strike a chord, discussion is sparked.

oh alright Judah, Jonah and I talkd about class a little. He was a women's studies undergrad whil i was getting a pH.d in Fouceauian Economics. we both happned to take the same elective, "Illnes" (really, scout's honour, that was the last word on page @6 of the sillybus, the teacher had written it in reverse). so on break one day, Jonah said to me, 'this is a Whale of a class!' and i said 'yeah, i know, i saw your nose growing during the midterm, gepetto. he said, 'boy you're witty.andisaid TalK abotu Class----

I don't see any evidence this guy was psychotic. He was diagnosed as autistic as a child but I don't see any evidence for that, either. He may have made remarks about hanging out with Putin or having a girlfriend on Mars, but I haven't heard anything about his behavior following these statements. They don't appear to be real delusions, and his rants to NBC were lucid. People with extreme social anxiety often make strange statements because they don't have the mechanisms to make normal conversation.

This kid pretty clearly had selective mutism. People with this condition can't talk in social situations despite having functional vocal cords, etc.

I had selective mutism as a child and I can't tell you how isolating and humiliating it is. Unlike autistics, selective mutes crave social interaction and want friends more than anything, but simply cannot communicate. I can relate with some of Cho's rantings -- I couldn't believe how easy life seemed for everyone and how happy my classmates seemed all the time. You have a LOT of time to sit and stew and get angry when you can't interact with the people all around you. Cho said, "you had a hundred billion chances and ways to avoid today." I take this as meaning he went through a hundred billion instances where people just didn't treat him as a person -- he was either treated as a freak or ignored. If this condition persisted into my teenage years and adult life (which it usually doesn't), I don't know what I would have done. I wouldn't have shot up a school, but I can imagine someone with a lot of built up male aggression doing so.

Speaking for me, Josh, I don't view the rant as a starting point for discussing class mostly because VT is and has been a land-grant school, a place where bootstrappers are the heritage and self-image. Given the absurd national increases in tutition over the past 20 years, I have no idea what that heritage means there today. But Cho lashed out at his peers, not at his class enemies. If he percieved them to be class enemies, well, clearly, he should have paid closer attention in his class warfare seminar.

I agree with many here - this hasn't spawned a discussion about class because despite his ramblings, it isn't the reason he did this.

Class in America isn't exactly easy to talk about either - our wealth is distributed very uneavenly for sure, but class divisions just aren't very clear anymore - especially since we're no longer a country that manufacturers goods - and maybe not even relavent.

@jtroop: Now that is a formulation for analyses that makes sense to me, and viewed through that lens, class might play a meaningful role in looking at the rant.

OTOH, as a former roommate of a full-on, multi-institutionalized loonie person, it was hard to learn much about the world per se by reading Fred's copious scrawls, except that he was sick and hurting and that his isolation heightened his sense of suffering. To date, I get that from Cho's rant too.

The NYT obituary of Kurt Vonnegut said Player Piano was about workers losing their jobs to technology, and no mention of economic injustice. In fact, while the obit said Vonnegut was an environmentalist, anti-war, a social critic, and so on, it said not one word about money, class, socialism, and capitalism. Nothing.

It's as if Kurt Vonnegut never mentioned those things at all in his whole long career.

Funny how that all works, huh?

@15,

I think it's far more likely that Cho was an introvert and thus had more run-of-the-mill difficulty in interacting with others. Introverts are also frequently ignored/snubbed by extroverts since extroverts tend to view introverts as reticent rather than simply socially awkward.

Judging from the statements that he made, I'm inclined to think that Cho was pissed off that others failed to recognize the awsomeness that was him. That festering resentment plus mental instability/illness equals mayhem.

I agree that the class issue is a nonstarter. Was Cho especially poor? I haven't seen anything to indicate that he was any lower than middle class. Middle class Americans are so wealthy and have such a high standard of living compared to most of the rest of the world that they have no excuse to be resentful.

I can't get beyond your first sentence-----When al Qaeda killed 3,000 people there was a refrain among the left, “I don’t condone it, but I understand it…”---if you are talking about your LEFTIST cubicle mates be specific. Your blog had a ""Cho-esque" quality to it. Angry/sad in an unhinged manner.

Excepting the wild shot about trust funds, this eruption IS about race. It's a rant against hip-hop culture, isn't it? Mercedes, Corvoisier, 'debauchery'.

Yes, let's talk about this important problem. Clearly, the children of the lower classes, unhinged by envy, are a danger to children of the upper classes. To protect the offspring of our most productive citizens, it would probably be better not to let poor kids into colleges. If we must, we can at least sit them down and say: "Look, this education you are being offered will let you earn, on average, 70% more than those who don't get it. If you have a problem with that, we can give your slot to someone else." Such a policy would decimate sociology departments, but that's just a side-benefit.

How can Cho claim class victimhood if his sister, despite their low family income, was able to graduate from pricey Princeton and if he was on his way to graduating from a top public university? He also, mind you grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the richest counties in the nation. Could we dismiss this as the tirade of an ungrateful kid who failed to count the best opportunities on the planet given to him by his family and community?

It defies reason because he was a madman, and the social commentaries of madmen are rarely worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Thus the Cho manifesto speaks the views of a madman and is not a coherent narrative on class in America.

DKJ at 21, you're onto something.

meanwhile, last week the Stranger blog had field day gangbanging bang do it bang it posts about Gonzales in their typical predictable fetishizing/smokescreening opinionized blur

an op-ed in the
seattle Sunday times
apr 22
no weblink, get a hard copy
Note to Readers
(Some syndicated columns and opinion pieces which appear in the Seattle Times are not published online because of contractual limitations.)

a Smiling reporter, looking much more damn CLASSy than ecbarnett, spells out the angry/sad Gonzales and Wolfowitz affairs. Concisely written, she focuses more on Wolfowitz, and with all due relevancy, if the NEWSTEAM from this blog wants to talk about -ClaSs-

so tomorrow, rise and shine alternative seattle, the Today Show will feature the editd news, from Seattle's only pokerfaced newspaper. Inorganic flapjacks with imitation lutefisk will be served, with felching opinions to lace brains, followed by a sly wink saying we, the Stranger, are as morally corrupt as Cho's mis-wired neurons.

#7: Word.

I think Josh's premise, that class is something we are loathe to have a public discussion about, is a sound one. Nor do I think it's a coincidence -- this country has a long history of glossing over such issues and painting those who dare to bring them up in public forums as traitors and reds. Probably has something to do with who has traditionally owned all the printing presses.

However, in this particular instance, I'm glad that the ravings of a mass murderer are not motivating the media to take up a discussion of class, because in that context I have a pretty good idea how that discussion would go. It's the same way I felt when I read the Unabomber's manifesto and realized that I agreed with a lot of his points. To all the dangerous psychotics out there who for whatever reason come down on the same side of some political issue with me, I'd like to say on behalf of like-minded people everywhere: Don't do us any favors.

Honest discussion of class inequities in our society and in the global marketplace would be a great thing, but I sure as hell don't want to start out that discussion with "Well, as the notorious mass murderer pointed out in his suicide tape...."

this was about a lot of things we don't talk about:
1. first person shooter video games (mom hoped college would pull him out of the world of video games)
2. parental inadequacy - dad is a dry cleaning presser - NYT had him working 14 hour days. he was absent, & probably has symptoms of mental illness, too. mom prayed & prayed but never took action to utilize what mental health services exist for low-income immigrants.
3. failure of federal/state agencies to coordinate no-gun-sale lists. his 2005 committment never showed up.
4. he ran up all these purchases on a credit card in a month. who's minding the store?
5. no one wants to talk about mental illness - and we don't want to DO anything about it but give the metally ill bus tickets to seattle.

#28 - You say no one wants to DO anything about mental illness, but in fact he was offered help many times and when he threatened to hurt himself he was put in a hospital for several days. He hadn't made threats against anyone else and he refused help, what do you want to do, lock up anyone who exhibits odd behavior?

What is it that you want people to DO about mental illness in this case?

I don't think it's surprising that someone with his mental disorder blames other people for his own perceived injustices. Sure, class is an issue. But he bootstrapped that into something far greater than it is or needs to be. Bottom line is, he was crazy. End of story.

Class is an issue in this country, but I don't see it tied in here. Bin Laden ranted (rants) constantly about the west and/or America, and his targets are invariably American. So, loony or not, his words fit his actions. Cho, on the other hand, rants about class, but it doesn't fit his actions. He was at a public university, populated by a wide variety of students. If he was truly pissed at the wealthy, why not shoot up a rich neighborhood nearby, or take a drive to Yale or Harvard or some other target rich environment of blue bloods?

Cho aside, class is a difficult discussion in America. I've visited other countries where social class structure was rigidly enforced by their own culture. It wasn't about money, it was about social standing. And it was very difficult if not impossible to move up in class.

But here in the US, despite the ever widening gap between rich and poor, there is the widely held perception that any of us could become rich. Theoretically, it is true. Some become rich through inheritance or a lot of hard work. But we hear glamorous stories of musicians or movie stars or sports figures who make bazzilions of dollars, and any one of us could do that if we just got a lucky break, right? Just as soon as I write that famous novel, or invent the next greatest gizmo, or find the buried treasure, or whatever.

Many people are reluctant to trash the wealthy too much, because many of us hold out hope that we can be like that some day too.

Honest discussion of class inequities in our society and in the global marketplace would be a great thing,

See, I guess I'm not convinced this is true. I mean, what do most people really know about class inequality in the United States? Like, specifically? Most people "know" the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but proposing "an honest discussion of class inequities in our society," is probably going to be a pretty fucking pointless exercise; most people don't have the foggiest notion what the mechanics of class inequity in this country are and, when they star to find out, they usually back off in a big hurry.

Judah: I take it back. Honest discussion of class issues is a bad idea, because everybody but you is evidently too stupid to understand it. Sorry.

It's a bit odd to talk about the lack of social mobility in the US when Cho's own sister is an obvious example. Her parents are solidly working class, doing manual labor in a dry cleaners and a school cafeteria. And she graduated from a top university and is working for a contractor administering aid to Iraq.

Anyone who has gone to school with second generation Asian immigrants know this isn't an anomaly, but common.

Josh enjoys popularity from stupid people. His interest in education is evident in his comment on Charles' post.

the second comment on Charles' post.

There's no discussion of Cho's points about classism because the rich motherfuckers who own the media don't want those discussions to happen. Once the lid's off that box, it's a different world for the very wealthy in this country and you KNOW they don't want that.

What the fuck, guys? There is no valid reason for anyone to shoot 32 civilians. I don't care what class you're in. To paraphrase Ann Coulter, making a college campus a gun-free zone is as ludicrous as making our country a "sad-free zone." Hey I got an idea, let's spread out all of America's wealth equally among the planet's population and then we can all live in third world squalor. This Cho fuck (and anyone else who wants to complain) should try visiting the rest of the world and then maybe we would appreciate our sad Mercede-less existence. Equal distribution, Josh? Yeah, they've tried that, I believe it's called Communism.

Another thing occurs to me (author of previous post). As with Iraq's obvious hatred for democracy (it clashes with their ideology) I think that some might be making a mistake in thinking that jealousy is a factor. I don't think the extremists are jealous of our way of life, they just hate it. In the same way, perhaps Cho just hated rich kids and their "debaucheries" without envy. As for you posters on this thread complaining about unequal wealth distribution, don't you already have enough? You live in America, most likely, and we have it pretty good here.

Actually, anonymous, to address just one of your points, inequality and health are very correlated. Countries in Europe, Canada, Australia, and even some poor countries like Costa Rica are more equal and have better health than the U.S. These are not "communist" counties that redistribute all wealth, but they have social policies that support things like education and health for all, and - what a surprise, everyone does better because of it.

My response to Josh's post is that, yes, America is not good about talking about class - in part because of the "Class warfare," in part because of the above poster's knee-jerk response ("Stalin tried that already" and "America is pretty good" ... meanwhile, infant mortality in the richest country in the world is now increasing in the South). But we don't need to ask about class because Cho brought it up. Seems like the Stranger has ample opportunity to discuss this key issue throughout the year, if it wanted to. (I have not been following the print version but overall you don't seem to have a big focus on class)

This issue is power. It has to be discussed at some point (both on national and international levels) but I don't think Cho's rantings are a good place to start, for reasons already stated here.

Honest discussion of class issues is a bad idea, because everybody but you is evidently too stupid to understand it.

Yes, well, that's a boring bit of sarcasm but it doesn't really address my point, does it? I'm asking what's likely to be gained by an "honest discussion of class." It's not like an honest discussion about racism-- racism is, basically, a pretty obvious social justice issue. But what specific economic mechanisms perpetuate class inequities in the United States, and to what extent are those inequities a natural outgrowth of any kind of market capitalism? Or are the class inequities a peculiarity of our extractive economy, less driven by social inequality than by the dynamics of the commodity market-- it's worth noticing that other extractive economies (oil, diamonds, coal) tend to be extremely lopsided. Maybe the reason Europe's class situation is more balanced is because they've consumed most of their resources, so they have more manufacturing-focused economy.

Even an economist can't really answer those questions. So what's likely to come of an "honest" discussion of class? The same thing that's come out of our long "honest" discussion about the causes of the war: people will pick good guys and bad guys, establish positions accordingly, and stick to those positions to the bitter fucking end. What percentage of Americans still believes we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Or maybe I'm wrong. I was merely suggesting that maybe the reason nobody wants to talk about this is less that it's some kind of dirty little secret and more that they recognize it's just one more very complicated issue that's unlikely to be resolved by having an "honest discussion" about it. Just fuck'n throwing that idea out there. A'ight?

Josh, you asked, "Why, in this instance, are we ignoring what he said?"

We're ignoring it because killing 32 people shouldn't be rewarded by getting a nationwide discussion on the topic of your choice.

When ELF activists accidentally kill someone as they are freeing animals from a lab, we decry the activists. Nobody ever says, "But gee, maybe we should start talking about what an animal's life is really like in a cage."

Anti-abortion zealots kill abortion doctors in their homes. Pro-choice and even sane pro-life folks know not to use that killing as a platform for discussions of the morality of abortion.

When you see Newsweek and Time devote feature length cover stories to class awareness issues in America, Cho wins. He achieves exactly what he set out to do. And every nutjob college kid that follows him will learn that the way to get a nation talking about the issues you care about most is to shoot a bunch of people and then shoot yourself.

@29

i want to give them bus tickets to seattle. or portland. or SF. or LA. because the west coast just loves being the rest of america's narrenschiff.

by DO something - i mean that his family watched it for 23 years - and never DID anything because of the shame. his older sister is a fricking princeton grad - she's smart enough to figure out that her little brother was crazy. his high school counseling staff never DID anything. his university left it in the hands of the creative writing teachers & 18 y.o. freshman dormmates. the judge who declared him mentally ill never followed up. no one talked to anyone else - agencies, parents, etc. ad nauseum.

how about we remove the barriers between agencies talking for starters?

43max, give it up, we're stupid here - first explain what narrenschiff is. then get a pair of Nikes and go for a jog with autofellatiating Josh. just DO it.

You have it wrong Josh. It's not about class. It's about rage.

We live in a society that bullies for many reasons, some of them discussed in leftist discourse, and some of them ignored. When people are bullied and dehumanized, especially by a group that can be identified by the victim, they build up a rage. Add this to: trauma due to social isolation, physical/sexual abuse in the home, no teaching on constructive ways to deal with anger and rage, no access to competent people who understand the problem--clearly there is a shortage--and no competent intervention from those empowered to do so, added to some mental issues that otherwise would have been manageable, you get a guy like this. Or like Kyle Huff for that matter. The similarities are so similar when you consider the above.

Unfortunately, everyone--including the left, uses events like this that cannot/will not be explained to advance their agenda. Gun control vs 2nd Amendment. Class. Race. All important issues, but do not address why our society continues to produce these individuals, or why we are incapable of changing our culture to prevent it.

Not all nut cases reach for a gun. Neither do all who are bullied. But psychology needs to be taught like the three R's (not that we can even do that effectively) so that people have an understanding of how their actions affect other people. And then we can join the rest of the industrialized world in not having to worry if we will get gunned down at the mall while returning Rubbermaid containers to the Target.

The answer is not in the polysci department.

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

- Anais Nin

I think part of the reason that many people aren't discussing what he actually said was that it's difficult to find the content of what he said unfiltered and in it's entirety. Does anyone have a link to his writings or his full video?

It's an error to define class by wealth. c'mon, we all read the Great Gatsby. But an even clearer and more contemporary example: Caddyshack. Just because Rodney Dangerfield has more money than any of the snobs at the club, does not make him their equal in the class structure. He can aquire as much wealth as he wants, but the real upper class will always considder him a prole. One of the reasons we can't have an honest class discussion is because Americans mostly cannot admit or understand where they fall in the Class spectrum. As an immigrant Cho and his family (including his Princeton sister) were in a position where no amount of wealth or success would raise them in the class.

So the class inequities he rants about may indeed be real, and not just the perception of a deranged mind, but his ACTIONS are insane.

Read some of John Edwards speeches. He talks about class inequities all the time.

I agree with #7. We have shooting after shooting in this nation targeted at women, and no one even mentions it. If it were any other group, racial, religious, or even sexual orientation-- people would be talking.

Does anyone even remember the shooting at the Amish school last year? He let everyone but the girls go, and he was read with his lube. Our society tells men that they are entitled to women. I think examining that is a pretty good place to start.

Gosh, exelizabeth - I'd forgotten about the Amish shooting! Now I'm nauseated and will have nightmares about my daughter for a week all over again! There's not a word in the world to describe how horrible it is to have forgotten such a vicious, evil crime because there've been so many damn other ones to edge it out.