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Cho as Hero, We Love Our Villains
for release 04-20-07
Washington DC
by Lightning Rod
Have you ever marveled at America's fascination with bad guys? Our popular history is not filled with Ghandis and Mother Theresas, it is populated by Billy The Kid and Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde and John Wilkes Boothe and James Earle Ray and Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wayne Gacy (why are all these people known by three names?) and the Mansons and the Whitmans and the Chapmans. Not a day goes by on the History Channel without at least a few hours devoted to Adolph Hitler.
And now we appear to have a new contender for champion bad guy, a new black-belt murderer and nut-case that will amuse psychologists for years to come. Mr. Cho. What made him do it? What unbearable societal pain was he suffering that caused him to retreat into violence and murder? Was he bullied in school? Did his girlfriend jilt him? Was he sexually abused in the womb? What does his first grade school teacher have to say about him, or his roommates or his next door neighbor? Was he hooked on pornographic video games? The questions are endless. We'll have to start a whole new cable TV channel just to explore the gruesome possibilities. Nancy Grace has six months of programming in the bank.
Oh yes, we love our villains. We love to glorify and idealize and analyze and dissect and roll the miscreants around on our tongues and invent myths and conspiracy theories surrounding them like the aura of a nightmare. It's the same reason that Stephen King is such a popular writer. We are intrigued by the macabre and the sensational and most of all.....body count. We love our bad boys.
Let's just examine the 'news' stories that have gotten the most ink in the last couple of months. You have the Duke Lacrosse Team scandal (bad boys, bad girl) We have the Anna Nicole spectacle (bad girls.) There was the Don Imus crucifixion (bad boy.) And now we have the Virginia Tech killings (crazy boy.)
You can bet that camera crews are already on the plane to South Korea to film Cho's childhood home and make studious deductions about the young man's history and family and sufferings and his immigration to a foreign land (don't even say immigration) and his alienation from American commercial culture and his feelings of rejection...ah, it goes on and on. I'm imagining a whole new growth industry of pop psychologists as they jump on the Dr. Phil wagon and go on TV to pontificate about what caused this act of wanton killing from the 'scientific' or humanistic or evangelical point of view.
Every newscaster is keeping score of the body count. This is a new record, after all. We can just hear the panting out there as other disaffected youths work out in their basement gyms with violent video games and dream of their day of infamy and of breaking the body count record and moving to the next level of despair in the game. It's enough to keep us all on the edges of our seats.
The Poet's Eye has a puzzled look today. I wonder why we dwell on the petty villains who kill only a handful of innocents once in a while, rather than the really dastardly ones like starvation and AIDS and war and injustice that kill thousands every day. Perhaps those are too hard to look at or too hard to see, like the forest for the trees.
Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried
Along with her name - nobody came
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands
As he walks from the grave - no one was saved
All the lonely people, where do they all come from
All the lonely people, where do they all belong
---Beatles
