This is for single things that just drive you nuts in the media coverage of this case that don’t deserve their own thread. I have many but I’ll just give two for starters.
Ooh- how bout this- we can hold a big benefit for the survivors and the families of the victims right here in this old news studio! Anderson and Nancy Grace can dance, and Hannity can sing, and Rachael Ray can run the snack bar and Mr. Fashion can make the costumes… we’ll call it MASSACRE-ADE!
Speaking of Cooper: On Anderson Cooper last night, Dr. Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist and former official fellater of the last person to fellate Freud, answers one important question: what makes a student kill 33 people? Is it a complex variety of external stimulae that play on an already majorly fucked up brain chemistry? Well, it’s that… and the fact that Cho was a HoMo of course.
It’s all so clear. Cho had a secret identity as a gay Asian, and the way you know that Secret Asian Man was a latent homosexual is that he was ALWAYS NOT PRACTICING! He was such a Chomo he developed obsessive interest in women and so insistent at keeping up the charade that even when it got him arrested and confined to mental hospitals he kept pretending he was interested in them. Wow. And of course traditional Asian culture is so homophobic he couldn’t come out, so instead he murdered 33 people and killed himself, because that’s a whole lot more acceptable…
Was it George Hearst who said “That don’t make good sense. Shit, that don’t even make good nonsense!” It’s not that as a gay man I feel it’s homophobic to say Cho was gay- I mean we’ve got our share of fucked up individuals like Leopold & Loeb and Dahmer and Bobby Trendy and all- but I think the whole repressed polesmoking tendencies kind of went out with the Bunny Hug and the rumble seat.
Meanwhile, I love this exchange, which I swear to Og I witnessed. I don’t know the name of the newscasters, but they’re on CNN in the morning, she’s an attractivish lady with dark hair and he’s a middle aged black guy and they were doing some lighthearted banter over the Alec Baldwin-screaming-at-his-daughter-tape and had this great segue:
And in addition to linking Alec Baldwin’s being an asshole to killing dozens of college students, THEY’RE BOTH FUCKING SMILING!
Whole I agree with most of your post, how is “massacre” incorrect? I’m curious, just from a linguistic point of view. Is it because only 32 people were killed? I mean, we’re not talking about St. Bartholemew’s Day here, but there have been massacres with smaller body counts. Is it because there was a single killer? Should machetes have been involved?
Well, no wonder he was no good at it.
You know, Cooper is persistently rumored to be gay. If that’s true, it’s too bad he didn’t give this woman a piece of his mind (better a secondhand mind than none at all).
Segues are always the worst part of a news show. If I watched the evening news, it would be for the segues. They’re howlingly awkward and sometimes offensive.
Oh, his eyes popped open like he was in Sanjaya’s dressing room, but he mainly responded with “but he was obsessed with women” and then switching to the other person. It’s generally believed it would take a Peterbilt to drag him out of the closet, though he’s the most openly closeted gay guy in the universe. (Rumors are it’s in his CNN contract but I discount them; when he was new, maybe- but now he’s got enough clout that he could leave CNN and go into syndication and talk about anything he damned well wanted, I think he just likes the mystery.)
It’s not incorrect, it’s just a personal distaste. It sounds so— media-ey. I’d prefer Virginia Tech Murders. Massacre is a more… glamorous, exalted, almost political term that seems to raise it above the random act of senseless insane violence it was.
It has one. Pardon the cross posting, but I posted some YouTube links to a BBC Louis Theroux documentary on the Phelps clan (part 1 is here) that’s one of the most hypnotically fascinating things I’ve seen in a while. Unlike the usual screaming matches, Theroux (from the Norman French words for “Moe Rocca”) befriends the family and accompanies them on their picketing and they’re good natured and gracious to him and so it’s way more horrifying, especially seeing the inside of their compound.
And I wish the media would stop describing his videos as “chilling”, “haunting”, “disturbing”, etc.
Just because this event ended in tragedy doesn’t take away from the fact that those videos were “laughable”, “juvenile”, “lame”.
The kid sounded like Napoleon Dynamite trying to do and Arnold Shwarzenegger impersonation. Complains about rich kids even though he’s attending Virginia Tech being paid for by??? He didn’t even have a job.
He was a senior english major yet his “plays” sounded like a 14 year-old who gets off on Penthouse, Rob Zombie movies, and Insane Clown Posse.
He just an introverted wannabe gang banger who decided he was going to “show everyone” and did something extremely stupid.
Wait a minute! You mean the reason behind the massacre was that VA Tech had given him a number, and they’d taken away his name?
You’re right. It doesn’t even make good nonsense.
Oh, and just a nano-rant here:
I don’t care what abbreviation they happen to use on campus. The school is Virginia Technical University. You can shorthand it by using VA Tech, VTU, or whatever, for all of me. But “VT” to most of America means another state, the one Virginia doesn’t recognize the civil unions of. It’s like me abbreviating my former employers as “THC” and expecting everyone to know it’s a New York state agency, not the active ingredient in pot, that I’m talking about when I throw it in randomly.
I hadn’t heard about that before. What an idiotic statement. Reminds me of some ultra right wing nutjob who was claiming that all atheists had a psychological problem where they were homosexuals and thus hated their fathers and thus hated God. Some people should just automatically have whatever credentials they managed to drum up stripped of them is they demonstrate utter incompetence in the field they are supposed to be representing.
Polycarp, thank you for saying so. This has been bugging me for a while as well; in fact, when I first saw “VT shootings” in print, my first thought was that some nutjob in Vermont had gone crazy as well.
Essentially, stop looking for answers. Your answer is above: a fucked up guy went nuts and killed a lot of people. That’s the answer, that’s the meaning, that’s that. It’s awful, but it’s a Random Act of Tragedy (RAT) and RATs happen.
This entire article, purporting to interveiw Cho’s family pisses me off no end. It’s complete fabrication IMO as well. No way did he have the diagnosis that article claims, or else it would have been in his school records, and he’d have gotten more help than he did. By law schools must accomodate such students, and make up individualized education plans to see to it they get an education too.
What’s pissing me off currently is that everyone’s been picking up on his scribblings since they were released into the intertubes. It’s not the fact that he wrote violent things, as many many people have pointed out, lots of people write violent scenes. Very few of them have killed over thirty people. The REAL warning signs were his behavior and the fact that he made one of his tutors feel so unsafe that she had to have a codeword to alert the police in case he crossed the line.
I know many people in the creative writing concentration at my university. Most of them have, at one time or another, written something incredibly violent. None of them have ever made their professors feel that unsafe.
Thanks. From which we get “VT” how? (Of course VPISU isn’t as snazzy a logo.
I think I’ll start abbreviating “State University of New York College of Arts and Sciences at Oswego” (my alma mater for my B.A.) as “Harvard” (pronounced “Throatwarbler Mangrove” of course)
King has a point - and like someone else said, the kid’s writing wasn’t really scary or twisted, it was really juvenile and incredibly moronic. There was definitely a bunch of suppressed rage in there, but it wasn’t just his writing that set off alarm bells. It was his writing combined with his personality.
And while he already has a pit thread I’ll say it again here- if I hear the words “Healing” and “Dr. Phil” uttered within 20 seconds of each other ONE MORE FUCKING TIME on the news I swear to God I’m going to get impotently pissed off and doing nothing about it again! Fuck healing, Dr. Phil, how about raising the dead? You’ve got at least as much chance of doing that as you do of “healing” anybody- “My 20 year old son just got shot to death by a lunatic who should have been locked up years ago, but you know what? Dr. Phil explained that this is just a part of life and he had me and all the other victims’ loved ones line up and sing Kum Bah Yah and *Always Look on the Bright Side of Life * and now I’m all better.” Fuck that- raise just one of the 33 victims (that’s already the same number as Jesus’s age so use that) from the dead for just 1 hour and then I’ll believe you aren’t just a grandstanding selfpromoting piece of Texified shit.
So in other words you’re saying this should have happened in Vermont? Well fuck you!sorry, just got caught up in the emotion of the moment
Autism is becoming as overused as schizoaffective was when I worked in mental health. (Schizoaffective was a term that covered damned near any ailment for record keeping purposes- I’ve known people who were “schizoaffectively disordered” who ranged from a single depressive suicidal episode to retarded with anger management problems to “I’ve known them since 1989 and I still have no clue what their problem’s even supposed to be”.) For a while it was ADHD even when the kid had none of the classical ADD symptoms but was just a badly spoiled obnoxious little brat, and now you hear autism to describe a kid who doesn’t communicate and has all the other autism symptoms or just any socially inept introvert.
