More Eurotrash musing on V-Tech

The Times Online offers some more European-style thoughts about the shootings at Virginia Tech:

Just before 5am on Monday, April 16, Cho Seung-hui got out of bed and walked to his computer. Perhaps he fiddled with his rambling 1,800-word self-portrait of a killer as the insults and grievances that he had been nursing for years coursed through his head.

High on his list were his classmates from Westfield high school, who jeered at him to “go back to China” without bothering to check his nationality. Two of them — who happened to attend Virginia Tech — were going to pay later that day. Then there were the college girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning.

Oh, that poor misunderstood lad! [Lemuel pauses to vomit.]

“By a name, I know not how to tell who I am,” he had written to one of them. He understood literature, he could have thought, while they didn’t have the brains to recognise that he was quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Spurned by them, he had to make do with a fantasy girlfriend, a supermodel who called him “Spanky”.

He had read Shakespeare! What a treasure this poor man was. Oh curses upon the blind Philistines who knew not his value. "They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground." Clearly we did not recognize greatness and will forever be the poorer for it.

On the way to the bathroom Cho bumped into his roommate Karan Grewal. As usual, Cho didn’t try to speak to him or even nod hello. He swallowed his antidepressants, put on his contact lenses and applied his spot cream. As he picked up his weapons, a Glock 9mm pistol and Walther P22 handgun, and twisted back his black baseball cap, he clearly did not want to be remembered as the kid with acne.

No, far better to be remembered as a mass murdering freak. One must keep one's priorities straight.

At 7.15am, campus police were alerted to a shooting at West Ambler Johnston residential hall, a two-minute walk from Cho’s own hall. Witnesses heard screams and the eerie “pop pop” of a semi-automatic weapon before finding the bodies of a young man and a young woman sprawled on the floor in the hallway between the men’s and women’s dorms.

The dead girl was Emily Hilscher, 19. Perhaps there was something about her that reminded Cho of another girl he had fancied — the one he had sneaked into the women’s dorm to see but, as a roommate recalled, “When he looked into her eyes, he saw promiscuity”.

No similarity to anything that has ever been said by any Islamofascist jihadist there. Those neocon wing-nuts must have been crazy to even speculate that Cho was influenced by Islam in any way whatsoever.

This is getting boring so let's skip ahead a bit in the newspaper story and see if anything interesting pops up:

This time he would target professors as well as students. He walked across the campus to the teaching block at Norris Hall, where he chained the front doors so nobody could escape. He may have remembered some lines from Mr Brownstone, a play he had written: “He gave me a D, when I only forgot to turn in two homeworks.”

As he gunned down Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French lecturer, science professor Kevin Granata and Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, he may have thought again of the professor in his play who “ass-raped us all — isn’t that what teachers do?

“I wanna watch him bleed, the way he watched us bleed”. Now he was fulfilling his own prophecy.

Remember Liviu Librescu. He was the 74 year-old man who thought quickly and held the door to his classroom shut with his own body to give his students time to escape. Librescu was shot through the door at least twice. He did not survive.

As for the students, they could forget his sympathy. He fired at them again and again, scattering their flesh across the floor. Most of his victims, girls and boys, were shot three times. Sometimes he would return to check whom he had killed and who was merely playing dead. His face was blank, but his emotions were seething.

On a purely technical note if he had used a .40 caliber Glock loaded with Federal HST hollowpoints he would not have had to shoot his victims so many times. Not that this would have been a good thing, but this should be remembered by honest citizens who own firearms for legitimate purposes.

As he said in his video, “You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats, Your gold necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs . . . You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing.”

Did anyone think that they were "extinguishing" his life? It sounds like people tried to reach out to him and he slapped back every hand that was extended.

Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.

If you don't understand the above paragraph don't feel bad. It isn't meant to be understood. It is academic gibberish. Its purpose isn't to convey facts for the purpose of education it is designed to elevate the writer in his own eyes and to cow the reader into intellectual submission by making him feel that he could understand it if only he were a little bit smarter. Think "The Emperor's New Clothes " and you'll get the idea.

Let's skip ahead a little bit more and look at another of Cho's pronouncements:

“Do you know what it feels to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?” he railed on video. “You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your whole lives. You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.”

Did Cho know what it felt like to be "torched alive"? Had Cho ever felt true pain? I don't mean the angst of the picked-on high school student. I mean the kind of pain that his fellow Koreans in the North feel when they look at their children who are dying of starvation because they live in a communist country ruled by an insane dictator with an emotional age of about three. Had Cho ever felt the kind of pain that American Marines and soldiers felt on the march back from the Chosin Reservoir in 30 below zero temperatures during the war which kept his homeland free?

Not that this essay doesn't ask some legitimate questions:

In a twist to the debate on masculinity, some commentators have complained that the terrified Virginia Tech students were no Rambos when it came to defending themselves. John Derbyshire, a right-wing British writer based in America, wondered, “Why didn’t anyone rush the guy? Yes, I know it is easy to say these things, but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?” — a reference to the passengers fighting back in the 9/11 hijacked plane.

The columnist Mark Steyn took up the theme with an essay on the “culture of passivity” that is overtaking America. In his view, students are becoming so infantilised that they have lost their capacity to take responsibility.

Of course an explanation is quickly provided which absolves the students and faculty of any accusation of whimpdom:

“When someone opens the door of a classroom and begins firing with a semi-automatic weapon, there is no fighting back possible,” says Paglia. “All of this happened too fast for the young men or young women to rush the shooter and bring him down.”

Paglia is a defender of the constitutional right to bear arms in America. She is troubled, however, by the ease with which Cho bought his weapons. “The problem is not hunting guns but these semi-automatic weapons. He could not have cut down that many people so quickly or with such brutal efficiency without them. They have no use except for commandos, swat teams and paramilitary organisations.

[. . .]

“Throughout most of human history men have been armed, but with swords not guns,” Paglia observes. As the weapons grow more deadly, even a solitary “boy” can commit the worst massacre in American history. This is the 19th such scenario in the past decade. Unfortunately it is unlikely to be the last.

You see it wasn't their fault that they sat there like lambs in the slaughter pen. Cho had a SEMI-AUTOMATIC WEAPON! [cue ominous music] No one can stand against the firepower of a semi-automatic handgun [cue ominous music] (Paglia, for those of you who aren't familiar with her, is an academic motormouth who suffers from one of the most extreme cases of verbal diarrhea known to medical science).

Remember Liviu Librescu, the 74 year-old Holocaust survivor who, even though faced with a SEMI-AUTOMATIC WEAPON [cue ominous music] sprang into action and put his body between his students and the killer? Why didn't things happen too fast for this old, old man?

I would submit that if a man almost old enough to be the great-grandfather of any student in that class could find it within himself to act then any of those students could have done so as well. And some few did, but not many.

When I started this blog I didn't intend to become a chronicler of the deterioration of Europe in its long slide into oblivion but the whole topic seems so compelling. After all with forewarning perhaps America can avoid the same deterioration.