SHOOTINGS…SCAPEGOATS…SUFFERING…

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It seems that one cannot currently escape some kind of news report, commentary or speculation in regard to the Virginia Tech massacres. Turning on the TV an hour or so ago, I saw further coverage of the deeds of Seung Cho, the “loner and introvert” (*rolls eyes*) responsible for the killings.

And another key indicator of his blackened heart, beyond him being – uh oh Chongo (!) – “quiet and introverted”?

He wrote “disturbing” narratives for his writing!

Really, this is the red flag sign of a ruthless killer who needs help(and candy)!

Better lock up Toshio Maeda, Buronson, Garth Ennis, Tom Fontana, Go Nagai et al – before it’s too late!!

So much for being, y’know, CREATIVE in a fucking CREATIVE WRITING class!

The same bullshit scapegoating that always goes on in the wake of events like these (albeit from a novel angle…)

All that off my chest, I must say Cho’s work comes off as “creative” in the sense that a typical three-year old’s squiggles do. Actually, I apologize to three-year olds across the world for that one – those little ‘uns probably possess a better command of narrative, characterisation, and dialogue than displayed in Mr Brownstone. Clearly anyone who pens dialogue such as “He ass-raped you. He’s such a rapist.” needs help of an entirely different kind—clearly, the creative world lost its next Shakespeare, its Tarantino MkII, on Monday!

Now, of course, according to Leader of the (relatively) Free World, G.W. Bush, “a nation mourns”.

To that I say, “Spare me the melodrama, Georgie-boy!”

Really, what’s with all the grief-whoring whenever big events like this hit the headlines? You got people still steeped in grief over 9-11 which I see as understandable – if you actually knew any of the poor fuckers who died then! With this smaller scale massacre, the supposed radius of this “grief” strikes me as all the more baffling – I don’t dare doubt the friends, family and acquaintances of the deceased in their mourning, but “national grief”? Don’t fuck with me! This seems the sort of thing dgowers derides in this post…..

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the punditry predictably pummel the pet piñata of the Second Amendment with their usual reactionary “there ought to be a law” zeal. Tony Blair however, in a rare burst of good sense, deems it “completely inappropriate” to join them – just as well, seeing as this country’s gun controls do a great fucking job at keeping people safe! Remember the last time someone got shot, got gunned down in the Beautiful Borough of Newham, hmm?

It pleases me to live in a country where the gun control laws really make a difference in regards to public safety—Adam Regis feels the same way too!

What does London Mayor Ken Livingstone do in the wake of all this? What any politician worth their salt does – scapegoat !

The last time I checked, Kill Bill‘s Beatrix Kiddo used considerable “brain power” to achieve her goal of bloody revenge; more than Ken used when he let under-16s travel for free on London Buses! I wonder if the absence of such a permission would’ve made a difference to Adam’s quality of life.

I’d know it’d improve my quality of life not to share a bus with a whole school of obnoxious little gangsta-wannabe cunts….

Mr Livingstone, there really ought not to be a law!

~MRDA~

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20 Responses to SHOOTINGS…SCAPEGOATS…SUFFERING…

  1. Like I said in a recent entry: the fuss is much ado about nothing. That kill count isn’t really impressive.
    And his putting of words into strings of sentence-like structures is the pinnacle of atrocity. That people were subjected to his works is the biggest crime that transpired because of this fiasco.
    I’m waiting for “He ass raped you. He’s such a rapist” to get turned into net lingo. It makes me giggle.

    • MRDA says:

      “I’m waiting for “He ass raped you. He’s such a rapist” to get turned into net lingo. It makes me giggle.”
      I wonder if a T-shirt line will be spun off from all this….

  2. the first time i ever noticed you was over the internet debate on rob’s journal over the columbine killers’ status as heroes.
    so here we are again!
    sticking to the first part of you entry, i am constantly finding myself disabusing people of the notion (whether for better or for worse) that the shooters are to be regarded as tragic mythic folk heroes…that they are the poor twisted product of a corrupt society.
    that, coupled with the constant finger-pointing and scape-goating, makes these affairs all about the relinquishment of personal responsibility.
    the shooter wasn’t repsonsible because he was a weird loner who was shunned by the world and the video games/movies/marilyn manson/dark poetry/nietzsche made him do it.
    the people around him weren’t responsible because it was the video games, etc., anything but them
    it wasn’t the video games, it was the parents, it wasn’t the parents it was the school….blah blah blah blah…everyone’s so horrified and just desperately trying to scramble out of the path of having had any part in it.
    but as manson said, “throw a rock and you’ll hit some one who is responsible.”
    and he’s right, but more responsible than any one is the shooter himself. we may not know exactly why he did it, but some one is always inevitably saying when it comes to school shootings, especially in highschools, that it’s because of the horrible highschool culture.
    well…look at what people are always doing, saying, “these are the best years of your life…i wish i was your age again!” and worshipping highschool culture by obsessing endlessly over teen magazines, proms, football games, and youth culture in general, that sort of thing.
    this is the attitude that pushes people to believe (however short-sidedly) that it really IS the end of your life if you aren’t the popular kid and having a great time. the truth is, most people don’t have a great time, they just want to look like they’re having fun.
    instead, we’ve got a media obsession with making a mythic folk story out of school shootings further endorsing the worship that helped create the shootings in the first place.
    of course, the shooters have given more validity to this worship and myth than the media or bullies or vicariously-living-billions-of-dollars-spending-child-worshipping-parents ever could….they gave this stupid obsession with highschool culture the highest value of all; that of being worth life and death.
    they confirm what society so wickedly implies; that not being popular and happy in highschool is worth killing and dying for.

    • haha in all that i forgot to mention…i agree with you. seeing the whole victim bully mentality thing you brought up way back when helped me form the above opinion

      • Or he finally ran into someone that told him exactly what they thought of his “plays”. ^_^
        “What? You dare question my works of indelible genius?! You shall rue this day, heathen. RUE!”
        Wait. It was probably more like: “[unintelligible sound] You am not like my word making? Cho is sad face now. Also mad face. Mcbeef!”
        Thus did tragedy strike. Poor, poor, Virginia. They already have West Virginia as permanent scar and reminder of failure, now this.

    • MRDA says:

      Heh, I too remember the whole Columbine thing and what I said about it; it sure seems hard to act so magnanimous in the face of one’s tormentors, I’ll say!
      I agree that lionizing these schoolyard killer is a mistake; however, I won’t pretend to give a shit for the poor slaughtered lambs of Columbine; I’d even go far as to say that, in that whole pointless killing spree, I hope they at least took out those who gave them shit.
      It makes me laugh and sigh how everyone rushes to blame games, guns, flicks, music and other such things and very few people want to look at the high-school culture and the Hinduesque social stratification that goes on there. Like, okay, killing your classmates isn’t the best solution to things – counterproductive in fact – but… bullying is…. “character-building”? That’s the kind of dismissive comment that makes me think some people really should choke on a bowl of dicks!
      The high school culture does get inflated to levels that any sane person would term disgusting, particularly on your side of the pond! The fetishization of youth culture in general helps reinforce this climate of enforced enjoyment and racking up popularity points.
      And whomever coined the phrase “school days make up the best days of your life” really needs to eat the same bowl of dicks as those in the “bullying is character-building” camp! Hardly a sterling endorsement for life, however you want to view the phrase…..
      You really did take my thought to a place I barely touched upon – great insight!

      • thank you!
        and bullying thing, it’s easy for me to say “suck it up”. no one bullied me because i was a euphorically oblivious child, and also because i was always the one fighting the kids who bullied my friends. and even then fighting wasn’t scary, i always thought it was fun, haha…
        but you’re right, bullying is hard to endure, and one can’t always “turn the other cheek”! and it is bullshit that parents, teachers, and the entire western world seems to be too busy “fetishizing,” (as you say) the youth culture to find the time to yank on the reigns once in a while!

  3. konami says:

    Lucky for you, you can’t see the american news stations… I just tuned CNN and they are attempting to explain “why do bad things happen to good people?”
    What the fuck.
    Why does the news have a need to EXPLAIN why things happen? Shit, it’s like they are running a fucking sermon, and the watchers the laypeople… Except the news offers no answers and just a lot of buttfuck. Tell me what happened and shutup about what you think about it! Jesus it never ends!

    • MRDA says:

      Yeah the silly, melodramatic,value judgments piss me off too! Sure, what happened rates as terrible, but for fuck’s sake, journalists, spare me the inane “Embodiment of Evil” crap, please…..

      • konami says:

        I wish it could be only a new problem. No matter what, the commercial news outlet wants to cater to a specific audience. CNN wants to tune into american values, the BBC the british values, etc. No matter how fair they may be, there’s always the taint. The Indie news is even worse!
        Truely, the best news program I watch is a CHRISTIAN news program covering regular issues. This would seem like a mighty contradiction to what I want; but at least there’s some backbone to them projecting the news in a moralist light. It’s at least you know; HONEST. Infact, in this way the news is less tainted by the point of view. The Professors on BBC and the “Experts” on CNN talk out of their ass and carry away the facts into strange territories and unknown agendas.
        I suppose the point is, call the news what it is.

  4. ghostdog_ says:

    This is beside the point, but Garth Ennis is fucking awesome.
    England and guns always gets people in a fuss. I’ve thought for a while now that we could benefit from some new gun ownership laws with the state of random violence here.
    Then something like this happens and everybody points at America and says ‘oh look it doesn’t work guns iz teh evil.’

    • MRDA says:

      Yeah really – it does strike me as pathetic seeing as “homegrown” killers, when they’re not doing drive-bys, get round gun control with knives. I’m waiting for the knife amnesty where you’ll see gangstas and housewives alike handing in their implements of destruction….

  5. psuedoid says:

    There definately is a “straw-cho”, stereotypical ‘being quiet is bad and a sign of homicidal tendency’ sort of angle going on in some spheres. It also goes without saying, after the facts have been had, that a big part of his inner rage was due to his total division from other people! Not only was he pretty lonely, but he was always in a position of seeing other people who did have friends and were connecting with other people. From what I’ve read his social ineptitude was extreme and grasp of english..loose. That’s bound to build a shitload of frustration to project out onto concepts like “hedonism” and “rich people” that he could vilify. Political melo-drama is silly as fuck, no two ways about it, politics sometimes is little more than a deceitful show of oneupmanship, not so different from early school days when our balls were just dropping.

    • MRDA says:

      It does annoy me – can’t people loners just be….I dunno…left alone if they so desire it? Why all the dumbfuck herd devaluations?
      It does amuse me how people will term lonely peeps as odd, weird, sad and whatever-the-fuck epithets they can think of; yet any attempt said persons to alleviate or overcome their condition get met with a general “Ewww!” feeling by those socialites; a genuine attempt by a loner-of-circumstance to bond with others gets brushed off as “creepy” and thus the cycle perpetuates.
      And that feeling of “life’s a party and you’re not invited” must have burned in Cho’s breast; I know it burns in mine from time to time (even if I do generally like my own company). That said, I can’t really see any sound motivation for his unsound action – his recorded rants come across as the same vein of scapegoating as any cocksucking politician/journalist….

  6. newedition says:

    I haven’t been doing much on LJ in quite a while so I thought I’d say hi.
    Good points in this entry. The news that I’ve seen/read is focusing on:
    – That he was a loner and therefore we should distrust loners
    – That he used a gun and therefore we should ban all guns
    Those sentiments match all of the letters to the editor and interviews that I’ve seen. Not too much longer before there is a total police state. In the name of safety, of course.
    However– I actually do think his “creative” plays are cause for alarm. The violence in them has nothing to do with the plot… in fact, there is no plot. His writings are just 10 pages of swearing and violence for the sake of swearing and violence. I’m not saying this means people should have automatically been suspicious of him (I recall the injustice of my college roommates trying to report me to my residence advisor to force me in to counseling for so-called depression because I’d rather have been alone than associate with them), but those plays do sound like his violent fantasies rather than any kind of creative writing.

    • ubermensch says:

      so we should see cause for alarm because this man, as opposed to, say, (insert horror writer of your choice here) is totally lacking in creative talent?

    • MRDA says:

      Long time no see….I hope you’ve been doing well….
      In regard to the plays – I read/watch far more disturbing material than that from artists of higher aesthetic calibre and personal self-control; it reads like the sort of thing a 13-year old would write after watching a few violent movies and watching the news – nothing stands out in those stories as particularly chilling for me.
      If violent fantasies constitute a criterion for “medical help”, they’d have had Rand in a straitjacket before she could say “Roark”.

  7. goodbye_doll says:

    I know. It’s everywhere on the news. MY school even lowered its flag half-mast, and crap like that.
    Like, yeah, it does suck, and a lot of people died.
    But, that’s what happens when “everyone” is allowed to have guns. Some people, you know, uh. . .get SHOT AND KILLED.
    Everything is such a big deal. I guess, it should be important, if only for the reason to show everyone that not only do bullied little Marilyn Manson fans shoot up their schools, but so do young asian men who can’t write well. And Maybe just maybe school shootings by mentally unstable people are pushed along, and even caused by, the availability of guns, and not because people listen to Marilyn Manson or are quiet and introverted.
    Because, I mean, if those were the only reasons, I should be shooting up MY school right about now.

    • MRDA says:

      I think that blaming guns isn’t any less a scapegoat than blaming solitude, Manson, Resident Evil or Oldboy in all honesty.
      Question on my mind (amongst other people’s): What the fuck happened to the security in that little bloodshed intermission?
      I have to say I agree with the peeps who say more guns, not less, would’ve made a positive difference on Monday…

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