As the whole blogosphere is buzzing about it, I am compelled to chime in. Perhaps it is because the story is so random and violent that everyone has become a victim that I feel like commenting. I am not sure what has drawn me to this whole story, but I am fixated. The shootings at Virginia Tech are as surreal as they are frightening.
Tragic and ironic, at an engineering school – where it seems there are so many people on the edge – the English major is the one who stood on the tower - a metaphor that ironically came from the most deadly school shooting in US History before the Virginia Tech massacre. I guess that is the first thing that struck me about the identity of the killer when it was revealed. This is his poetic ending, his tragic rise to fame and all of the metaphors and character types that are spinning around this story.
There is no doubt in my mind that in the weeks and months ahead people will get their hands on the stories and plays that he wrote that scared his classmates in the months leading up to this massacre. There will be a bidding war to get inside the mind of the killer and be the first to publish his violent stories and just like that – Cho Seung Hui will have “made his mark on the literary world”.
As an English major, I know all about the brooding and deeply disturbed prerequisites that come along with a writing career. I know about the anarchist idealism and the second philosophy major that makes your studies seem legitimate. It doesn’t explain why he was the one to go far beyond the image and create a story that will grip thousands for years to come. I recall sitting in class my senior year. Across the table was a student who washed seldom and wore his sunglasses inside, but behind those sunglasses there wasn’t a murderer hiding – or was there?
Was this act bred from a stereotype or is there a stereotype being bred by this act? I keep asking, with every interview I hear and each new story that floods the virtual front pages, what was it about him, Cho Seung Hui, that caused him to go so far as to take the lives of 32 people on a foggy Monday morning? What was is about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that caused them to take the lives of 12 people almost 8 years to the day? These characters arise from seemingly nowhere and pen a paragraph in our nation’s narrative that changes the course of the remaining story. Any good novelist would have foreshadowed this and as the days pass and more information comes to light, it appears there was always foreshadowing here but we just weren’t reading closely enough.
One last impression from me. There is a buzz about the words “Ismail Ax” written on his arm. There have been a lot of people speculating about what this might mean. In the book “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie, there is a character named Ismail. In “Midnight’s Childnren,” a wealthy and a poor child are switched at birth and different lives than those they were born to. Interestingly, wealth was something alluded to in Cho Seung-Hui’s note. To add to this similarity, in Cho’s play “Richard McBeef”, described as being profoundly disturbing to other students, the play focuses on the violent destruction of a stepfather by his stepson, and biological relationships are central to the “plot” while a bizarre and disturbing Oedipal twist emerges. You can read the plays on AOL’s news blogs.
The round up of views and opinions about the term Ishmale Ax that are collected in a Washington Post blog are very interesting as well and quite convincing. They include links to Islam, links to literature, and links to Christianity. But will we ever know what it means?
