Sympathy for the devil?

Cho’s manifesto! A manifesto of what? Read his plays and what strikes you is not the violence which is pretty unremarkable. It’s the vapid stupidity. Perhaps the guy took a long hard look at himself and realised that with such a complete lack of talent his one shot at fame was to shoot someone famous, or a whole lot of people who weren’t famous.

Take a chunk of the “manifesto”:

Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave? Do you know what it feels like to have throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can?

Do I know what it’s like to be impaled on a cross, have my throat slashed from ear to ear, be torched alive?

No.

And neither did Cho.

Time magazine ran a series of articles. There was a lot of the classy black and white photography it normally reserves for coverage of Oval office events. The cover featured 24 of the victims’ faces. There were several articles in the issue. General coverage to soul-searching essay. Much the same thing in the local press. The coverage in the Herald-Sun was similar in content though much less classy in tone. A field day! Pages and pages of stuff. Who was this Cho character? Is it guns, is it pop culture. One of Cho’s plays is named after a Guns ‘n’ Roses song. Maybe we should blame Axl Rose.

So much talk and not much said.

During one of the online forums I was making cracks about how Cho’s actions were simply an ambit by the mediocre and plain in the search for fame. Someone reminded me that doing dastardly deeds deliberately to make a name for oneself has ancient precedent. Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis so he would be remembered. In retaliation the authorities banished his name in an attempt to wipe him from memory. Obviously it didn’t work.

In the modern world fame has become the supreme state next to which all states are pale and worthless. Shows like Big Brother are emblems of vacuous fame. Fame for nothing. Big Brother is an annual ritual in which people will exchange their dignity for fame. They do so casually like shallow and spiritless persons selling their souls to the devil for a movie ticket and a bag of peanuts. They got a bargain. What’s a soul? We don’t use it. What’s dignity?

And for Cho and his brethren what is life?

Marilyn Manson maintains that he started his group as “a criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy”. But he fails to mention that he’s adopted the last name of a celebrity mass murderer. That each member of his band is named after a screen diva and a famous killer. The celebrity of death is the supreme kitsch. Oh how clever and ironic! The spectacle of violence and its irony twists in itself Mandelbrot style. We have Natural Born Killers, we have people copying Natural Born Killers, we have them turning around to sue Oliver Stone because he made Natural Born Killers and Natural Born Killers made them do it. People have committed odious acts in the distant past for fame yes. But has it ever been such a widespread phenomena?