In my high school speech class, one of our assignments was to give an Informative Speech. A how-to thing, in other words: How to change a tire, how to ride a horse, how to do needlepoint.
My speech explained various ways to commit suicide.
It was a joke, of course, my lame, adolescent attempt at subverting the system. The notion of an instructional speech seemed so lame, so dull, I wanted to contrast my deliberately stilted, rote presentation with the creepy, shocking premise.
The teacher, a cool, laid-back guy prone to quoting Arlo Guthrie lyrics in class, was concerned enough to contact the guidance counsellor, who called me into his office a few days later and introduced me to a therapist. Was I suicidal, they asked.
I was a fucked-up kid, hopelessly isolated from people my own age, reading a lot of William Burroughs, scribbling a lot of bitter notes, nursing a serious grudge against the world.
Which makes me exactly like John Lennon as a teenager, or Tim Burton, or Bill Hicks, or any of the millions of other misfits who pass through the world. Crazy dreamers, all of us, not quite fitting in. Some find those dreams lead to success, others spend their lives skulking in the shadows. Most simply grow up.
Occasionally, they buys guns and kill people.
The "warning signs" people are claiming they saw in Cho Seung-Hui just don't seem that unusual to me. He was anti-social, he didn't know how to ask a girl out, he wrote long, rambling diatribes against people he resented. His supposedly "shocking" writing, the stuff that so freaked out his professors that they contacted the authorities, strikes me as typical revenge fantasy bullshit, no more profane or violent than any night's programming on Spike.
True, the super-happy-funpack he sent off to NBC shows a guy who'd gone over the edge, but that's the point: By that time, he was gone, and he was going to go through with his Travis Bickle routine no matter what.
But the fact that he didn't fit in, that he harbored dangerous thoughts, was--gasp--mentally ill, none of that marks him as a potential killer. It simply makes him human.
