A billion posts about how everyone is sexist for hating Hillary, and THIS is the best tapped can do on Race in light of the Clintons shiny new racial strategy?

Even Joshua Marshall is ready to acknowledge what's going on here, but Tapped stands by and says nothing while the Clinton campaign says things clearly designed to provoke a response from the black community so they can point to that response and say 'look, the darkies are already getting uppity!' and scare whites away from Obama.

It's clear how important you people consider discrimination to be when it's not aimed at you. Which is to say, not very much.

And... another interesting set of ideas fed into the 1988 Seven Sisters mulcher.

Feh.

I knew someone who spent a couple of years contemplating homicide, and whose conversations, during that time, sounded an awful lot like Cho's. In his case, romantic rejection, and not being able to make friends more generally, had a lot to do with it. Like Cho, he was pretty isolated.

But I would be very, very reluctant to say that race had anything much to do with it, absent a lot more evidence. People in anything like this state of mind are visibly in pain, and visibly disturbed, as any reading of what people at VTech said about Cho after the massacre will make clear. When someone in that state tries to make friends with you, or to become involved with you, it's like being approached by a huge black hole of need, and it tends to spook people.

In my case, I had been friends with this person for years before the episode in question, so I never had to ask whether or not to befriend him at that time. But I could certainly understand why people might have shied away from him; and people who knew me tended to say: look, what he is asking of you, by putting you in this position of being almost the only one he's talking to while he's homicidal, is more than anyone should ever be able to ask of another person. I stuck it out, partly because he was serious, and might (in my judgment) well have done it, and I wanted to do whatever little I could to prevent that, and also because he was my friend.

But I would have understood me if I hadn't. It was a hellish couple of years. And I can all the more easily understand why someone he, or Cho, approached, in that condition, with that much visible need and pain and anger, would have declined to get involved.

Text messaging? What a perverse notion of how people get dates--even desirable white girl dates--Oddly, guys who come on to complete strangers in socially inappropriate ways aren't being rejected for their *race* or for not fitting in with some hypothetical master plan of the women involved--they are rejected because their come ons are socially unacceptable, come out of the blue, demand too much, are overly intimate, or whatever and that would hold true despite race or holding race constant.

the huge blind spot that adolescents have over how and why things happen to them exists regardless of race. Handsome guys, ugly guys, angry guys, this race guys and tht race guys (and replace guys with the world girls)--stuff happens to you when you are an adolescent that is at least as much because of how you behave as who you "are" in some existential sense. But it takes people a long time to realize that and many people never do.

aimai

I read around a bit looking for more info on the essay and though it isn't online and you can't get more than a glimpse of it through other people's takes on it I think I was a bit harsh. It seems that although Yang starts out seeming to blame the girls for having such "conventional" racist/upper class desires that Cho can't get any love he actually takes the essay in a very different and more complex direction. He seems to be arguing that lots of people, himself and Cho included, are essentially bottomless pits of need and desire that can't really be satisifed by others and that actively repel help and love because of their bottomless quality. I can remember some people in college, in truth no more needy or nerdy than the rest of us, who were rejected time and again because of their inability to accept the superficial courtesies of everyday life as superficial. They were always looking for and demanding a soul mate experience and that very neediness (every lunch invitation misread as an invitation to an all night chat session, every turn of the head an possible life time romance) made them impossible to be with.

I think the fact that the quoted paragraph seems to slough it all off onto race and snotty upper class bitches is misleading.

aimai

C'mon, white girls, drop the racism and start putting out so that all us white/asian/black/hispanic guys don't start blowing people away.

Aimai has a very good take on the essay for someone who hasn't read it. And it is worth finding a copy at your local bookstore or online. It's important to ward off the notion that women have an obligation to any schmuck who takes an interest in them, but Yang's argument is quite the opposite: it's to fight the cliche that there is someone for everyone, to suggest that there are people who are unlovable. It's not that one kind girl could have stopped a massacre; it's that the absence of that girl was no accident at all, but the result of a failed person more common than we allow ourselves to know, failed in a context of sexual desire and racial identity that is uncomfortable to speak about.

Hi Dana,

Thanks for engaging with and recommending my essay.

I will say that I'm sorry to read the following:

"you can't help but take away from the essay that, if only one kind girl had taken the trouble to love Cho, to relieve him of his virginity, 32 people would be alive today."

This reading is about as far away from the intent of my essay as a reader can get.

I'm not going to into the exhaustive rebuttal of this claim that I am tempted to get into. This is not the time or place for that. If anyone cares to pursue it, I'm prepared to do it in any venue, either written, spoken, or in person. But for now I'll say this:

Cho was crazy and evil; that's all we need to know to understand his crimes.

What I did want to do was use a crazy and evil person to describe the world as it is experienced by lots of people who are not crazy and evil.

And I wanted to use an essentially paranoiac vision of the world to illuminate the world as it actually is.

Can paranoia teach us anything? It's my feeling that in certain kinds of writing addressed to extreme experience, it can. That's what I tried to do in this experimental essay, and I'm glad to know that you found it worthwhile reading, despite the conclusion that you've taken from it.

There's immense danger in this strategy, and it's up to each reader to decide for themselves whether they find something edifying in the process of looking at the world in this way.

I can't control what other people are going to conclude or think on the basis of my essay; all I can do is write as clearly as I can and hope that my intentions are visible. If I haven't made them clear, the fault is my own, of course, but given an opportunity to clarify, I would like to take it.

No one deserved to be harmed in any way by anyone; Cho deserves no moral consideration or empathy for his act.

On the other hand, he lived a social predicament that many people know better than they would like to admit, to themselves, or others.

I wanted to describe that predicament as an end in itself; not as a factor in any chain of causation relating to murder; certainly not to mitigate blame or distribute it onto undeserving others.

The only thing I will ask is that anyone reading this post and in any way provoked by it try to "help themselves" from reaching the conclusion referenced above until they have read the piece.

Thanks you!

Wes

Hi Wes,
Thanks for responding to the post. I did really enjoy your essay, and I think Wrongshore's analysis above is spot on -- you had some wonderful analysis of the idea of a "failed person," and you fit Cho well into that framework, and experimented with the fear we all have of becoming a "failed" person ourselves.

I don't think you meant to hold Cho's victims accountable for his crimes. Not at all. But reading your piece, I was reminded of how often the media -- usually thoughtlessly (though your piece was very, very thoughtful) -- tries to ascribe men's crimes to women's actions.

Obviously this is complicated terrain, as many mass murderers do suffer from sexual dysfunctions and obsessions. Yet it is important to point out, always, that these dysfunctions have nothing to do with women, and everything to do with the men themselves.

One part of your piece I really appreciated was your analysis of Cho's short story, in which the narrator does fall in love with "Gothic Girl," but instead of living happily ever after, they embark upon a killing rampage together. So this really isn't about women or sex for Cho, because even in his own imagination, finding a partner, finding love, would not have assuaged his drive to kill.

Anyhow, thanks for the civil debate here, and I look forward to reading more of your stuff!

Dana

I've never read but published version, but after the Columbine shootings and the well-publicized links to taunting and social outcasts, the online geek website slashdot (slashdot.org) threw open their comment threads in a series of postings called "voices from the hellmouth", for high school students past and present to, for lack of a better term, vent. If you didn't find yourself miserable every minute of high school, try reading this and see how the other fraction lives.

You make a good point about the media explaining men's crimes through women's actions. I'd like to think that I evaded this danger, but I can see how I also courted it by situating the piece where I put it -- possibly an unavoidable danger -- and I wonder now if there are safeguards I might have put in against this danger.

The last defense I'll make of it is to specify what _kind_ of piece it is. Nominally about a mass murderer, it tries to describe a feeling tone and a way of experiencing -- a way of being menaced -- by the world.

It is on the one hand a remarkably benign world: one in which nobody is going to enslave you, or launch a pogrom against you, or defer to you because of an inherited title. It is a world that welcomes immigrants and people of all colors and creeds in which your merit alone is what matters, and in which caring professionals exist (as they did for Cho) who try to help you if you are sick and suffering.

The thing that is so often overlooked in this picture is that there is a large surplus population of people without merit -- people who are ugly and sick and who have been twisted and misshapen by rejection and unhappiness.

It was perhaps a bit of poetic license to slot myself into this category; but that's just the point: I know something about it, others know either more or less about it. We have so many comedic accounts of this world that paint a smiley face on it; but not all these stories have happy endings.

The "loser class" competes in the same market as the rest of us in a nominally free and fair competition that they will never be able to master. These people are not the working class, who (used to, anyway) have the dignity of a labor movement behind them; they are an unorganized and unorganized rabble of lone individuals locked into the prison of their solitude. They are beyond politics; they are beneath politics; they exist to be administered by institutions or self-help, and when all else fails, depending on their means, they lapse into quiet desperation (most of them,) and sometimes, rarely (and here is where evil -- a term I have no trouble endorsing in such instance -- enters the picture) violent, psychotic criminality.

So it's my feeling that you don't turn to the essay for reasons and explanations of Cho's act, but instead for a visceral and emotional instantiation of a certain kind of nervous frenzy that is the ambient backdrop to so much of our culture, that shapes what we feel and perceive and that sometimes producing these bizarre eruptions of what Phillip Roth called "the indigenous American berzerk."

This frenzy is so pervasive that we can never really feel it, until something like Va. Tech happens, to make it perceptible. And once the impact dies away, we're left without any good explanations for it.

I wanted to try to get that dread onto the page, not so that we could organize a political or administrative or even a cultural response to it, or so that men, or women could praised, or blamed, but just so that we would know and face this thing that we all know, to varying degrees, without admitting it. To varying degrees, we all found a way to barricade ourselves against this frenzy, but we know that there are people caught in it.

Anyway, that's the idea, and everyone that looks at the piece is entitled to judge whether it worked.

Thank you for this very civil and edifying exchange, and excuse me for using this space to do some totally off-the-cuff, overlong -- and probably very muddled -- thinking aloud.

Wes

Wes, thanks for your awesome response. It definitely makes me reconsider how I read the essay -- as a political journalist, I'm quick to fit things into current events frames, and I recognize your piece had a more discursive purpose.

Anyhow, well done!

Dana

This is Cho's face:

http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/070417_070423/070417_Cho2_hsmall.widec.jpg

It's a perfectly nice-looking, ordinary face. There are hundreds of thousands of young men walking around behind faces like this arm in arm with young women of all sorts of races. The idea that Cho killed people because he was ugly or dark-skinned is so sick, shallow and racist that it's hard even to formulate a response to it.

Nominally about a mass murderer, it tries to describe a feeling tone and a way of experiencing -- a way of being menaced -- by the world.

While on one hand, we realize that, on the other hand, I just don't think that Cho's rampage is a helpful/illuminating springboard for discussing the issues you wanted to explore.

To me it seems like an ordinary, rather unhappy face, though hardly repellent per se. I think that using a term like "evil" which is both emotive and dangerously self-absolving really doesn't explain anything, except the strikingly banal idea that there are people who do terrible things, and we need a term for them that doesn't require much thought on our part. I also think that evil comes freighted with a good deal of unacknowledged religious baggage, which also does not bring much to our understanding of events. I can't agree with the rather sunny picture Wes draws of the world. It is, especially in college, a much harsher, competitive, judgmental world, especially for a young, relatively unformed and unsuccessful person. The dorm world is intense, often over-enclosed, and fosters gossip, backbiting, cliques that can be very corrosive to the excluded. You don't have to be ugly or sick to be rejected by this world. It can happen because of your accent, your quirks, your background, your family's income level, your inability to come up with quick responses - any one of a number of factors. Perfectly "normal" people wind up on the outside - and feel wretched. To make matters worse, college has this mythology of "happy days" associated with it. Everyone else must be successful, beautiful, sexual - and the disjunct between their "success" and my "honest average" can be a hideous experience. In some ways, I think we can argue that our society depends on failure to measure and validate success. In a capitalist world, material/physical success is what matters, far more than any measure of virtue, decency, kindness etc. More important, there must be the negative example for us t feel that we have succeeded, as opposed to the loser on the corner. That's what destroys the average person - not their "sickness", or "ugliness". They just happen to be average in a world that regards such a status as failure.

Dear Anonymous:

You're attacking a point that is most assuredly not made in the essay. This is called a "Straw Man" argument, and it's one of the first fallacies that thinking people learn not to be persuaded by or attempt to make on their own.

Dear Tyro:

And whether or not the rampage is helpful or illuminating to discuss these issues is only something that you can judge after you've read the essay. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

If you read the piece and conclude, as Reihan Salam, and Matthew Yglesias did, that the piece was interesting and edifying -- "one of the best things I've read in a long time," then it was a worthwhile experiment.

If you read it and conclude otherwise, then it didn't work out for you, and that's OK too. Not everybody has to like everything. Not everybody is going to like everything.

What's not OK is to take a handful of really short characterizations and snippets from an 11,000 word piece -- especially ones that, on further reflection, the person who made them has seen fit to revise in her own mind -- and then use them to accuse people of being "sick, shallow, and racist."

That wouldn't be intelligent, and it wouldn't be fair. That would be invidious name calling in place of thought, and to get away from that sort of thing is why we're here at TAPPED instead of, say, the blog of Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter.

We're here to have an intelligent conversation based on things we've thought about and read. Right?

We're not here to lash out in the dark based on conclusions we've jumped to without having read or thought. That's not how intelligent, sensitive people behave.

I want to think this is true of everyone at this site, and even of you, Dear Anonymous Tyro. Think it over and ask yourself if you behaved like your best self in your posts: I will submit to you that even if doing better hasn't occurred to you, you are still capable of it.

How's that for an optimistic view of life?

I acknowledge, of course, that there's a structural problem here: we're talking about this very long essay that cannot, by its nature, be boiled down to a single paragraph or set of paragraphs. That's why Yglesias, rightly I think, declined to tease the piece at very great length. No excerpt from the piece conveys the experience of reading it: it's that kind of piece. Yes, my friends, this cannot be boiled down to a headline and then bandied about for hours of meaningless play, like Hillary's tears: you actually have to sit down and read it.

Fortunately, the way to overcome this problem is simple. If you are interested to debate this question or hold opinions on it, read the essay:

Go here:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/subscribe.html

to subscribe to n+1

or here:

http://www.amazon.com/n%2B1-Number-Six-Mainstream/dp/0976050358/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200360856&sr=8-1

To order a single issue.

Then we'll convene back here and argue passionately pro and con, and all of us might learn something. Until then, I wish you luck.

Tyro I just don't think that Cho's rampage is a helpful/illuminating springboard for discussing the issues you wanted to explore.

However, it's quite impossible to get anybody to give a damn about the kind of creep Yang is talking about unless he's not just a creep but a psycho criminal. For a different take on these people see "James Tiptree's" short story The Women Men Don't See.

Wes, while I agree about your dislike for being accused of racism, I am not sure that being smug about the "straw man" argument really makes you come across as especially goodnatured either. On a related point, you have posted here a couple of times, and people may be responding to what you said in your posts, as much as to what you said in your essay. This seems worth considering to me - unless you feel that this is a Coulteresque attack?

While rejection and girl troubles may have been the initial cause of Cho's maladjustment, I don't think having a girlfriend in college would have cured him. Once someone becomes that angry and obsessive, there's no going back. For every man who murders a girl because she rejected him, there's ten who murder girlfriends whom they erroneously suspect of cheating.

And no, I don't think Wesley Yang thinks girls should provide sex as a public good to ensure the mental health of young men. He's just pointing out that our society can be cruel to marginalized and unpopular individuals.

Also, note this article. A Virginia Tech girl left a note on Cho's grave, signed "With all my love, Laura."

If Cho had been able to get out of his angry funk and interact with people more, he'd have realized that it's really easy to find people who'll like you. And it's easy to find girls who'll like you and have sex with you and marry you, even if you're ten times uglier than Cho, no matter what race you are or what your accent sounds like. Society is cruel sometimes, but it can seem a lot crueler than it really is, especially to a guy like Cho.

What a thought provoking exchange this is. I will definitely be going to my local bookstore to pick up a copy of this essay. And I probably will be subscribing to TAP, too. You don't find this kind of considered analysis everywhere. Thanks for the comments, Dana, and thank you very much, Mr. Yang, for engaging.

Mr. Noah wrote:
Also, note this article. A Virginia Tech girl left a note on Cho's grave, signed "With all my love, Laura."

Of course, there's no reason to assume that this Laura knew Cho in real life, or that she would have gotten along with him if she had; she may have been expressing something more like a broad religious or philosophical belief that all humans are deserving of love and compassion, rather than anything more personal.

If Cho had been able to get out of his angry funk and interact with people more, he'd have realized that it's really easy to find people who'll like you. And it's easy to find girls who'll like you and have sex with you and marry you, even if you're ten times uglier than Cho, no matter what race you are or what your accent sounds like. Society is cruel sometimes, but it can seem a lot crueler than it really is, especially to a guy like Cho.

You really think it's "easy"? I don't think ugliness (and Cho wasn't really particularly ugly) or foreign accents are serious obstacles in themselves, but some people have major social handicaps that make it very difficult to make friends, let alone romantic partners--think of an autistic person (even a high-functioning autist), for example. Myself, I'm a major introvert who just can't think of things to talk about with strangers, and even with people I know I rarely do much of the talking; my small circle of friends seem to find me likeable enough, and I'm not in an "angry funk", but I hardly ever make friends with anyone new because I have no ability to get the conversational ball rolling. I have no idea what Cho's problems were, but it wouldn't surprise me if he had his own social handicaps which would have made it very difficult to form relationships even if he could have gotten over his anger issues (and anger/alienation/narcissism can themselves be deep-seated personality issues which are not so easy to overcome through force of will alone). "Interact with people more" may be good advice for those whose social skills are not too far from the "normal" range, but I don't think it's a magic formula that will work for anyone.

I haven't gotten a chance to read Wesley Yang's essay yet (I'll see if the local college bookstore stocks n+1 tomorrow), and it may be that this is not quite what he's talking about when he refers to the "loser class" in his comment above--the class of people with terrible social skills is not identical to the class of "people who are ugly and sick and who have been twisted and misshapen by rejection and unhappiness", as he put it--but it sounds like part of what he is arguing is that we should question comforting notions like "there's someone out there for everyone" or "just buck up and try harder and you'll soon find the love and acceptance you desire".

aimai, Cho text-messaged his invitations because he was unable to handle face-to-face interactions. He couldn't handle eye contact or speak properly, and these disabilities were almost certainly due to some organic dysfunction. Yes, it was socially inappropriate, but do we want social norms that condemn people being forbidden to make dating offers because they lack they ability to do things normally? Cho was probably unsalvageable, by the time he was in college at least, but there are many others with similar disabilities who aren't homicidal who just suffer.

Someone claims to be Wesley Yang who is not -- it is hard to imagine that the author of the third post signed "Wes" is the same as the author of the first two.

Why someone would go to the trouble is beyond me--some part of me wonders I'm even bothering to point this out, except it explains some part of my frustration with blog comment threads.

Also I have failed three CAPTCHAs.

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