roachboy

i agree with shani on this, but would go further:

my reaction to information about/clips and images from cho's video and the accompanying manifesto was the opposite of uncle phil's above...the massacre was obviously disturbing in itself and it follows that anything remotely like an "explanation"--especially particularlized through cho himself in full regalia doing a kind of pantomime of "terrorist" videos--was also bound to be disturbing. but i think it absolutely should have been shown.

the persecution/martyrdom complex at the center of it is pretty obviously pathological, but not everything that cho processed through this complex was or is.
he in a way held up a very disturbing mirror that shows a combination of broad socio-political problems that are endemic to the american socio-economic order AND a very particular image of an individual who reacted in an incoherent, inarticulate and ultimately murderous way to these problems...these two general elements were self-evidently tangled up in a bizarre way as a function of his particular psychological state.
if there is a problem with this, then, it lay in the fact that the "explanation" simply compounds ambiguity--what are "we" (viewers, readers, spectators in general) supposed to do with this information?
on the other hand, what were "we" expecting? something to make us feel better about this? from the guy who did the killing? how is that reasonable? the action was obviously inspired by the possibility of giving all of us something that COULD NOT be resolved into anything that made any of us feel better about anything.

but the information should nonetheless have been aired: information has no necessary therapeutic function for those who take it in. there is no such requirement, nor should there be one.

there's another way of seeing this as well: if the concern really is copycat actions, it would seem to me that they would be *more* likely to happen the *less* information about cho is out there--this because the less information that is made available, the greater the space for projections about him--and it seems to me that the condition of possibility for copycat action is projection--what another fucked up kid might IMAGINE to have been the motives and how that imagining could leave out as much as it includes such that an equivalent action might seem to make sense. showing cho himself would seem to me to erase something of that space for projection.

there's more to say, but i'll leave this here for now.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite