"We cannot predict who is going to do this type of thing and who is
not with any more accuracy than guessing and that's just a fact," says
Jeffrey Schaler, a psychologist at American University. There are
people who "write much more disturbing literary messages than this guy
did and never commit acts like this."
Tragedy abhors a vacuum.
"Ismael Ax" said the words on Seung Hui Cho's arm. Or maybe "Ismale
Ax" or "Ismail Ax," depending on the news report.
In the absence of much understanding, we study these words, like
cryptographers trying to crack enemy code.
After he killed 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday, Cho died with
some variety of this phrase penned to his arm. (It wasn't a tattoo, it
turns out, despite earlier reports.) Then Wednesday, NBC News received
the package Cho mailed between murders, and here was another clue. The
sender is listed on the envelope as "A. Ishmael."
What could these words mean? Are they invoking the biblical Ishmael,
born to a lowly servant, cast out by his father, Abraham? Are they an
English major's reference to James Fenimore Cooper's "The Prairie," in
which the outlaw settler Ishmael Bush sets west across the country
with his axe? What about the loner who narrates "Moby-Dick"?
"It begins with 'Call me Ishmael,' " the crime writer Patricia
Cornwell says. "The whole story is about an obsession that eventually
drags you into the vortex of the sea."
Cho's pseudonym is our "Rosebud," the mysterious word that begins the
movie "Citizen Kane," when it is uttered by the dying publishing
tycoon Charles Foster Kane. It is the phrase we hope to understand, to
help a 23-year-old mass murderer make sense.
Everybody's got a theory. The suggestions come in by e-mail, they are
posted to online comments boards, they are posed by colleagues and
bloggers, with Talmudic attention to detail. One person ruminates that
"Ismale Ax" might be derived from a song Bob Marley performed, "Small
Axe." Another person says the phrase might come from computer coding
language. Another person mentions an alien named "Ax" from the
children's science fiction series, "Animorphs."
Someone else: Could "Ismale Ax" be an anagram for "Islam Axe,"
suggesting some sort of religious vengeance? Could another spelling,
"Ismail Ax," be an anagram for "Salami XI," derived from the Italian
word for -- oh, never mind.
A guy named Bill McClelland, who lives on the west side of Cleveland,
calls The Washington Post to offer some tips. He directs a reporter to
the Web site for a "Gothic Male Model" who goes by the name of "Ax."
Could the Web site somehow be connected to Cho's murderous rampage?
McClelland wants to know.
"I've followed this story for three days now and it's intriguing,"
McClelland says. "What drove him? I think everybody would like to know
that."
We would, we would. In mystery novels, the plot often turns on a
single clue. Find the gun, find the killer. Motives are
one-dimensional. (The wife did it for the life insurance!) Here we
don't have such luck. Instead, what we have is wild speculation, with
occasional input from a wacko. (Wackos always rise from their slumbers
to send the media e-mail at times like this. As in: "Why is the media
helping Bush hide the fact that this wasn't 'senseless random
violence' at all, and in fact was clearly a suicide attack staged in
protest of US Support for Israel?")
There's something very human in all this, something akin to our
tendency to see faces in knots of wood. We look for reason in the
nonsense. We look for ourselves. (Let's see, how would I justify the
murders if I were Cho? . . . No, no, no.)
Cornwell has made several trips to England to study the letters
allegedly written by Jack the Ripper, which were sent to police and
newspapers during his lifetime. These letters are filled with
hieroglyphs, she says; she studies them for clues as to who he was and
why he was.
"Why did he choose this type of handwriting? Why did he draw this
doodle?" she asks. "Is he simply making fun of us and it doesn't mean
anything?" Each one might be a clue to the bigger why, the why that
scares us, the why we'd like to answer and thereby emasculate. In the
case of Jack the Ripper, Cornwell says: "Why do you cut someone open
and dump their intestines to the pavement? Why do you flay somebody to
the bone?"
What's scariest is that we can't see ourselves in Cho. The hieroglyphs
are meaningless. If he was invoking the Bible or "Moby-Dick" with
those words on his arm, it doesn't make any more sense than if he
wasn't. Try parsing the sweeping rage in those writings he sent to NBC
News, or in his violent plays. No way to reason with the anger. No one
to blame but him. That's what's scariest.
"We cannot predict who is going to do this type of thing and who is
not with any more accuracy than guessing and that's just a fact," says
Jeffrey Schaler, a psychologist at American University. There are
people who "write much more disturbing literary messages than this guy
did and never commit acts like this."
...
Full
posted by Jeff Schaler | 2:20 PM
1 Comments:
Blogger MW Smith said...
''What's scariest is that we can't see ourselves in Cho. ...
Try parsing the sweeping rage in those writings he sent to NBC
News, or in his violent plays. No way to reason with the anger.
No one to blame but him. That's what's scariest.''
I agree, but there was someone there to reason with, and
although his pieces written in isolation aren't reasonable, he
could have been reasoned with. I think the problem was no one
was reasoning with him all along. He was isolated. The thinking
of an isolated person continues to evolve, but with no sounding
boards to attenuate his thinking, it can diverge from reality.
The more it diverges, the more likely it will look crazy, and
if he becomes angry, he will use his diverged way of thinking
to decide what to do.
I don't know what the solution to this problem of isolation is.
I would be lost without the internet.
Hi Jeff.
Martin Smith
3:38 PM
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
No comments:
Post a Comment