Scio, Scio

Bigotry and the Common Blog

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:43:50 -0700

I found this interesting article on National Review, and thought I'd share it. I enjoy the fact that Islam is still being preserved from criticism, even much deserved criticism. It seems that no progress has been made since the riots following the pope's call to reason at Regensburg.
Threaten enough people and I guess you get your way. Perhaps when Christians begin to cut off the heads of their detractors they will be afforded the same deference. I doubt that very much, for it often seems that anti-Christian sentiment is the last acceptable bigotry. Is it because we are "the Establishment" religion? Perhaps so. Europeans are increasingly godless and it has ever been the fashion of the American societal elite to ape Europe. Give him enough time, and the common man begins to ape the ape in a bid for the appearance of sophistication.
The other week I had the occasion to attempt a dialogue with another Voxer who had made it very clear that she didn't like my particular religion. She trotted out the usual litany of abuses committed by my Church over the years, but focused primarily on the sexual abuse scandal among the clergy. When I offered a counterpoint to her views, I was unfortunately met with "The Wall." That is, the "this is my personal view and I don't want to be criticized for it" wall. Now, I would hope that anyone who reads my piddling excuse for a blog would understand my frustration. Anything I post in public I understand to be open to criticism. Especially if I post something critical to another person's beliefs. Sometimes, I border on the insulting. I'd hate to be labeled a troll, but there is a point at which letting an accusation or a misconception stand is tantamount to agreement. So it seems I am constantly stepping on the toes of liberals, atheists, global warming nuts and even Protestants.
It's all quite frustrating, because at the end of the day the Internet just isn't real. The victories I might win are easily ignored. The points I make are suspect because the conversation begins with me as an intruder on a particular person's public space (which makes no sense to me...the Internet is hardly private). So what is the point of it all?
Well, I still believe that we can carry our principles with us even when we are completely anonymous. I feel that the anonymity allows us to engage in debate devoid of the usual obfuscations of personal pride and ego. Rhetorical tactics can still be used to great effect, but the debate can be essentially neutral without lacking substance.
What we say on the Internet actually is real and it matters. I still believe that relativism is the thing that will doom us to half-witted expressions of banal tolerance for even the worst sorts of offenses. And so I suppose I am going to continue feeling awkward and unpopular amongst my many anonymous Internet acquaintances.
Whose commentary, as always, I welcome.

The Evolution of Religious Bigotry

Courage without consequence.
By Jonah Goldberg
I just watched Fitna, a 17-minute film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders.
Released on the Internet last week, Fitna juxtaposes verses from the Koran with images from the world of jihad. Heads cut off, bodies blown apart, gays executed, toddlers taught to denounce Jews as “apes and pigs,” protesters holding up signs reading “God Bless Hitler” and “Freedom go to Hell” — these are among the powerful images from Fitna, Arabic for “strife” or “ordeal.”
Predictably, various Muslim governments have condemned the film. Half the Jordanian parliament voted to sever ties with the Netherlands. Egypt’s grand imam threatened “severe” consequences if the Dutch didn’t ban the film.
Meanwhile, European and U.N. leaders are going through the usual theatrical hand-wringing, heaping anger on Wilders for sowing “hatred.”
Me? I keep thinking about Jesus fish.
During a 1991 visit to Istanbul, a buddy and I found ourselves in a small restaurant, drinking, dancing, and singing with a bunch of middle-class Turkish businessmen, mostly shop owners. It was a hilariously joyful evening, even though they spoke little English and we spoke considerably less Turkish.
At the end of the night, after imbibing unquantifiable quantities of raki, an ouzo-like Turkish liqueur, one of the men gave me a worn-out business card. On the back, he’d scribbled an image. It was little more than a curlicue, but he seemed intent on showing it to me (and nobody else). It was, I realized, a Jesus fish.
It was an eye-opening moment for me, though obviously trivial compared with the experiences of others. Here in this cosmopolitan and self-styled European city, this fellow felt the need to surreptitiously clue me in that he was a Christian just like me (or so he thought).
Traditionally, the fish pictogram conjures the miracle of the loaves and fishes as well as the Greek word IXΘΥΣ, which means fish and also is an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” Christians persecuted by the Romans used to draw the Jesus fish in the dirt as a way to tip off fellow Christians that they weren’t alone.
In America, these fish appear mostly on cars. Recently, however, it seems Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you’ve seen these, too. The fish is “updated” with little feet on the bottom, and “IXΘΥΣ” or “Jesus” is replaced with either “Darwin” or “Evolve.”
I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.
The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.
As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”
But it’s the false bravado of the Darwin fish that grates the most. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap, to show courage without consequence.
Whatever the faults of Fitna, it ain’t no Darwin fish.
Wilders’ film could easily get him killed. It picks up the work of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a jihadi for criticizing Islam.
Fitna is provocative, but it has good reason to provoke. A cancer of violence, bigotry, and cruelty is metastasizing within the Islamic world.
It’s fine for Muslim moderates to say they aren’t part of the cancer; and that some have, in response to the film, is a positive sign. But more often, diagnosing or even observing this cancer — in film, book or cartoon — is dubbed “intolerant,” while calls for violence, censorship, and even murder are treated as understandable, if regrettable, expressions of anger.
It’s not that secular progressives support Muslim religious fanatics, it’s that they reserve their passion and scorn for religious Christians who are neither fanatical nor violent.
The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

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Holy Week is Nearly Done

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:07:43 -0700

March has been a slow month for my Vox. I haven't had much to say, and I still don't. But I have an article to share. It deals with the post-Christian element of our culture, and it makes me somewhat sad. Essentially, it made me question just how I've been treating this most holy of weeks. Do I act as a Christian should? Not always. I don't pray as much as I should, for one. I go to Mass every week, without fail, but I feel uninspired at times.
I'm planning a trip to Philadelphia to visit a community of friars. I enjoy the experience of regimented religious life. I come away from my visits to their community with a better understanding of my place in the world and how I should pursue my Faith. But I live in the world while striving not to be "of" the world. Is this possible? Absolutely. But it requires discipline that I sometimes fear I lack.
What troubles me most about this article is the sad truth of it. We live in a society that didn't even realize St. Patrick's Day fell during Holy Week, and so was actually moved. People who would otherwise choose to oppose Christianity's ideological enemies would not necessarily embrace Christian life, especially if it should mean giving up Green Beer Night. It's a phenomenon of cultural Christianity -- identifying oneself as Christian in the same way an American might call himself Irish despite a gulf of generations between him and Éire.
My family went to Disney World when I was sixteen. Stayed there for three or four days and went all over the park. On our first day there, I think we were in Epcot. Being sixteen, I decided I didn't want to hang out with my family all day. We separated, and you must remember that this was in the days before cell phones were commonplace. So I am alone until the park closes, wandering through a world of wonders and enchantment. Distractions galore, all prefabricated and striving for authenticity. An uncritical eye is pleased with the superficial effect, as I was.
But then came night, and the inevitable closing time which none can escape. And I found myself still alone, with not an idea where my family might be. I thought that perhaps we had agreed to meet at a certain point, but there was an obstacle between me and it.
Anyone who has been to Disney World at closing time might know that after the fireworks there is an orderly stampede towards the gates. Thousands of people moving in one direction, shoulder to shoulder. All nations, all races, all moving in one direction. Well, imagine a sixteen year old me, moving opposite. Surely, I reasoned, my family would be in this throng. And surely I would see them. So I made my way through the middle of the crowd, scanning for them and trying to remain visible. I made my way across a bridge, where things became very tight. Whole families locked arms, presenting a wall which impeded my progress tremendously. It took me 20 minutes to cross.
Have you ever gone against a crowd? It is not pleasant. I received literally hundreds of dirty looks, and several women loudly asked their husbands, "What is wrong with him?" while looking directly at me. Still, I had no choice but to continue seeking my family. And so I braved the crush of people, weaving as best I could but sometimes running into people headlong.
Then all at once I saw them. The whole bunch of my family, blessedly standing still at the agreed upon spot. Stressed and tired from the unpleasant experience of fighting thousands of people, I joined them and we made our way to the exit and back to the hotel, where I was allowed to order room service.
Sometimes the Faith feels like that for me. Here's the article:

Easter, Anyone?
A cultural soul diminished.
By Charlotte Allen
For many years on Good Friday I would drive across town to a late-afternoon religious service at the house of a Catholic religious order in my city, Washington, D.C. Then, as dusk fell after the two-hour liturgy, I would drive back across town to my home. Each time I would be shocked to realize that I was a member of a dwindling minority of people who regarded Good Friday as different from the other 51 Fridays in the year.
Different neighborhoods on my route home provided little variance in this trend; whether the genteel and expensive post-Christian enclave in Northwest Washington where I lived, or the mostly African American and presumably fervently biblical ward in which the religious order that hosted my Good Friday liturgy resided, the general atmosphere remained consistent. A line of blue-jeaned college students snaked outside the door of my neighborhood pickup bar, the Cactus Cantina, as it did every other Friday night. Cars cruised and horns honked, and clusters of young people on the prowl for weekend adventure crammed the sidewalks.
The working-class Latino neighborhood through which I drove, whose residents nominally shared my Catholic faith and for whom Viernes Santo is a solemn fast day commemorating Christ’s death, was unseasonably merry: roaring crowds on the sidewalks, glittering lights from the bars, beer bottles smashing periodically against the asphalt.
Each passing scene on my tour confirmed the cultural obliteration of Easter — that most sacred of Christian feasts — in a society whose members still define themselves overwhelmingly as Christians. The “war against Christmas” — the campaign to force everyone to say, “Happy Holiday!” and banish the crèche from public places — is still ongoing and met with considerable resistance, à la Mike Huckabee and his in-your-face December campaign ad reminding viewers that Dec. 25 celebrates the day Jesus was born. The war against Easter, by contrast, seems sadly over.
My latest issue of Fine Cooking magazine arrived the other day, featuring what would have been known in former times as an Easter dinner: roast lamb, asparagus soup, angel food cake. Here, it’s identified as a “spring” dinner, and the issue otherwise contains not a hint that some of its readers might wish to mark the spring by celebrating Jesus’ triumph over death. Not even a recipe for dyed eggs or baby chick-shaped cookies graces the pages of the magazine.
More ominously still, St. Patrick’s Day falls this year during Holy Week for the first time since 1940. The usual green-beer binges did not abate in honor of the solemnity of this week. The saint himself, famous for having brought the bonfires of the Easter Vigil to Ireland, may well turn over in his grave.
Millions of American Christians will nonetheless celebrate Easter this year with church and sunrise services, and family lunches and brunches. But these commemorations are nowadays generally private and muted. Most schools and workplaces drone on in routine without even acknowledging the holiday (except in Hawaii, whose Good Friday legal holiday somehow survived a constitutional challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union). The “Easter parades” of yore in which people strolled in their finery after church are much diminished, if they continue to exist at all. Even the famous White House Egg Roll on Easter Monday has turned at least in part into a political occasion for gay and lesbian parents.
Given the solemn nature of Easter, which celebrates not the happy birth of a child as does Christmas, but the awesome themes of suffering, death, atonement, and resurrection, it is always conceptually difficult to festoon the paschal season with the rounds of merrymaking that characterize the end of December.
Still, it is sad and disconcerting that the oldest and holiest of Christian festivals is simply ignored by the media (and almost everyone else), and that Christians have acquiesced to the near-disappearance of their highest feast day from public consciousness.
Though we may — like the soldiers who boozed and gambled at the foot of the cross as salvation unfolded before them — ignore the phenomenon of redemption, Easter is above all a feast of hope. And as Augustine of Hippo wrote, “We are an Easter people.”
— Charlotte Allen is author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.

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Sex, Violence, Profanity Are Fine...But Don't You Dare Pretend To Be Another Race

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:49:39 -0800

Now for those who know me and my politics, the following should come as no surprise. But I'm going to discuss some very sensitive issues here and I'm going to do so in my usual frank and somewhat insensitive way. So, sharpen your knives.

Have you ever made a comment that dealt directly or indirectly with a person's race, and seen your audience begin to shift their eyes and shuffle their feet uncontrollably? Not a racist comment, mind you, but just a frank acknowledgment of differences among the races?

"I'd recommend my stylist to her, but she doesn't know how to cut black hair." On the face of it, sounds vaguely racist. At the very least, it was not pleasant for me to write the words or for you to read them. But talk to any black woman and she'll tell you that black hair behaves differently from white hair. Stylists frequently charge extra when dealing with black hair for the simple reason that it is more complicated.

But make a simple comment like that, and you have the obligation to explain yourself...if you're white, and you're talking to white people. Because one thing I've noticed about my fellow Caucasoids is our sheer neuroticism in matters of identity politics. Race is uncomfortable due to the very real history of slavery in this country, and so we avoid discussing it with the single-minded purpose of an obsessive-compulsive personality.

I've also noticed that it tends to be liberals who react most strongly to perceived racism and assaults on the "comfortable silence" that is the de facto state of affairs when it comes to race in America. Conservatives are of course blamed for the state of the races in the country, but liberal progressives have had their fair share of racism to haunt their dreams. Eugenics, anyone? Tangential, sorry.
All this is not to downplay the fact that the races are in very different places when it comes to opportunity, affluence and power. Heavens no.

So, I wasn't at all surprised to see this article from the Daily Mail website. Along with this photograph:

Here's the context: Robert Downey Jr. is playing an Oscar-worthy actor, down on his luck, who is forced to take a role in the biggest Vietnam movie ever. And the part he is playing was originally cast for a black man but, pompous actor that he is, the character "goes method" to quote the article. Which is not even the plot of the movie, because the actors are so fussy that the studio drops them into the middle of a live conflict...which the actors are too self-absorbed to notice is real. What a great commentary on people who take their profession or their own talents so seriously that they refuse to let common sense come close to informing them.

Now, what do you think is going to happen when you put a white man in make up that makes him look like a black man? Here's what I think: White people are going to be very nervous about offending other races, black people won't care. And along the way the whole point of the movie might be lost.

...anticipating a backlash, Downey Jr told a US magazine: "If it's done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don't do it right, we're going to hell."

That's the attitude to take. Don't read into everything when it comes to race!
Personally, I think the makeup is a brilliant job. But be prepared for the word "controversial" to surround this film anytime you see it on Entertainment Tonight, or whatever the shows are these days. Also, feel free to call me a deluded bigot if you want.

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The Follies of Cotillard, or: I Knew I Didn't Like the French.

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:46:29 -0800

So, once more we find that our European friends exist in a world of delusion and self-absorption. Here's hoping that this woman never wins another Oscar, ever. But even aside from that, let's hope that Europe scrapes up the resolve to save its own culture from radical Islam. It's a special kind of intellect that can observe the work of terrorists and then without irony assert that the destruction was all an inside job. Astoundingly special.

You may be aware that Mohammed is quickly becoming the most popular boy's name in Britain and France. And anyone who has followed the news in Denmark may be aware that things are getting hairy. I'd like to believe that people like Mark Steyn are wrong. I'd like to believe that a culture will, when faced with things like the Sept. 11th attacks, rally its disparate parts and commit to preserving its way of life.

But it seems that as the threat from militant Islam increases, European nations only bury their head in the sand with yet more vigor. They attack those critical to Islam as bigots, blithely refusing to do anything about the imams who preach violence and conquest to impressionable, disenfranchised young immigrants. They acquiesce to Muslim demands that demean women. A recent example? Giving tax breaks to men with multiple wives. The Archbishop of Canterbury proposes that some form of shari'a law in Britain might be a good thing. When some commentary is made, it is generally not productive. Comes to mind the Danish Cartoons -- worldwide riots erupt and still the Europeans blame themselves. They are committing cultural suicide. If only we could let them.
But in their place would rise a threat to America that is unprecedented in this age of unbelief. A militant religion that would fill the void in Europe made by the excoriation of Christianity, that would within a few generations be poised to seriously impede American influence.
Because if you think the French don't like America now, wait until the French take their cues from the imams who are preaching today.

'9/11 attacks made up, ' says French best actress Oscar-winner

By PETER ALLEN - More by this author » Last updated at 01:08am on 2nd March 2008
Comments (11)

Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard has accused America of fabricating the 9/11 attacks

Actress Marion Cotillard sparked a political row yesterday after accusing America of fabricating the 9/11 attacks.

The 32-year-old French actress, who received an Oscar last month for her performance as singer Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, openly questioned the truth behind the terrorist atrocity in an interview broadcast on a French website.
"I think we're lied to about a number of things," Cotillard said, singling out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of the US making up horror stories for political ends.
Referring to the two passenger jets being flown into the Twin Towers, Cotillard said:
"We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? They [sic] was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed."
She added that the towers, planned in the early Sixties, were an outdated "money-sucker" that would have cost more to modernise than to rebuild altogether, which is why they were destroyed.
She said: "It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them."
Cotillard's stardom and increased earning power looked assured following her Oscar win.
But after her outburst, in which she also queried the 1969 Moon landings, a successful future in Hollywood appears to be in jeopardy.
She said: "Did a man really walk on the Moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don't believe all they tell me, that's for sure."
Cotillard, who was born and brought up in Paris, made the comments on Paris Première - Paris Dernière, a programme broadcast a year ago.

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Stars in their eyes: Elton John and partner David Furnish cosy up to the hottest new actress in Hollywood

Celebration: Marion celebrated her win with Hollywood's A-listers - including Sharon Stone - at Elton John's party in Hollywood

At the time her remarks were largely ignored, but their appearance yesterday on the French magazine website Marianne2 comes at a time when Cotillard's profile is sky-high.
She is shortly due to fly to Chicago to star alongside Johnny Depp in Public Enemies, a gangster movie expected to be her first big money-spinner.
Cotillard's film career began in Luc Besson's 1998 film Taxi - a huge hit in France but less so around the world.
She is slowly becoming a household name in France, in a list most recently topped by her close friend Audrey Tautou and previously by women such as Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot.
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'I think we're lied to about a number of things' Cotillard said, singling out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of the US making up horror stories for political ends

But Cotillard, who lives with actor and director Guillaume Canet, frequently tells interviewers she has no interest in money or prestige.
Denying that she had any kind of "Anglo-Saxon ambition", she said she prefers to "choose roles which suit me".
Despite her low-key image, Cotillard is an environmental activist who once worked as a spokesman for Greenpeace.
News of her anti-Americanism comes as Franco-American relations appear to be thawing, following Paris's refusal to show support for the invasion of Iraq.
President Nicolas Sarkozy insists he is pro-American, even supporting so-called "Anglo-Saxon" economic reforms.

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Cardinal Mahony is the Winner!

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Wed, 16 May 2007 18:22:59 -0700

Hardly anybody ever makes the point that the L.A. diocese, with its rampant "progressive" Catholicism, also has had to dole out the most in sex-abuse money. It's gotten so bad that the Prince has had to sell his fancy new office buildings. I found a site that will soothe my worries about the Los Angeles diocese under His Eminence Roger Cardinal Mahony.

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Fare well, Falwell.

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:35:58 -0700

I suppose that when even pornographers like Larry Flynt express their admiration for you, you've done some good.

Goodbye, ally.

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Get Ready to Laugh

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:46:33 -0700

SEVENTEEN WAYS TO BE A GOOD LIBERAL (with Scio's comments in purple)

1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on
demand. Consistency is important. Capital punishment should be used judiciously, when there are no better options. Also, the dignity of the human person must be maintained at all times. But the same dignity should be shown to children in utero.

2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments
create prosperity.

3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are
more of a threat than nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Iran, China
and North Korea.

4. You have to believe that there was no art before federal funding.

5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by
cyclical changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms
driving SUVs. I have made the point many times that our footprint on this planet is much smaller than our hubris likes to admit.

7. You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal
funding.

8. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how
to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex. Yes! Nobody ever quite makes this connection.

9. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but PETA
activists do.

10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually
doing something to earn it. I have strong feelings about this one. I have always thought that people gave me too much praise for doing things that weren't overly exceptional. Being a polite and well-mannered person (in public) shouldn't be exceptional, it should be expected.

11. You have to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of
the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts
of the Constitution.

12. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.

13. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more
important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or
Abraham Lincoln.

14. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial
quotas and set-asides are not.

15. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked
anywhere it's been tried is because the right people haven't been in charge. This is probably true. The only way that Socialism might work is in small groups with no cohesive identity beyond the village level. When Hilldawg said it takes a village, she was setting a threshold for maximum occupancy in a socialist system.

16. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag queens and
transvestites should be constitutionally protected, and manger scenes at
Christmas should be illegal. Game, set, match. The solution to this problem is that nobody does anything with public funds, licensing, or facilities whatsoever. No parades, no art, no manger scenes, no music, no debates, no county fairs. I'm willing to tolerate (not condone, mind you) public homosexual lechery if their hounds at the ACLU will let me set up an Infant Jesus by city hall in my primarily Christian town.

17. You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right-wing
conspiracy.

Are you laughing yet?

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The Catholic Church -- Just Not That Repressive.

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:29:46 -0700

This is Sherwin Nuland from New Republic via Amy Welborn:

...I found myself at a luncheon where alumni of a large Ivy League university had gathered in the interest of educational sodality and fund-raising, a variety of rite commonly favored by organizations of aging graduates and their alma maters. Perhaps to prepare the mood for the postprandial speaker--a visiting art historian about to discuss the works of Leonardo da Vinci--one of the group's officers was holding forth at my table on a thesis so consistent with common preconceptions about the intellectual backwardness of the Catholic Church that it always finds a receptive audience. With a forcefulness honed by decades as a trial lawyer, he was regaling his attentive listeners with accusations of the obstinacy with which the church opposed human dissection during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This, he pointed out as emphatically as if he were addressing a jury, had necessitated all kinds of clandestine and gruesome activities on the part of those whose aim was to study the human body, whether for scientific purposes or because they were artists of the caliber of Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. Not only was medical knowledge thus stunted in its advancement, he added in his summation, but such opposition necessitated the well-known horrors of grave-robbing in order to obtain cadavers for study, an unnatural activity that marred the image of the profession of healing until late in the nineteenth century.
Were Benedict XVI present to act as advocate for his long-ago predecessors, he would have entered a plea of not guilty on their behalf. And the pope would certainly have won the ensuing debate, because the overwhelming weight of evidence supports his long-dead clients. Stated simply, the persuasive lawyer was dead wrong. Whatever difficulties may have been faced by Galileo and several other prominent scientists of that and later eras, the anatomists and the artists had few such obstructionist forces to contend with, at least from the Catholic hierarchy of the time. The truth of the matter differs markedly from what might have been thought by the old alums listening with such knowing accord to the disquisition being presented to them.

Not only did the church not stand in the way of dissection, but it frequently provided an atmosphere and means to facilitate it. Perhaps the most direct demonstration of such a supportive philosophy is to be found in a Bull issued in 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV, who responded to a request from the students and faculty of the University of Tübingen by permitting human dissection providing that local clerical permission was granted. In doing this, Sixtus was only acknowledging practices already in effect at the universities of Bologna and Padua, in both of which he had been a student and in neither of which had church authorities ever prevented the opening of corpses for the purposes of research and teaching.

Leonardo's first such studies took place in the mid-1480s, probably at Milan's Ospedale del Brolo, a unit of the Ospedale Maggiore licensed to allow dissections with the consent of the local bishop. And scarcely a decade after the Bull of Sixtus, the prior of the Church of San Spirito in Florence gave dissecting permission to, among others, a young painter named Michelangelo Buonarroti. As for grave-robbing, it is no historical aberration that the best-known escapades of famous grave robbers and their ghastly doings happen to have taken place in Protestant countries, such as England, Scotland, and the United States. The explanation for this phenomenon is clear: it was primarily in Protestant lands, not Catholic ones, that bodies were difficult to obtain, because there were stringent, often clergy-driven, laws against dissection.

I do not mean to imply that my tablemate was an ignoramus, or that his hearers were swayed by his argument because they were uneducated in the facts as presented in standard descriptions of early modern history. It is hardly their fault that current-day literature and even many textbooks have portrayed an imaginary scenario in which the church stood inexorably opposed to the Renaissance mood of rapidly emerging scientific discovery, particularly with respect to delving into the secrets of life. Every schoolboy knows that the new humanism that is the hallmark of the period manifested itself, among other ways, in a fascination with the structure and function of man's body, but every schoolboy has also been taught that the Catholic Church did what it could to halt or at least slow the scientific progress that might be the inevitable result of such a fascination. If he did not learn it in the classroom, the schoolboy read of it as portrayed in every example of the literary fiction that deals with the subject.
Katharine Park's important book has two major themes, and putting to a well-deserved rest the erroneous image of a thoroughly resistant church is one of them. True, there were certainly conspicuous instances--and again, Galileo's is the most prominent--of theological wrongheadedness and maleficent obstructionism, and even an underlying current of belief that made certain scientists of the early modern period interpret objective findings in a way that did not clash with church teachings. But in general Catholicism has taken a rap much more severe than it deserves, especially in the area of anatomy...

There have been many times that I've been in the company of those who are unaware of my Catholicism, who have put forth similar misconceptions about the Church with sure certainty. And it is true that there are stories about the Church that every young Protestant is told...some taken for granted to be accurate. Part of that is an American problem, since America has never been particularly receptive to Catholicism.
I have a friend whose father takes particular pleasure in making jabs at Catholicism in my presence. He seems alternately to imply that because of the sins of individual members of the Church the institution is rendered defunct, or by ascribing political motivations for Catholic practices (eating fish on Friday, for example) attempting to cast aspersions again upon the institution.
I find religious discussion with others must always move towards ending at a simple declaration of belief or the conversion of one party to the other's Faith. To end a discussion otherwise is like unto ending a sentence with a colon: In truth, I find colons rude little fellows and any concept which can be tenuously connected to them to be distasteful.

I think that my friends who are not Catholic would say that I do not bash people over the head with my religion, nor do I lean on them to convert, but I do draw lines and rise to challenges against my faith. Sometimes this means I myself am "rude." Had I been at the dinner equipped with this knowledge, why I would have interrupted that lawyer's grand oration with nary a second thought and ruined everyone's five minutes of entertainment.

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National Review, SCORE

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:42:14 -0700

Americans Without Americanness
Is our nation nothing more than an address?
April 2007

By JOHN McWHORTER

I will never forget a conversation I had with two twentysomething Muslims not long after 9/11. One had been born and raised in the United States, the other had come here at a young age. It was clear from our conversation, though they gingerly avoided putting it explicitly, that neither of them entirely disapproved of what Osama bin Laden had done. There were, of course, multiple recitations of “I think what he did was terrible"—but delivered with a certain lack of emotional commitment. What came through was a sentiment that, in the end, something terrible had been necessary for bin Laden to get across a valuable message. I did not find it hard to imagine that the two young Muslims would have been more explicit about this with each other had I not been present.

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is reported to have said that he could not walk down Fifth Avenue without wondering what it and the people on it would have looked like a century before. I share that type of historical curiosity—and it occurs to me that this conversation with the Muslims would have been very unlikely before about 30 years ago. There was a time when immigrants, if residing in America permanently, unhesitatingly embraced becoming Americans. Any sentiment that, say, Pearl Harbor was “understandable” would have been kept very, very quiet.

These two Muslims, however, thought of America as an opportunity, but not as an identity. Orientations like theirs are, in today’s America, perfectly normal — even among the unhyphenated, as I have learned in assorted conversations since 9/11. Among a vast proportion of Americans, one of the very defining traits of being an American is to lack pride in being one. One either has no conscious sense of American identity or, if one is given to lending the issue more attention, is ashamed of being American. To celebrate America, meanwhile, is considered naive and peculiar; one gets a pass by defining America as the sum of competing “diversities” — witness claims that Barack Obama represents “what America is” — which means that America is no one thing, and thus nothing, finally, but an address.

AT HOME IN AMERICA

One thing that an American sent back in time to 1907 would have to get used to is how much prouder the American identity was among people of all walks of life. The term American carried a warmth and a swagger. People often referred to English spoken in our country as “American,” and were not always joking: H. L. Mencken titled his scholarly masterpiece The American Language, a highly unlikely title for a similar work today. The American Beauty Rose was named in 1875; today one imagines a new rose being given a name like Suri. The Gershwin brothers titled an early hit “The Real American Folk Song Is a Rag” in a spirit of jolly celebration. A series of revues called Americana — unironically — ran on Broadway starting in the late Twenties.

There was, to be sure, an element of parochialism in this apple-pie patriotism, and too often it shaded into an unreflective George M. Cohan–style jingoism. A century from now, though, what will appear equally unreflective is the opposite sentiment now held up as a sign of enlightenment: active contempt for the American experiment.

Nowhere is this contempt more explicit than among our intelligentsia. The humanities and social sciences enshrine the examination of power relations (or, more specifically, injustice) obsessively. The endless explorations of the subordination of the subaltern, and the possibilities of contesting and transgression, are a stark abbreviation of human curiosity. Legions of scholars nevertheless devote careers to this narrow conception of scholarship, out of a fundamental commitment to revealing our Powers That Be as frauds. There is little room for love of country in this view of the world.

Obviously, it is old news for intellectuals to be gadflies. In the 1922 anthology Civilization in the United States, editor Harold Stearns blasted “emotional and aesthetic starvation,” “the mania for petty regulation,” “the driving, regimentating, and drilling” of society. Strong drink, but these scholars were mostly opposed to how the lesser sides of human nature gum up the works in a country that could do better. One searches this book in vain for the kind of bone-deep, utterly dismissive contempt for all that America stands for that is now common coin in academia.

For example, a cherished observation on a certain circuit is that “America was founded upon racism from its very beginnings,” which regularly cops vigorous applause from white as well as black audience members. There’s some truth to this, to be sure — but in that we cannot change it, the charge implies that it would have been better if Jamestown and Plymouth had never been settled and Africans had remained in their villages. Patriotism, obviously, does not apply here.

Certainly one would not expect scholarly people to devote careers to mere celebration. But one might imagine them fashioning a nuanced but vigorous brand of patriotism, calling America on its weaknesses with a basic pride in what we do right. A model would be typical intellectuals in France. Instead, we are taught that the enlightened orientation to our native land ought be more like the one that reigns in Germany, so deeply embarrassed about the Holocaust as to recoil at any prideful view of their Vaterland. The enlightened soul must therefore sneer at such notions as a U.S. policy titled Homeland Security.

The extreme nature of modern leftist academics’ writings suggests that empirical engagement with reality is not the driving force in such ideology. For example, most of this work, while presented as advocacy for the downtrodden, reveals a curious lack of genuine commitment to change. The tacit assumption is that nothing could make America a worthy project short of a seismic transformation in its operating procedures and in the fundamental psychologies of its inhabitants. No reasonable person could have any hope that this could actually happen, and this can only mean that people who think this way maintain their opinions for reasons other than practical ones.

Those reasons are emotional rather than political — a desire to wear alienation from the Establishment as a badge of insight and sophistication. It reaffirms that the wearers are good people, good in a way unavailable to those less learned and aware. This cynicism is calisthenic: It benefits its bearer rather than the people it purports to be concerned about. It is something I have elsewhere termed therapeutic alienation.

Therapeutic alienation is not, however, confined to the ivory tower. Beyond the campus, explicit, acrid contempt for the Establishment is a fringe taste — but the therapeutic alienation at the roots of this contempt is now widespread, and has equally dire consequences for proud American identity. Existential alienation and oppositional sentiment for their own sake have a way of discouraging people from saluting a flag.

CHAFING AGAINST ‘THE MAN’

In 1964, 76 percent of Americans reported trust in the government; by 2000 — long before the Iraq War — only 44 percent, fewer than half, did. The dishonesty of the Johnson and Nixon administrations about the Vietnam War and the awakening of the country to the unjust treatment of blacks sparked this change. But that was a long time ago, and alienation has come to reign even among people too young to recall that era. The alienation has raged unchecked even as blacks have become steadily more central to even the highest realms of American life, and even under a Clinton administration that liberals did not consider arrantly mendacious about policy. It is no longer a response, but a self-standing gesture. Initiated by an external stimulus, this alienated posture has settled in as what one is born to and inhales as a norm, one readily embraced because of its self-congratulatory appeal.

An example is the howling antiestablishment despair typical of heavy-metal music, embraced even by the mild-mannered as “cool.” Similar is the “gangsta” strain of hip-hop, full of excoriations of the police and celebrations of black people as “niggers” engaged in eternal battle against a racist AmeriKKKa, now a staff of life among legions of blacks under 50 and supported by a 70 percent white buyership. The modern American, having never known a time when music like this was not a norm, is given to assuming that it is, in the first case, a natural reflection of the rebelliousness inherent to youth, and, in the second, the inevitable reaction of blacks who have suffered the abuse of racism. Yet hungry Okie migrants knew no such music, nor did the black sharecroppers watching lynchings year by year. No, music like this is the product of an attitudinal tic specific to our times.

The American Beauty: Would they call it that today?

Therapeutic alienation sends ripples throughout the culture. The late comedian Sam Kinison built a career in the Eighties on delighting audiences with tirades capped by open-throated screaming about The Man. Barbie is now fighting for her life against Bratz dolls, provocatively clad with smirky facial expressions hinting that they are not unfamiliar with sex. This is alienation and oppositionalism as fetish, posture, performance.

Alienation as performance, to be sure, began the first time an early Homo sapiens child had a tantrum. But under ordinary conditions of human society, this behavior, while more typical of some individuals than others, does not become a zeitgeist. It is treated as an emotional indulgence that real-life exigencies must keep in check. Societies living on the land, ever in fear that weather or warfare will leave them in danger of starvation, do not know of alienation as sport. Modern America, however, is a wealthy society where few are hungry, and where there has not been a war on our own soil in 150 years (and not one that all able-bodied men were required to participate in in 40 years). Under these conditions, the tantrum no longer constitutes a threat to survival. Enter, then, alienation embraced as a cathartic pose. It is no accident that America saw a preview of the same in the prosperous Twenties, when the Smart Set went about with their copies of the studiously cynical American Mercury, whose editor, Mencken, was devoted more to the rhetorical sonority of trashing the powers that be than fashioning a coherent political alternative.

THE ALIENATED MINORITY

The reign of therapeutic alienation has also upended black America’s orientation to being American. A time traveler to 1907 would find peculiar how openly the black people, just a decade past Plessy v. Ferguson, were striving toward being “American.” At all-black Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., students were learning Latin. W. E. B. Du Bois taught Greek, and those who cherish his Marxist tilt later in life are often unaware that he could have conversed with Marx in German.

In their smash-hit musical Shuffle Along (1921), Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle included a ballad with language straight out of the operettas popular at the time: “Love will find a way / though now skies are gray / Love like ours can never be ruled / Cupid’s not schooled that way.” A photograph of black women protesting lynching in front of the White House in the Thirties includes a placard reading “Kentucky women demand justice for all American citizens” — as opposed to the more likely version in our own times, which would demand justice for “Black People.”

Since the Sixties, black Americans are much more concerned with maintaining a “black identity” — a term unknown to Victorian-era Du Bois — than with being “American.” Many would claim that this is because being black in America is to experience an ongoing assault from racist actions. But striving for Americanness was typical among a great many blacks in an era starkly racist to a degree we are blissfully past, when, as Richard Wright once put it, successful blacks were rare “single fishes that leap and flash for a split second above the surface of the sea,” “fleeting exceptions to that vast, tragic school that swims below in the depths.”

Of course, quite a few blacks and white fellow-travelers insist that little has changed since Wright wrote; they willfully neglect the fact that today there are more middle-class blacks than poor ones. Ideology also trumps empiricism in the insistences that (a) it’s school underfunding that keeps black grades and test scores down (when many black students are amply documented as thinking of doing well in school as a “white” characteristic) and (b) the reason black men are overrepresented in the prison population must be “the prison-industrial complex” (when black men also commit violent crimes in vast disproportion to their percentage of the population).

The dogged insistence on chronicling “racism” — when the larger problem today is so clearly cultural, and not caused by racism — only makes sense as another manifestation of therapeutic alienation. Again, improved prospects ironically pave the way for staged grievance. When barriers to black advancement were concrete and pitiless, there was no room for poses about an all-too-real injustice. Only now can such routines thrive, lending passing pleasure to a people otherwise rising by the year. The result is that amidst musings on what black identity should be, Africa plays a large part while being “American” is considered beside the point — even though America is the only homeland black Americans have known for centuries, or ever will.

ROOTS OF DISASTER

There certainly exist people in the United States who have a self-conscious and positive sense of their identity as Americans. They are more likely to be military than civilian, conservative rather than liberal, working-class rather than upper-middle. They are on the defensive, regularly dismissed as maudlin and uninformed.

Could there ever again be in the U.S. a widespread sense of pride in a single culture, as has been typical of Greece, China, Thailand, or most other nations in human history? Sadly, I can think of nothing that could create such an America other than a sustained violent attack upon our country. Apparently, the single one that already happened has left the self-medicating oppositional impulse intact. Leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag were fashioning 9/11 as our just deserts for imperialism even while Ground Zero was still aglow. Chomsky’s pamphlet on the issue sold like hotcakes. Good-thinking people have been taught to view al-Qaeda as freedom fighters sticking a thumb in our eye for our government’s support of Israel.

Yet if we suffered a string of brutal nuclear bombings of several American cities à la television’s 24, in which it became a typical American experience to lose a relative or friend in carnage wrought by fundamentalist Arabs reviling America as the Great Satan, we would suddenly be back to the old days. Tragic, mercilessly concrete reality — maimed corpses, attending funerals as a monthly ritual — would make self-medicating iPod theatrics seem instantly trivial. The urgency of defending the life we know, American life, against murderous barbarians would instantly wake us up to the value of what America, its flaws acknowledged, is, and what it has achieved.

I regret to say that short of that, to be American will continue to be, for most who bother to think about it, what one might term a postmodern position: nurturing a sense of personal legitimacy upon a willful, bitter ambivalence toward a land one has no intention of leaving.

Mr. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author most recently of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. This essay was prepared for the 2007 Bradley Symposium addressing the topic “Who Are We Today? American Character and Identity in the 21st Century.”

©2007 National Review

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Virginia Tech Massacre. Let's Talk.

nobody@vox.com(Scio, Scio) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 14:49:18 -0700

American psycho

When Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, the horrific slaughter revealed not only the poisons lurking in popular culture but the crisis of young males in a feminised society, says Sarah Baxter

Just before 5am on Monday, April 16, Cho Seung-hui got out of bed and walked to his computer. Perhaps he fiddled with his rambling 1,800-word self-portrait of a killer as the insults and grievances that he had been nursing for years coursed through his head.

High on his list were his classmates from Westfield high school, who jeered at him to “go back to China” without bothering to check his nationality. Two of them — who happened to attend Virginia Tech — were going to pay later that day. Then there were the college girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning.

“By a name, I know not how to tell who I am,” he had written to one of them. He understood literature, he could have thought, while they didn’t have the brains to recognise that he was quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Spurned by them, he had to make do with a fantasy girlfriend, a supermodel who called him “Spanky”.

On the way to the bathroom Cho bumped into his roommate Karan Grewal. As usual, Cho didn’t try to speak to him or even nod hello. He swallowed his antidepressants, put on his contact lenses and applied his spot cream. As he picked up his weapons, a Glock 9mm pistol and Walther P22 handgun, and twisted back his black baseball cap, he clearly did not want to be remembered as the kid with acne.

At 7.15am, campus police were alerted to a shooting at West Ambler Johnston residential hall, a two-minute walk from Cho’s own hall. Witnesses heard screams and the eerie “pop pop” of a semi-automatic weapon before finding the bodies of a young man and a young woman sprawled on the floor in the hallway between the men’s and women’s dorms.

The dead girl was Emily Hilscher, 19. Perhaps there was something about her that reminded Cho of another girl he had fancied — the one he had sneaked into the women’s dorm to see but, as a roommate recalled, “When he looked into her eyes, he saw promiscuity”.

Was Ryan Clark, 22, her boyfriend? Cho didn’t know but he shot him anyway. Deprived of sex himself, he regarded those who were getting it with malevolence. “All your debaucheries weren’t enough . . . to fulfil your hedonistic needs,” he had ranted on his pre- prepared “martyrdom” video.

He went back to his room and recorded one last QuickTime video clip. It was 7.24am, according to his computer log. “This is it. This is where it ends. End of the road. What a life it was. Some life,” he said agitatedly.

But Cho wasn’t finished yet. He still had more scores to settle and fame to seek. He downloaded 28 video clips onto a DVD, which showed him posing with his weapons like the star of a Quentin Tarantino film or Lara Croft, and set out for the post office, past the police cars that had arrived outside the dorm. By the time he arrived it was 8.45am.

It was tax-filing day in America, but as a student he didn’t pay any. The queue in the post office surprised him, though he waited his turn patiently as he rehearsed his next acts of violence in his mind. He posted his multimedia manifesto to NBC News, went back to his room, grabbed his weapons and set out for more killing.

This time he would target professors as well as students. He walked across the campus to the teaching block at Norris Hall, where he chained the front doors so nobody could escape. He may have remembered some lines from Mr Brownstone, a play he had written: “He gave me a D, when I only forgot to turn in two homeworks.”

As he gunned down Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French lecturer, science professor Kevin Granata and Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, he may have thought again of the professor in his play who “ass-raped us all — isn’t that what teachers do?

“I wanna watch him bleed, the way he watched us bleed”. Now he was fulfilling his own prophecy.

As for the students, they could forget his sympathy. He fired at them again and again, scattering their flesh across the floor. Most of his victims, girls and boys, were shot three times. Sometimes he would return to check whom he had killed and who was merely playing dead. His face was blank, but his emotions were seething.

As he said in his video, “You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats, Your gold necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs . . . You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing.”

The baby-faced Cho was 23, an adult by most people’s reckoning. In any other era it is doubtful he would have thought of himself as a boy or described his fellow students at Virginia Tech as “brats”. Trapped in the perpetual adolescence of the student, he has become a new monstrous poster child for boys who would rather kill themselves and others than grow up.

Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.

Cho swallowed his medicine, but it failed to stop him carrying out the biggest mass murder by a lone gunman in American history. By the time he turned his gun on himself, 32 students and teachers were dead — more than twice the number killed by the Columbine high school students in 1999.

Colin Goddard, 21, whose father is British, was one of the last students to be shot before Cho killed himself. He remembers the horror he felt as Cho entered his lecture room at Virginia Tech and began firing calmly and methodically at the class. “He had on boots, dark pants and a white shirt. He just started walking down the rows of desks, shooting people multiple times. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t demand anything. He was just shooting.”

The scene at Virginia Tech was hellish. Some students managed to save themselves by jumping from the windows, but those left behind died without knowing what Cho’s grievance was or why they were being punished for his rage.

Yet in death and murder, the silent Cho found his voice, railing at the perceived ills of society and slights to his deranged ego. From the blunt message he posted on a college web forum warning, “I’m going to kill people at Va Tech”, to the mountainous last testament of writings, photographs and video clips sent to NBC, rarely has a killer been as loquacious or left so much evidence of his twisted mind.

“That’s got to be more than he’s spoken, ever,” one surprised graduate student said. “I thought, ‘Well, he does talk’.”

Cho’s parents were hospitalised by shock when they heard of the killings, but some relatives have begun to speak out. Cho’s sister Sun Kyong-Cho said: “This is someone I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn’t know this person.” But in Seoul some family members described Cho as alienated even as a child. After watching the videos of him posing with his weapons, his furious 82-year-old grandfather said, “Son of a bitch. It served him right he died with his victims.”

Kim Hyang-Im, Cho’s mother, was the second of five children, who was obliged to look after the younger members of her family. At 29 she was still unmarried. Fearful that she would become an old maid, her parents fixed her up on a blind date with Cho Sun Tae, 10 years her senior. “Her husband was very serious and quiet and careful with money. He was not very friendly to his mother-in-law and father-in-law,” Cho’s 85-year-old aunt recalled.

Cho’s father scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand bookstore in South Korea, where they lived in a cheap, rented apartment. When relatives invited them to America, they were thrilled at the chance to “provide a better education”, the grandfather said.

The family was already worried about Cho, then eight years old. Soon after arriving in America he was diagnosed with autism. “He was very quiet and only followed his mother and father around but never showed any feelings or emotions,” his great-aunt said. His parents were too poor and busy trying to scrape a new life together to get specialist help for Cho.

They opened a dry-cleaning business, like many Korean immigrants, and moved to a two-storey cream town house in Centerville, Virginia, just outside Washington. In fulfilment of her parents’ dream, Cho’s sister went to Princeton University and now works as a contractor for the US State Department on the reconstruction of Iraq.

Cho chose to study English in at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, a sprawling residential college in the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. It is hard to fathom his rage at the “trust fund” brats with golden necklaces, vodka and cognac and “everything you wanted”, when among his victims were many immigrants like himself, who were proud of making their way in America.

But this carefully manicured campus — home to 26,000 students who called themselves Hokies — was no place for a social misfit. Even Cho used to wear the uniform of the mini-city: an orange or maroon T-shirt or sweatshirt with a baseball cap. Paglia, who has taught in American universities for 35 years, describes America’s residential campuses as vast “islands of green and slack conformity where a strange benevolent and tyrannical paternalism has taken over. It’s like a resort atmosphere”.

Paglia believes the school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. “There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.

“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

“Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.”

The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic”, as can be seen by the sad spectacle of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears flashing their lack of underwear during a night on the town. “It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”

The former Virginia Tech student who posted two of Cho’s hate-filled plays on the internet recalls that Cho fitted the “exact stereotype of what one would typically think of as a ‘school shooter’ — a loner, obsessed with violence and with serious personal problems”. But the plays show he was preoccupied not just with girls but with paedophilia and sodomy.

In Richard McBeef, a drama about child abuse, a stepson rants, “I will not be molested by an aging, balding, overweight pedophile [sic]stepdad named Dick”, before threatening to shove the television remote control “up his ass”. It concludes: “I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick.”

Dr James Gilligan, a former prison psychiatrist who teaches at New York University, believes that misogyny and homophobia are a central component of the make-up of violent criminals, who often fear they have homosexual tendencies.

“An underlying factor that is virtually always present is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood and the way to do that, to gain respect, is to commit a violent act,” he says. “It is tremendously tempting to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”

It is not simply an American phenomenon. In Cho’s video manifesto, there are unmistakable echoes of the home-made martyrdom videos of the young male jihadists circulating on the internet.

Cho began working out in the gym weeks before the killings, and the video pictures sent to NBC reveal a bolder, more muscled character than the images of the shy young student released when his name was first identified.

Dressed to kill in black and tan, Cho borrowed the vocabulary as well as the iconography of Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers by hailing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the two teen killers at Columbine — as “martyrs” of the same vengeful cult of death.

On his arm Cho had etched in red ink the nom de guerre Ismail Ax, a possible reference to the son whom Ibrahim (or Abraham) prepared to sacrifice in the Koran, sparking a torrent of speculation on the internet about his religious motives.

Others suggested that the student of literature was merely thinking about an American novel called Ishmael about a young boy growing up outside Washington, just as he did. But Cho was also explicitly drawn to Christian symbolism and its own veneration of martyrdom.

“Do you know what it feels to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?” he railed on video. “You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your whole lives. You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.”

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes the common denominator between the terrorist suicide bomber and the suicidal mass murderer is their sexual frustration and gender. “It really is young men between 15 and 30 who are responsible the vast majority of crimes, although it is politically incorrect to say this too loudly,” he says.

Suicide bombers and the Virginia Tech killer, Fukuyama suggests, “fall into the same demographic of young males, a lot of whom are unemployed, without a clear place in the social hierarchy. These guys have the most to gain and the least to lose by martyrdom”. And often, he adds, they are upset about girls “whose attention they can’t get”.

Fukuyama believes that Cho’s case is “fairly unique” but “the maleness is important”. In his essay Identity and Migration, published by Prospect last February, he writes that radical Islamism should be understood in the context of identity politics.

“We have seen this problem before in the extremist politics of the 20th century, among the young people who became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Baader-Meinhof gang.” It is not specifically tied to radical Islam, he insists.

Yet Cho’s ethnicity may have prevented the university authorities from intervening in his life, Paglia suggests. Voicing a theme that conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh have taken up with gusto, she wonders whether political correctness about his background and culture may have led them to make excuses for him.

“He was Korean and so people were hesitant to declare he was abnormal in American terms,” she says. It is no accident, she believes, that the two female lecturers who were most suspicious of his behaviour were themselves not white.

One professor, Nikki Giovanni, known as the “princess of black poetry”, was the first to raise the alarm about Cho’s writing. It did not feature hardcore violence; but it was weird. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to rip your heart out’,” she said. “It’s that, ‘Your bra is torn and I’m looking at your flesh’.” When female students said they were scared of him, she wanted him out of her class.

Giovanni reported her concerns to Lucinda Roy, a British professor of literature who was then head of the department. She was so disturbed by Cho that she contacted the university police and went on to give him individual lessons — after devising a code word which, if ever used, would be a signal to her assistant to call security.

“You seem so lonely,” she told him. “Do you have any friends?”

“I am lonely,” Cho replied. “I don’t have any friends.”

The lone gunman is a familiar figure in American mythology. “In American culture you always have the rough-edged loner, the anti- establishment figure which goes all the way back to the silent films and westerns and continues through Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Marlon Brando,” says Paglia.

In Cho’s case, there were echoes of Taxi Driver, the story of a stalker. The promiscuity that Cho saw in women was “a huge warning sign”, Paglia believes. “You want them, you want the status of being seen with them, you’re driven towards them and at the same time they are contaminated, they are dirty. That’s exactly the mentality of the stalker and assassin played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. There is an apocalyptic impulse to destroy everything and to purify the world.”

In a twist to the debate on masculinity, some commentators have complained that the terrified Virginia Tech students were no Rambos when it came to defending themselves. John Derbyshire, a right-wing British writer based in America, wondered, “Why didn’t anyone rush the guy? Yes, I know it is easy to say these things, but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?” — a reference to the passengers fighting back in the 9/11 hijacked plane.

The columnist Mark Steyn took up the theme with an essay on the “culture of passivity” that is overtaking America. In his view, students are becoming so infantilised that they have lost their capacity to take responsibility.

“In a horrible world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself and others,” he believes. “It is a poor reflection on us that in those critical first seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor understood instinctively the obligation to act.”

Librescu, 75, forced his body against the door to prevent Cho storming his classroom, gaining time for some of his students to escape. He was shot dead. But there were younger heroes, too, such as Derek O’Dell, who was shot in the arm but managed to wedge his foot in the door and prevent Cho from re-entering the classroom.

Another student, realising that a friend was playing dead, was said to have deliberately drawn Cho’s attention to himself as the gunman searched the room for survivors — and sacrificed his own life.

“When someone opens the door of a classroom and begins firing with a semi-automatic weapon, there is no fighting back possible,” says Paglia. “All of this happened too fast for the young men or young women to rush the shooter and bring him down.”

Paglia is a defender of the constitutional right to bear arms in America. She is troubled, however, by the ease with which Cho bought his weapons. “The problem is not hunting guns but these semi-automatic weapons. He could not have cut down that many people so quickly or with such brutal efficiency without them. They have no use except for commandos, swat teams and paramilitary organisations.

“This is part of the plague that has come with the drug culture in the inner cities,” she says. “Cho’s use of semi-automatic weapons can ultimately be traced back to gangsta rap. It is a fabrication of urban life which is sold to teenagers trapped in the utterly sterile shopping-mall culture of the American suburbs.”

“Throughout most of human history men have been armed, but with swords not guns,” Paglia observes. As the weapons grow more deadly, even a solitary “boy” can commit the worst massacre in American history. This is the 19th such scenario in the past decade. Unfortunately it is unlikely to be the last.

This article has quoted from so many people with whom I agree that it is difficult to know where to begin.

Paglia, with her insightful commentary on the feminization of American culture...

Steyn, raising the issue of what it means when only someone who lived through a horrific time period has the fortitude to act...

Fukuyama, with his verbalization of something I have felt myself, that sense of being "too male" for the culture...

This whole thing just makes me sick. Cho was right when he said that there were so many ways for us to prevent what happened. The only problem is that none of it is obvious. It's all subtlety and unspoken truths. It's a deeper problem with our culture, deeper than gun control or any platitude about race or religion.

Gun control is a band-aid on top of gangrene.

There is a certain amount of helpless confusion that I think many men experience as they reach adulthood. In simple terms (as I understand this only in a simple fashion), there is this constructive urge to strike out and do things, but there is societal pressure to simply graduate from college and get a job. As in the article:

“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

Have I felt that! It's everywhere. I remember it seemed like I was hopelessly trapped as I graduated. I found an outlet for this feeling in Americorps, but even still it's not quite hopping on a ship and sailing around the world.
Cho Seung-Hui (or Seung-Hui Cho, as he called himself) was not a monster. He was not a victim, either, labelling him as such would be playing right into the hands of this castration of society. He didn't know how to deal with being a social misfit, for reasons of mental illness.
And when he decided to take others with him as he committed suicide, nobody except an old man tried to stand up to him. I could make it an allegory of the West and radical Islam, but that would dehumanize the victims.

But let's be frank: Gun control is not the answer, nor is therapy. There are no easy answers to this problem, none at all.

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