It’s hard to believe that Camille Paglia teaches at the same university as Chuck Pennacchio. She has truly jumped the shark. I mean, look at some of these explanations she gives the Times of London for why Cho Seung-hui went on a rampage at Virginia Tech.
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.
And:
“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.”
What the fuck does this even mean? I don’t doubt that Cho would have been less inclined to murder over two dozen of his classmates if he had been getting a few benefits along with his friendships, but the poor guy didn’t even have any friendships. Are we going to blame the slack morals of female co-eds now for every guy that can’t get laid and goes on to massacre people? Seriously, wouldn’t the answer to that be even more slack morals in women so no guy gets left out of the fun?
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.”
This analysis is baffling. Taxi Driver as social science? I get irritated by analysis that takes the blame away from the perpetrator and puts it on the victims. Was Robert DeNiro (Travis Bickle) right to take Cybil Shepherd (Betsy) to a porno on their first date and then react to his rejection by trying to kill Senator Charles Palantine? I know Bickle was screwed up by his time in Vietnam, but are we going to blame Vietnam or are we going to insist that there is no excuse for trying to assassinate a Senator?
We can try to explain what led Cho to murder. But no explanation is complete without taking into account the brain inside Cho’s head. Countless other people have been alienated in the same ways, taunted in the same ways, even provoked in the same ways…and have not committed an atrocity in response. So…it’s the cookie cutter, glorified high school aspects of Virginia Tech that are to blame? It’s the casual sex that is to blame?
This child, Cho, was a maladjusted kid from the get-go.
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.
Do you think this could be solved by a few mercy fucks? Do you think he would have been fine if no one he knew was experiencing sex?
For Paglia, places like Virginia Tech have ‘green and slack conformity’. What’s does that mean, and what does it explain? She says Tech has ‘a strange benevolent and tyrannical paternalism’. How can something be simultaneously benevolent and tyrannical? And what does that explain?
Paglia seems to be saying that Cho saw a lot of guys getting laid without a whole lot of effort and he couldn’t deal with his inability to get some for himself. Yet, the guy wouldn’t even talk to his roommates. Don’t you think his problems ran a little deeper that whether or not he was able to score?
The guy was diagnosed as autistic (why, or whether that was a good diagnosis, I don’t know). He was anti-social. He wrote plays filled with hatred for his teachers…plays that indicated that he might have been a victim of sexual abuse…
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.”
And he was taunted (by guys). He was made an object of ridicule (by guys). Might not that have had something to do with his anger?
But wait. Paglia saves her most inane analysis for last.
“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.”
It’s Ice Cube’s fault.