Seung-Hui Cho Revisited

So Dana Goldstein went and read the Wesley Yang essay on "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" in N + 1 that I recommended so highly earlier and came away with some criticisms. Or, rather, she came across a somewhat ambiguous passage which, if you construe one way, seems to be making an objectionable claim. When I read that part, I assumed that that wasn't what Yang was trying to say since, as Dana argues, that wouldn't be a very smart thing to say.

In general, I think it's usually wise to be generous in your interpretation of other people's arguments when they don't have some kind of bad track record or something. At any rate, Yang himself jumps into the comment thread and says what I would have expected him to say -- that's not what he meant, and the essay isn't really about why Seung-Hui Cho become a mass murderer at all. Rather, it's about looking into the face of a mass murderer and seeing and exploring character traits that are much more widespread.

Comments

In general, I think it's usually wise to be generous in your interpretation of other people's arguments when they don't have some kind of bad track record or something.

Tell that to the Obama campaign, please.

Posted by Jason C. | January 14, 2008 7:53 PM

Is Matthew really suggesting here that all Asians are serial killers?

Posted by Petey | January 14, 2008 7:58 PM

In general, I think it's usually wise to be generous in your interpretation of other people's arguments when they don't have some kind of bad track record or something.
Too bad that all of blogging is based on and encourages ungenerosity and impatience. You should really go into real journalism or something else.

Posted by Moral Panicker | January 14, 2008 8:01 PM

I went out and read the essay after the recommendations flew around. Dana Goldstein is wrong.

Maybe there'd be something to her criticism, if you stopped reading the essay at the "offending" sentences that she quotes. But, and I hesitate to use the word "obviously," Mr. Yang's essay is much more ambitious than what Goldstein makes it out to be.

For Goldstein to say that the essay's thesis is that Cho killed because white women wouldn't have sex with him makes little sense. I don't see how Goldstein can critically justify Yang writing in the essay about all of the other topics he covers. She doesn't think it was badly written - so why does Yang give us the story of Samuel Goldfarb, or the section about "undernourished souls" as the fuel of new markets, for example? Mr. Yang touches on this in his second comment, if a reader (like Goldstein) missed it in his essay.

Posted by mike | January 14, 2008 8:17 PM

This is why most political writers can't do anything on art or culture. Dana Goldstein is incredibly cloddish and literal-minded in her discussion of the essay. It's like somebody reading "Crime and Punishment" and saying that it's making excuses for the killing of old ladies.

Posted by mq | January 14, 2008 9:08 PM

http://www.bitterasianmen.com/rants.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 14, 2008 9:32 PM

By the way, Cho's old English professor at Virginia Tech, Nikki Giovanni, who gave the closing remarks at the campus memorial service for the 32 victims, has published several poems advocating race murder:

"The True Import of Present Dialog, Black vs. Negro," by Nikki Giovanni

Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a ni**er kill
Can a ni**er kill a honkie
Can a ni**er kill the Man
Can you kill ni**er
Huh? Ni**er can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
‘68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill
A ni**er can die
We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
[More]

The above poem is not an isolated example. Cho's old professor has had, for example, a Molotov cocktail obsession:

Also a company called Revolution has just issued
A special kit for little boys
Called Burn Baby
I’m told it has full instructions on how to siphon gas
And fill a bottle

And, then there's this:

and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 14, 2008 9:35 PM

The irony is that a Virginia Tech girl came and left flowers on Cho's grave and left a note signed "With all my love, Laura."

Cho probably felt that girls hated him a lot more than they really did. Believe me, guys a lot uglier and fucked up than him get plenty of girls. It was probably just more about his feeling of ostracism and hopelessness...

Posted by Mr. Noah | January 14, 2008 9:41 PM

Not having read any of this, I can only point out a book on serial killers I read once which explicitly made the argument that many, if not most, of them were in fact "social" or "political" murders in that the killers invariably targeted people one economic level up from their own. Many such killers explicitly penned rants concerning their concerns, which were mostly ignored by the psychs.

There's really not much difference between serial killers (that is, those who kill without weird fetish behavior being involved - perhaps the term mass murderers would be better) and terrorists: many of them are simply people who could not deal with certain frustrations of existing society and got "fed up".

The Situationists used to say that reaction was better than blandly accepting the status quo.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 14, 2008 10:11 PM

Mr. Sailer,

Is your blog post about Asian men not being able to get white girls based on actual statistical evidence? Not denying it, just curious. Is it supposed to apply to South Asians too or just East Asians?

In my experience most of the (South) Asian guys in my family/friends circles tend to marry/go out with white women.

Posted by Hector | January 14, 2008 11:32 PM

I read a survey some where years ago that there are two groups that come up short in the sexual sweepstakes:

1) Black women - because black men like white women (and vice versa).

2) Asian men - because white (and black) men like Asian women (and vice versa, at least with regard to white men - Asians tend to look down on blacks).

I don't notice number 2, at least, because it looks to me that most Asian women, at least in San Francisco, date and marry mostly in their ethnicity. Although you do see Asian-Caucasian couples frequently, you don't really see that many married couples.

My complaint is that it seems that Asian women turn 18, then five minutes later they're married to some Asian guy and have six kids in the next four years. They're "on the market" for like five minutes - and if you aren't going to marry them, forget about it. Good luck finding an unmarried Asian over 30 - unless their husband dropped dead, got arrested, or they divorced him for being a total asshole.

So I don't know if there are any stats that really prove this, or if it's just another common myth that people believe - like the usual myth here in San Francisco that "all the men are gay so women can't find a husband" which statistically has been proven false.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 15, 2008 2:22 AM

The 2000 Census showed a gender disparity in the composition of interracial couples. . . 18 percent of Asian wives have white husbands, while merely seven percent of asian husbands have white wives. The sex ratios of asian/white couples is the mirror image of black/white marriages. Asian women had white husbands 3.08 times more often than asian men had white wives. In other words, slightly more than 75 percent of white-asian couples featured a white husband and asian wife. However, unlike the situation with black/white couples, the gender imbalance is slightly less with cohabiting couples; only 2.09 times as many white men cohabited with asian women as asian men cohabited with white women.

http://archivex-ht.com/articles/Article/Interracial-Dating-Does-It-Turn-You-On-/5516

Posted by blah | January 15, 2008 2:29 AM

Thanks for the link - pretty well confirms my hypothesis and the stereotypes. Still, I was surprised to see 18% of Asian women hooking up with white guys - that percentage is higher than I would have expected - almost one in five.

The situation for black women might be improving over the last twenty or thirty years or so. Quite a few black women have more glamorous roles in movies and TV and in general black women appear to be improving their perceived appearance to be slimmer and less "loud". Some black models have been fairly successful. As more blacks move into the middle class, this trend will probably increase, as it's mostly an issue of diet, income and stress.

Asian women are doing very well in movies and TV (Maggie Q was even a model) and should continue to do well with white men.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 15, 2008 6:26 AM

Nikki Giovanni . . . has published several poems advocating race murder

No, she's published several poems which do just the opposite, but which the likes of Steve Sailer are insufficiently intelligent to understand. He must have some bad genes somewhere in his ancestry . . .

Posted by rea | January 15, 2008 11:10 AM