[Reader-list] Meditations on the Virginia Tech accident

[ARNAB CHATTERJEE]

            It was those days in the early 90’s when
leaving my desolate college in Park Street,  I used to
go the American Center Library in Esplanade to read
Gregory Corso and American Poetry Review. It was
pretty exciting when I came across an adolescent 
monograph on postmodernism ( edited by Ihab Hassan) in
which there were praises for separate lonely,
unorganized acts of violence as being postmodern. I
still remember at least two of such anecdotes: “ What
is Stalin but a Chenghiz Khan with a telephone”  and
“terrorists are the greatest entertainers of our
times.” Quotable quotes—ofcourse (though neither
Stalin nor Chenghiz Khan or the terrorists could be
called lonely aggressors any way!)
        Having grown up in age, it seemed no longer
interesting to grapple with things such as
postmodernism—and “post” others—and sit, being unwell,
in an eternal post-office—as if. But those two
sentences remained in my mind and slept as quotations
like two friends till Cho Seung-hui and his Virginia
Tech massacre—sparked that memory with bright light.
If you’ve been following the incidents post
Virginia-Tech  carnage, you will nothing but agree
with me.
          In a US school campus—in the canteen
somebody had left a  small note: “Shooting will start
at dot 12 noon and it will be worse than Virginia
Tech.” Immense snooping followed up the threat  to
find just nothing—it was a joke. A boy in a New Jersey
college has been arrested, as because,  from the dorm
he swayed his toy gun in ambivalence to a suspecting
audience; at Oklahoma a man’s umbrella has been seized
for a gun. A number of campuses have been shut down to
goof up security and  return to normalcy. All in the
United States. In India for instance one remembers,
subsequent to Dhananjay Chatterjee’s hanging, a number
of adolescent  deaths while aping  that act. I still
remember an excerpt (published in a local Bengali
daily) from a boy’s interview who belonged to a group
in which atleast two such dramatic deaths celebrating
Dhananjay’s noose had been reported. He said, “ Thank
God !-- I’ve escaped; now in our group—it is the
latest game, this Monday I was to be hanged—it was my
date
.” 
   To make sense of this, one needs to examine a
number of play theories that we know. Winnicott for
instance noticed how for a child any violent act he
perceives will be the subject of his next new game.
Only children could afford “To play with the four
seasons : this play, this evil.” But when so called
adults give hoax calls as bomb alerts, then how come
s/he adopts the gesture of a playing, aping child? I
think we need to take this with a pinch of sugar. This
is how things become normalized. Today’s Gujarat is
tomorrow’s joke, today’s Nandigram will not remain a
nightmare anymore. It might be painful this way but
there is less cause for misunderstanding if one
reckons with the fact that these hoax callers, game
players, joke makers  are not at all insensitive
people; they have real tears in their eyes which have
not been planted. But all the more they can transform
an event into an image—which having undergone this
change—looses much of its cutting edge. On a massacre
-  either a joke is invented or a cinema censored;
stories  written, documentaries are shown, novels
forbidden. It’s mourning ( as all the hoax calls are
mourning) in a very different way; even some mourning
will not be permitted. It proves that all deaths are
social and allegorical. Or how come people arrive for
a feast ( the shraddh ) after a very near one has
died? One popular explanation is, to forget the
setback and get on with life again. An objection is
easy: time itself fades the ruthlessness of  pogroms
and poetry continues to be written after Auschwitz; so
why do we need a joke, or games have to be crafted to
aid us in forgetting? Truly time is a good leveler.
But time takes time and if we agree that we live in an
age of speed and trace, we need to undertake the
duties that time performs and accomplish acts well
before time. A hoax bomb alert is thus after an event
but it is well before time too; for what “remains to
come”! Situated in between, it’s mourning for the
already dead; also for the deaths to come. No one can
deny its message. It is meant for everybody but is no
where—an utopia. The consequence of adopting an
impossible  duty that only time performs.
            And this is the final crux of the Virginia
Tech carnage. Cho had complained that everybody in his
audience had had a hundred chance to be saved from his
gunfire, but could not avail them. Teachers and
pop-psychologists are complaining that signs were
everywhere –in the country’s errant gun laws to  Cho’s
authored dramas,  his “unwanted” SMS’s sent to campus
girls, his ‘Old man’ movie, his voice, his
loneliness—that he was dangerous and “sick” and needed
‘counseling’ (though his so called  ex-counsellors had
released him with Cho showing ‘normal’ responses).
Alas! it seems, signs-- for both the perpetrator and
the victims,  were everywhere and nowhere. 
         Now,  to declare a war of extermination
against the “ the rich, the debauch and the deceitful
charlatans”—which Cho said he did, is, in 2007, a
sickness and a crime both-- an anarcho-communist
syndrome as if-- anachronically misplaced in time and
space. Lets agree he was sick. The problem with Cho is
he could not persuade others to go with him. In an age
of commodification he could not transform “neurosis
and even mild lunacy into a commodity which the
afflicted can easily sell, once he has discovered that
many others  have an affinity for his own illness.”
Cho Seung-hui could not; but who could have  done that
? Adorno answers, “The fascist agitator is usually a
masterly salesman of his own psychological defects.”
Do  Cho’s critics want him to have been  an anarcho
–communist with the techniques of a proto-fascist?  
Well, it comes for the first time that Cho’s acts will
be praised as infinitely normal and (in)comparably
sane not having had the potential to play a Hitler or
a Pol Pot game. And in the wake of this uncalled for
praise, Cho’s footage will be surrounded by (dead)
bodies of those –all of whom were not rich, debauch or
cunning charlatans—equally or perhaps--not even
minimally—gifted with Cho’s itemized “Mercedes” or
“cognac”. They will stand  (or sleep for
ever)--allegorically for perpetrators who were not
present –a utopia again. Neither Cho would represent
the “weak and the defenseless” as he claims. Cho is
definitely a postmodern unlike Che who had had his
aims and enemies clear.
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