Inside a killer's mind

@RANDOM

I AM INSIDE Cho-Seung-hui's head, looking for the exit, but it's dark in here. On April 16, Cho-Seung-hui, a 23-year-old student at Virgina Tech, shot two students. No one knows exactly what Cho-Seung-hui did for the next one-and-a-half hours, except that during that time he mailed a package containing a rambling videotaped statement and some documents to NBC. Between 9 am and 9:45 am, Cho-Seung gunned down 32 people; then he shot himself.

The Virginia Tech website shows a university in mourning. By the end of the week, online memorials were everywhere, at popular college sites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com.

In the virtual world Second Life, "Milosun Czervik" built a memorial wall to the students of Virginia Tech, using a virtual version of the "Hokie Stone" that is used in all the V Tech buildings. In the real world, "Czervik" is a professor at Virginia Tech; he was far away from the location of the shootings when they occurred.

Virginia Tech's website/ memorial:
https://bsmedia.business-standard.comwww.vt.edu/
MTV's report on the Second Life memorial:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1557432/20070417/index.jhtml

But at The Smoking Gun, there was something far more disturbing: the complete script of Cho-Seung-hui's play, Richard McBeef, in which a teenage boy accuses his stepfather of paedophilia and of killing the boy's own father.

Reading it is not an experience I ever want to repeat: the play is badly written, but beyond the flaws, it radiates disturbance. It is not hard to understand why two of Cho-Seung's teachers had sent up warning flags to the college administration.

On YouTube, readings of Cho's two plays ""Richard McBeef and Mr Brownstone, both indifferent, staccato, violent pieces of work "" are available, for those who have the stomach. I don't. NBC has excerpts from Cho's video up on its site, too. I watch a few minutes and I've had enough. I need to get out of Cho-Seung-hui's disturbed, methodical, deadly mind.

Richard McBeef on The Smoking Gun:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0417071vtech7.html
Mr Brownstone: play reading:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gUh7PBzGlaQ
Cho's video "confession":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18138369/

With previous tragedies, it sometimes seemed that we never knew enough: what would send an apparently ordinary person off the rails, make him pick up a gun and kill a bunch of people who had never harmed him?

Now it seems as though we know too much. I think of Cho-Seung coldly making that video, making his plans, ensuring that the right amount of postage goes on his parcel to NBC so that people like us can hear his rambling, disjointed anger.

Surfing a few hours later, still troubled, I find a small montage. Robert Frost's poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay", set to music. "Nature's first green is gold,/ Her hardest hue to hold./ Her early leaf's a flower;/ But only so an hour./ Then leaf subsides to leaf./ So Eden sank to grief,/ So dawn goes down to day./ Nothing gold can stay."

A while later, a friend sends me a link to a reading of "The Clocks of the Dead". Charles Simic's gentle voice rolls out the phrases: "How quiet the city is, I said/ Like the clocks of the dead, my wife replied." I spend some time listening, and then some time at the memorial in Second Life. The web stores a great deal of darkness and evil; but it also offers consolation, and hope.

Nothing Gold Can Stay:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=W-_G9-nDY2M
The Clocks of the Dead:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=5561