Letters to the Editor
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there are parallels
We pathologize and label and desperately try to restrict attention to Cho for the same reasons that we did Saddam Hussein or the hijackers of 9/11, or the Duke stripper, or Andrea Yates, or one of Nancy Grace’s straw men. It’s a defense, an opiate that allows escape from intolerable insight into environments that drive and explain horrific behaviors, environments we maintain and celebrate.
Cho was not mentally ill. Like Andrea Yates, he reacted maladaptively and with impaired ego function to the normalized social pathology that was destroying him: constructed roles, shamed and repressed sexuality, the pathological needs of family, church, race, class, and that instrument of caste assignment and of doxa we term “university”.
Utterances that posit his behavior as “senseless” may be understood as defenses, as “Please never ask us to face the real pathology that drove the shootings.” Never ask us to face what drove our attack of Iraq. It is, after all, our way of life.