The image is pure Hollywood: The lone avenger, armed to the teeth, ready to strike a blow against a cruel world. This, it seems, is how the campus killer Cho Seung-hui wanted to be remembered, finding time between killing his first two victims and a second, much more deadly round of shooting two hours later, to post video clips of himself to the American broadcaster NBC.
It is clear from the video clips that Cho is a young man who desperately wants to be hard, like Steve McQueen, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and a hundred other celluloid tough guys.
The problem is that the South Korean student feels empty inside. 23-year-old Cho left behind a message which sounds as if it is a very extreme version of the perpetual cry of the arrested adolescent.
In the past few days, as Cho’s lengthy history of disturbed behavior has emerged, much has been written about the failure of the authorities in Virginia to identify him as a serious risk to fellow students, especially young women.
There is clearly some truth in this, but it is also the case that too many young men are growing up without an understanding that disputes can be settled and grievances addressed without recourse to violence. This is far from being an exclusively American phenomenon.
But there is a significant difference between American and British cultures; in UK, guns have to be acquired illegally for the most part, and, as a consequence, angry young men are more likely to arm themselves with knives. It is obvious that the rampage at Virginia Tech and earlier horrors, such as the Columbine high school massacre, would have claimed fewer casualties if the perpetrators had carried knives instead of handguns.
But a tragically mistaken belief in the efficacy of violence is embedded in the American psyche.
Its origins lie in American history, a legacy of the anti-colonial and pioneer mentality of the earliest white settlers who believed themselves to be threatened by British imperialists, native Americans and their own rulers. Hence the constitutional right to bear arms, whose purpose of protecting indivduals from the over-powerful state long ago metamorphosed into a license which allows dangerous people to take out their lethal frustrations on innocent bystanders.
But there is more to this situation than a stubborn refusal to rethink lax gun laws in the face of irrefutable evidence of the damage they cause. The frontier mentality was crucial in creating the Hollywood myth of the embattled loner, setting out on a self-imposed mission to avenge all sorts of wrongs, but it also helped create a nation which is convinced of its ability to put things right through force.
Successive US administrations have gone to war with disastrous consequences, from Vietnam and Cambodia to Iraq, while covert American interference in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, must count as a foreign policy disaster on a grand scale. Even now, when the disaster of Iraq should have definitively demonstrated the limits of force, the Bush administration gives every indication of relishing an armed confrontation with Iran, a course of action which would unite Iranians behind their unpredictable president and further inflame anti-American sentiment across the world.
This shouldn’t come as a great surprise, as long as American popular culture goes on repeating the same old message about the desirability of solving every type of conflict, from the personal to the geopolitical, through violent means. Who is making films, writing novels or making computer games which praise the virtues of restraint, making the heretical suggestion that reaching for a semi-automatic weapon or going to war should be an absolutely final resort? Bestselling authors fetishise guns and ammunition in their fiction, encouraging readers to share a vision of the US in which the good guys can survive only if they wage a remorseless war on a population largely composed of freaks, perverts and serial killers.
There are echoes of this paranoid fictional world in Cho’s videotaped rant. In Cho’s deranged imagination, he is the victim who turns on his tormentors, the little guy finally becoming the big man he longs to be. The irony, given his intense hatred of life in America, is that he chose to do it in a way which shows how thoroughly immersed in American popular culture he had become.
