Chief: The War on Craziness?

It's the Guns, Stupid
By Chief
April 18, 2007

There's a scene in Brett Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" in which the protagonist starves his pet rat, and then introduces it to the vagina of a naked, hogtied abductee. I shouldn't need to connect the dots between the rat's hunger, and the resulting gore. In any event, if ever there's been a piece of "disturbing" writing, one that should set off our collective alarm bells about the mental state of its author, this scene might be it.

"Richard McBeef" the largely incoherent one-act play by Seung Hui Cho, does not strike me as particularly "disturbing", and yet, that's what credulous, pop-eyed commentators are calling it: they're saying that this infantile drivel somehow anticipates or signals the shooting spree that Mr. Cho would eventually unleash upon the campus of Virginia Tech; they're saying, "all the signs were there, in his writing."

Bullshit! None of the circumstances of the slaughter are anticipated by Mr. Cho's "plays." No guns are mentioned in either of his on-line plays, no college campus, no bicycle chains to lock his prospective victims in an engineering building--not a single detail of either work heralds the events of Monday morning. Whatever these plays might be expressing, in terms of Mr. Cho's mental state, is extremely incohate, and could not possibly be interpreted as a warning sign that he would, someday, in the not too distant future, go on a killing rampage.

As many of you know, I have worked with crazy people for most of my adult life. The crucial thing to understand about crazy people is that they often say things that are beyond interpretation. Whatever it is that they think they mean, usually means nothing to you, their sane, impartial interlocutor. "Do you happen to know the name of the cemetery Vincent Price is buried in in California?" I was once asked by a squirrelly, super-secretive client of mine when I was working in St. Vincent's Hospital. This question, when it was put to me, did sort of raise the hackles on the back of my neck, if only because it offered such a startlingly incisive glimpse into the nature of this particular client's delusion. But I did not alert the authorites (in anticipation of said client going to California in order to exhume Mr. Price's remains) because CRAZY PEOPLE SAY ALL MANNER OF MEANINGLESS SHIT! Asking me, in furtive whisper, if I knew where Vincent Price was buried didn't necessarily signal anything about anything. It was just a lot of weird bullshit, and I'm proud to report that I treated it as such--by pretending to ignore it.

"Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" deserve, and continue to deserve, similarly dismissive treatment. They don't tell us anything about Mr. Cho other than he was a messed-up little guy, and God knows, the world is bulging at the seams with messed-up little guys. Just as it is beyond stupid to prosecute a war on terror or a war on drugs, it is even more wrongheaded to prosecute a war upon quiet, messed-up little guys. There isn't anything a civil, open society can do to protect itself against an individual's psychosis. Attempting to institute a well-meant "hug your local psycho" program might make us feel generally better about ourselves, but it won't do a thing in terms of staving off some poor loner's break with reality. Sorry, do-gooders, but craziness always trumps hugs and asking the weird guy if he wants to tag along with you and your friends.

Crazy people are everywhere, and, perhaps regrettably, they will continue to be everywhere. The idea that the ramblings of crazy little guy roaming the world should prompt a police investigation is beyond stupid. The reality is, had Mr. Cho not had such easy, legal access to handguns, none of this would have happened. Insanity is not on trial here--unless you consider America's love affair with firearms insane. In short, if you want to prevent another rampage, you have to reverse the NRA's mantra: Guns do kill people. They just do.