Forget Oldboy. Did Cho ever listen to the Doors; like, really listen?

I’d hate to drag in Morrison’s good name into this, but some parts of “The End” are really chilling in light of what happened last week (aside of course from the oedipal references). Not trying to establish any real connection — which doesn’t exist — but, for the sake of hindsight (excerpted below):

“This is the end … of our elaborate plans, the end/Of everything that stands … No safety or surprise, the end/I’ll never look into your eyes again … Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand, in a desperate land/Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain, and all the children are insane...

“There’s danger on the edge of town … The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on/He took a face from the ancient gallery, and he walked on down the hall … It hurts to set you free, but you’ll never follow me/The end of laughter and soft lies…”

Anyway, Jim, you can rest in peace; God knows that with such an awful tragedy you definitely don’t merit any blame.

You have got to be kidding me (above, the all-round lubricant, apparently trademarked since 1958; reminds me of the Moo-latte and this).

And take that, feminists.

CNN reported Wednesday night that NBC News received the videotaped final rites of the murderous psychopath who rampaged Virginia Tech Monday. After (reluctantly) watching it in full, with eyes aghast and conscience shocked by this despicable basketcase, all that really can be said is this: My God, there’s no soul there; blood colder than ice went through him. What a crime against all humanity, and his deeds were simply the quintessence of evil, when the heartless are allowed to roam free and destroy their imagined demons. All there is to say, really.

The murderer has a name: Cho Seung-Hui. AOL News reported earlier today that a former classmate, Ian MacFarlane, pointed to two plays Cho had written. They read, in terms of the violent psychosis and immaturity within, almost exactly like the Harris-Klebold diaries released last year.

Is it me or do I smell evil around here? … I feel a satanic presence around me. Do you guys feel it?”

Excerpted from “Mr. Brownstone” (above), through an apparent alter ego, John. As far as his story goes, John and friends sneak into a casino and win the jackpot, whereupon the teacher (who is portrayed as an evil figure [four professors were murdered at Virginia Polytechnic]) named Brownstone, intervenes and calls security forces on them. After kicking them out, one of the officers says, “I am sorry about those gangsters, sir. We’ll beef up our security.”

Seems disturbingly prescient. Yet what gives rise to such unreasoning anger and lunacy?

Hannah Arendt was right. It can happen anywhere.

“‘I can imagine what they’re going through,’ Frank DeAngelis, Columbine High principal for almost three decades, said in a telephone interview. ‘You’re hoping there would be lessons learned from Columbine but that’s obviously not the case’” (Bloomberg News).

One would have thought so (Photo by Alan Kim, Roanoke Times).

Not gonna lie, Mr. Fish, but you have gone too far with this one (above). Just brutal.

Finger-lickin’ good news.

From the London Guardian’s excerpts of Vonnegut’s final work, “A Man Without a Country” (2005):

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable. … George W Bush has gathered around him … psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences. … These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything. PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. … Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t….”

This analysis was rolled out at the height of their dominance; they’re unraveling and imploding not a moment too soon. You will be missed.

Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut. R.I.P.

The crucification of Don Imus has to stop. Free speech shouldn’t stop at the opening of anyone’s offense. Tasteless, yes; stupid, yes. Grounds for a barrage of punishment? No. Wasn’t he trying to riff off a Spike Lee movie? Where is Spike’s share of the blame? Imus is, or rather was, a shock jock; it is the nature of the profession to make ribald, provocative remarks that are typically directed toward, well, everybody. Don’t take him out of the context of his ignorant comments about Jews and women. It’s nothing new. The key part of racism seems to be hate; if you specialize in cracking wise, which was his attempt, that’s not necessarily racism. One would have the same basis to call Carlos Mencia, apparently a total fraud, racist — and you wouldn’t hear that from me.

This reminds me of a recent spate of papering around the residence halls here, which read, “Only 15 of the 137 faculty members identify as non-white. What are you going to do about it?” Um, nothing. If it is representative of the demographics of the surrounding community (in the case of Wooster, Ohio, quite so; the words “vanilla suburbs” from George Clinton come to mind), no issue. Why is the color of someone’s skin at all relevant? Only racists think like that, or instead crypto-racists grotesquely posing as champions of diversity. Anyway, hi, I’m back.

The overlords at Google had me fooled. (But I am seriously taking a break from this. Until later.)

Taking a break from this for awhile.

At long last, there is proof-positive that this blogger is psycho-physio-ethically damaged, according to a report in the journal Nature as cited in Thursday’s New York Times:

“Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations…” Okay, look, there’s no brain damage up here; maybe a serotonin imbalance, but that’s about it. But take a gander at the question that’s quoted.

It’s a hypothetical that leaves no room for uncertainty. Here it is, in the original italics with some useful comments in brackets: You have abandoned a sinking cruise ship and are in a crowded lifeboat that is dangerously low in water. [Okay, very frantic circumstances where people ain’t gonna think normally anyway, right?] If nothing is done — assuming quite a bit — it will sink before the rescue boats arrive and everyone will die.

However, there is an injured person who will not survive in any case [my emphasis]. If you throw that person overboard, the boat will stay afloat and the remaining passengers will be saved. So it becomes do or die. And according to the Nature article slightly over 20 percent of “normal” patients say yes, they would throw the poor guy over; and just over 80 percent of “brain injured” folks say yes.

Um, according to the very hypothetical presented, isn’t this a no-brainer (no pun intended)? Now, certainly you wouldn’t ask me to be the man to do it. Maybe that’s what a fair amount of the 80 percent of normal people who said no might have thought: Well, yeah, in principle, but not me. So either there’s some brain damage that’s gone under the radar on my behalf, or this was a totally loaded situation. Forget it.

Ran into Paul Bremer at the grocery today. Didn’t think it was him (at first), though the recognition was almost instant. Things didn’t go past perfunctory greetings, and it shouldn’t have been otherwise. Didn’t feel it appropriate to ask if the de-Ba’athification policies over which he presided as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority back in ’03 were too drastic or extreme, so didn’t go there. Seemed like a nice fellow.

Too dark?

The old captain died not a minute too soon (from the executive summary of an internal FBI audit released today, below):

“… we identified many instances in which the FBI obtained telephone toll billing records and subscriber information from 3 telephone companies pursuant to more than 700 ‘exigent letters’ signed by personnel in the Counterterrorism Division without first issuing national security letters [NSL]. We concluded that the FBI’s acquisition of this information circumvented the requirements of the ECPA [Electronic Communications Privacy Act] NSL statute and violated the Attorney General’s Guidelines for FBI National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection … and internal FBI policy” (p. 41).

Until later.

Goodbye, Captain America (1941 - 2007).

Lest you thought you’d gotten me pinned down with the last post, here’s a sampling from another political philosophy that seems quite attractive to me as well (via Project Gutenberg):

“Society is indeed a contract… but the state ought not to be considered nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue … between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society … connecting the visible and invisible world… The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure…”

— Edmund Burke (emphasis added)

Referred to this topic in an earlier post, but this possibly could indicate why democratic socialism, at least by its immediate connotations, may not become a viable alternative in the U.S. for a long time, from Jason Schulman and Joseph Schwartz:

Hopes for a rapid democratic transition to socialism were shattered by the horrors of Stalinism and the failure of social democratic governments to discern a socialist road out of the Great Depression. After World War II, ‘democratic socialism’ increasingly became identified with the ‘Keynesian’ welfare state… with the crisis of the welfare state due to the end of post-WWII growth in the 1970s, the mainstream left … faced a crisis of vision and program.”

One could say that they’ve yet to get it back.