var sWinHTML = window.opener.sWinHTML; document.write(sWinHTML); The making of a mass murderer-- In english classBy Mary GrabarTuesday, April 24, 2007
A.A. Love that title. It's all downhill from there.
If you were a student at Virginia Tech last fall and had a propensity for the gruesome and violent you could have satisfied your thirst for the bloody and course requirements by enrolling in Professor Brent Stevens’s English 3984 class, “Special Studies: Contemporary Horror.” And, as a plus, you wouldn’t have to read many books because some of the “texts”--as they increasingly are in English classes today--would be movies.
Guess who took that class that watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and explored in papers and a “fear journal” how “horror has become a masochistic pleasure,” according to the course description? Guess who read a graphic novel (a book with pictures, i.e., a comic book) titled From Hell by Alan Moore, presented by Professor Stevens as “one of the most popular and accomplished writers in the medium,” as well as the work of scholarly “criticism,” Men, Women and Chainsaws? Guess who was drawn to the course described by the professor with these words: “We are consuming horror on an unprecedented scale. But the rules have changed. Until recent years, lead characters could be counted on to survive the invasion of zombies/homicidal maniacs/vampires. But this margin of safety no longer exists; horror has become a masochistic pleasure”? Guess who said to himself, “Bingo! That’s the course I want!” to a course description that ended with the words, ‘WARNING: Not for the faint of heart.”
A.A. I'm not a big fan of horror movies, I hate them and would never watch them. Still, only Cho of all the students who took the class(es) became a mass murderer. Had he not taken the class, he would never have committed the murders. That's obvious to Professor Grabar.
Cho Seung-Hui proved, indeed, that he was not “faint of heart.” His own massacre of 32 fellow students and professors on April 16 demonstrated that if he did have a heart it was filled with evil. Cho outdid Freddy Krueger.
A.A. She doesn't wonder where evil comes from. Norman Mailer thinks it comes from the devil. Maybe she thinks it comes from the devil too. I think it comes from abuse in childhood. Victims create victims. Each victim reacts differently. Unless you think the devil creates victims, the answer is to stop creating victims in childhood.
The showing of the videos and writings left by Cho has stirred up much debate by commentators. But what about the videos and books that were considered “texts” in an English class in an institution of supposedly “higher learning”? Would NBC and other stations be criticized for airing footage from one of the required class texts, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, on prime time? But this is what Cho and his classmates were writing term papers on.
A.A. She has a point that horror is trash. But, we do love our Imuses after all, far more than we love our Defoes. How about all the gunslingers? Violence escalates along with everything else as we get inured and jaded to it, and we worship our gunslingers. Can't have gunslingers if there's nobody to shoot, so we need to create villians to shoot so we can be morally superior.
And while the public gasped at Cho’s demented one-act plays (including one that involved a chainsaw murder), few noted that these were rather crude renderings of the subject matter of much young adult fiction discussed in high school classes: family dysfunction, the evil of teachers, and adults as perverts.
A.A. Families are dysfunctional and that does need to be discussed. Children must be taught that no one has the right to abuse them. If parents aren't telling them this, somebody has to, and I suspect the schools are not teaching it in any case, except in her mind. As far as evil of teachers, they are the ones teaching the classes on horror, are they not? So maybe what the kids are being taught in her mind is true after all. Also, teachers in the good old days were in fact evil. People who hit those smaller than themselves are evil. And yes, many adults are perverts, including those who indulge in passive abuse as well as active abuse. And that's a lot of adults.
In our schizophrenic universities students are taught that Christianity is evil
A.A. The Passion of Christ ws pretty evil. If it wasn't, define evil. Chainsaw slasher movies are horror; slasher movies revolving around whipping someone with a cat-o-nine-tails for two hours are religion. Some of the clips I saw of the Passion of Christ were breathtakingly evil. In any case, I'd like examples of where it's taught that Christianity is evil. Any ideas, Lawrence?
and that heroism is a passé idea of old fools;
A.A. Heroism like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, with all their guns ablazin'. Violence escalates. As noted, can't have heros without villians.
at the same they are trained in pacifism and sensitivity.
A.A. Where are students being trained in pacifism? These claims are flying a mile a minute with absolutely nothing to support them. Cops are trained in sensitivity, and it's both long overdue and nowhere near enough. As far as heroism, how about a dad who takes care of his kids. A true hero, don't you think? Mm, not unless he's teaching his kids how to wield guns and blow people away.
College classes extend from high school the training in respect and appreciation for the practices of every other culture,
A.A. Where is this training in respect and appreciation for the practices of other cultures happening? In comparative religion classes?
while disparaging our own.
A.A. Again, who is disparaging our own? Americans are as arrogant as any other culture about themselves. "Irish need not apply." "Wops" "Kikes" "What's the difference between a Swede and a bucket of poop? The bucket." etc. etc. This was most apparent in the good days before sensitivity. Eventually cultures become mainstream American. Pizza, for example, who could live without it now? Likewise Chinese food. Soon it will be tacos and maybe Indian food. Even so, all Americans feel in their hearts that they're superior to the Chinese and Indians and Latinos. Where is disparaging our own culture being taught?
Students, steeped in relativism, scoff at the notion of original sin,
A.A. Right, with 92% believing in this stuff. We're all condemned to hell on earth because somebody ate an apple. Maybe it's a notion that desperately needs scoffing, which is happening only in her mind anyway.
insisting that it is our culture, especially its religion, that corrupts the heart and mind of the inherently innocent child.
A.A. Of the inherently innocent child who is the product of original sin. This woman needs a course in disjointed non sequiturs and maybe even some of your vaunted logic, Lawrence. Is that why you posted this, to illustrate when logic is desperately needed?
When most college freshmen are presented with Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion that government should encourage religious belief and that atheists should be “marked as the natural foes of the whole people,” they gaze with horror.
A.A. Hopefully they do, but given all her other ridiculous statements that she pulled out of a hat, it's unlikely that they do.
How dare he state that an atheist’s ideas are less valid than a Christian’s! How judgmental and intolerant! Why atheists, they insist (sometimes pointing to themselves), can be “good people.” These students are only eighteen years old, but they are firmly set in their beliefs in gay marriage, unrestricted abortion, the prohibition of prayer in the public arena—and in cynicism about previously cherished values like heroism, nobility, and honor. But they have had 13 years of indoctrination.
A.A. Here we go again. She's unbelievable.
To aid and abet this moral leveling we have a curriculum made up of titillating ephemera.
A.A. Patterned after her unsupported statements that she made up from whole cloth.
Among the panoply of trivia are grievance tracts by “overlooked” writers, cave paintings, scalp dances, performance art, pornography—and horror flicks--that professors think will draw student-customers. It’s not that the great writers did not depict evil and horror; just read Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Flannery O’Connor. Pious literature is no more great literature than slash-and-burn movies are great cinema. But great literature, while providing the cathartic experience of tragedy, engages us in moral questions. As Toqueville points out, “the greater part of the most famous minds in literature adhere to the doctrines of a spiritual philosophy.” But chances are that the student taking the upper level Shakespeare class will have Judeo-Christian ideas “deconstructed” by the professor and by the scholarly criticism as evidence of an oppressive culture. Cho’s screed against Christianity is only slightly less logical than those that have been penned and published by Ph.D.’s since the 1960s.
A.A. She obviously has never heard of the Enlightenment in her joy at extolling the virtues of these New Dark Ages. She's proposing that all literature be viewed through a religious filter. It's her opinion, that religion will right all wrongs. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked to date.
At one time, institutions of “higher learning” cultivated an appreciation for the sublime through a study of literature. Literature dealt with the lofty and heroic—even among God’s fallen creatures. Of course, the notion of the sublime is meaningless to the soulless professor and administrator mired in the material realm like the cattle that Plato presents in The Republic: “always looking down with their heads bent to earth and table, they feed, fattening themselves, and copulating; and, for the sake of getting more of these things, they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of iron, killing each other because they are insatiable. . . .” They are insatiable in terms of the senses. Consequently, over the decades the subjects of study have had to become more and more extreme in order to be declared ‘relevant’ and to appeal to desensitized students.
A.A. Nice quotes, as if the world hasn't always been mired in the material realm. John Milton supported a political viewpoint. Religion was/is concerned with very earthly matters. Her bellyaching would be credible if she made some sense.
It’s quite interesting that Cho’s professor, Brent Stevens, chose to use the academically fashionable term, “encounter,” to describe the class assignments; they included, among papers and tests, the “fear journal in which students will write narratives about their personal fears and catalogue their interactions with the texts we encounter.” What more sensational “text” to “encounter” than that of a senseless, bloody “massacre”—whether by chainsaw or gun? What more appropriate education for the next egotistical, narcissistic, soulless, anti-Christian, anti-authority, anti-hero? Among those to be feared, indeed, are those like Professor Stevens, who assume to elevate Cho’s real-time actions of horror to a genre worthy of study.
A.A. So it's all Professor Stevens' fault that Cho did what he did. Bad Professor Stevens, bad!
Mary Grabar graduated from the University of Georgia with a Ph.D. in English and currently teaches at a university in Atlanta.
A.A. It's probably easy to get an 'A' in her classes. Yes, Professor Grabar, the lions will lie down with the lambs ... Good, Johnny, good! ... Uh, except it's never happened Professor Grabar ... Get out of my class you Godless sensitive pacifist!
