You Lookin At Me?

Now I'm convinced. Every person in the US is obsessed by visibility.

Cho Seung-Hui is the perfect example of someone starved for attention, believing that they deserve their time on the public stage.

I'm not sure whether Warhol was the first to notice this, or the first to expolit it, or maybe even the one to implant the obsession. Whatever. Now we're hooked.

Think of Cho's "massacre" as the ultimate reality TV, because surging underneath the consumption-controlled, image-obsessed skins of every 23 year old is a psycho-killer waiting for the moment of release. Luckily, most of Cho's peers will bury all this under unhappy relationships, intoxication, workout routines and therapy. But we are all raging lunatics, planning our escape from the hypocrisy and coldness of the world.

I don't feel bad for him. I feel bad for everyone who doesn't lose it and kill everyone they see. (Help! Help! I'm being repressed!)

We desire the projection of our "selves" into the public space because we are not getting what we need in our personal lives. The purpose, outside of the earning of a respectable (or minimal) living, is gone from our existence. The imperative of our survival is completely disassociated from our experience. The demands of evolution and adaptation seem remote and scientific, not immediate and dynamic. (Thank you, Veblen)

Cho is right. "We" made him do it.

But - and this is a huge BUT - he didn't have to act on it.

This is one of the side-effects of both the desire for visibility and the loss of individual purpose in our culture. Namely: a lamentable lack of personal responsibility.

Cho, and the majority of his peers, project themselves as the center of the universe and thus, when actions are taken, it is the responsibility of all the moving parts of that universe to cooperate with his (or her) desires. It is never "I choose", or "I made this happen". It is always "They made me", or "It's not my fault".

If you parse through the verbiage of interviews conducted by the police and the media (some examples here), you see that this mentality pervades even the highest levels of authority at VaTech, as well as the individuals who were in the best position to prevent Cho from taking this course of action through personal contact.

I'm not suggesting that his roommates should have known. Or that the University should have known. When a person chooses to shut out the world and carefully plot a sensational announcement to that rejected world, it is not anyone else's responsibility to know about it or prevent it. That's the point.

Cho's actions were his own responsibility. He chose. He made this happen.

But no one else that had contact with him should get off with a clutch "It's not my fault."

Brief update, as of 4/19/07 at 1:20 pm.