Era of the self-documented

What are we to make of Cho Seung-Hui's pre-rampage video?

• What a nut.
• What a fucking nut.
• No matter how much it seems like other people are the cause of your misery, suffering is ultimately self-generated. Cho's martyrdom began and ended inside the walls of his own skull. The scary part is that we are no different. We generate our own drama, our own self-pitying attitudes, our own fantasies of persecution or heroism, in exactly the same way. Our only salvation is our connection to other people, which puts a reality check on our delusions and cultivates the essential sympathy for others that defines what we call "humanity." I think it's important to recognize that Cho's evil was not in what he had -- hate, resentment, anger, frustration -- but in what he lacked: the slightest sense that other people mattered.
• Cho may have done us a favor by striking so many action-hero poses. Should we be surprised that all the images of gun-wielding power are embraced by those who feel powerless? I'm not saying that a violence-glorifying culture caused the tragedy . . . but those images are going to make it difficult for Hollywood to push its muscular fare for a few months. Suddenly, the stock image of "man with gun" has renewed horror.
• Nonetheless, we should not blame the media. Every man with the slightest trace of testosterone saw that photo of Cho pointing a gun and the camera, and had the immediate mini-fantasy: "I wish I could have been there, with a gun, to blow that guy away." The violence, the urge to power, are a part of the masculine psyche, for better or worse. Again, it's not what was in Cho that caused the tragedy; it was what he lacked.