On two ways in which AmericanStudies can provide contexts for one of our
most devastating recent tragedies.
It’s very difficult for me to write a post about the Virginia Tech massacre. Partly that’s
for personal reasons, on two different levels: my best friend is an alum of the
engineering program at VT, the community in which many of those students
and faculty killed worked (and many of my other high school friends and
classmates likewise attended the university); and the shooting took place on
April 16th, 2007, the birthday of my younger son Kyle. And partly it’s
because the event and memories are still raw enough that I worry about
offending or hurting those particularly affected and still grieving. But part
of public AmericanStudies scholarship is engaging with all our histories,
distant and recent, inspiring and horrific—and, when we can, finding ways to
provide contexts through which we can better understand any individual event.
One set of particularly complex such contexts relates to immigration and
identity. I’ve written before about the grotesque and bigoted way in which Pat
Buchanan used the Virginia Tech shooter’s Korean American identity to attack
diversity, and won’t rehash my objections. But while I entirely disagree
with Buchanan’s use of the term “alien” to describe Cho Seung-Hui, that doesn’t
mean that Cho’s own sense of alienation—which came through so palpably in
his various statements and documents—isn’t complicatedly connected to his
struggles with assimilation, acculturation, and education in America. Leon Czolgosz,
the Michigan-born son of Eastern European immigrants who assassinated President
McKinley in September 1901, had suffered at least one significant mental
breakdown in the years prior to that shooting. In his
own statements he connected those struggles, and his attraction to
anarchism, to a sense of alienation from America; and he described the
president as a representation of that nation’s official structures and systems.
In Czolgosz’s era, there was no significant attempt to understand those breakdowns
as symptoms of any sort of mental illness—and even if there had been, he likely
would have been only stigmatized
further as a result. When I see the way in which clearly (to my mind) mentally
ill criminals such as Cho, Jared
Loughner, James
Holmes, and others are described in media coverage, I wonder whether we
have progressed far (if at all) in our communal narratives of mental illness. That
is not to say that our resources or treatments are the same as they were in Dorothea
Dix’s era—but I’m not at all sure that our conversations about mental
illness have caught up to those medical shifts. Indeed, an engagement with Dix’s
own efforts might reveal just how closely many of our narratives of criminals
like Cho mirror the ways in which we have described the mentally ill for centuries—which,
while it does not have to lessen in any way our outrage at what Cho did, might
help us move toward a society that can respond to such illnesses more
successfully and perhaps prevent future such outrages.
Next Virginia post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other Virginia connections you’d share for the
weekend post?
No comments:
Post a Comment