[As with
everything else in this plague-ridden year, my sons and my annual summer trip
to Charlottesville unfortunately hasn’t been able to happen as planned. But this
blog will always return to my home state, this time for a series on a few
of Virginia’s pivotal historical moments!]
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. And partly it’s because the event and
memories are still raw enough among many of my Virginia friends 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.
Special Cville
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Virginia histories or contexts you’d share?
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