. . . on just locking up the weirdos. (And, you know—why that wouldn't work.)

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Democrats are primates! That means they can be educated!

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How I love your pizazz.

How I envy you your clothes, and your face and your beautiful body. I saw you read at the UCLA Book Fair once, and realized on some level that I just wanted to be you, with your beautiful embroidered cloak and your thick black hair.

And how I forgive you your leftism, despite the fact that I don't think it's done your humor as much good as one might hope. And yet, and yet . . .

Marguerite is grieving:

I look at the shooter's expressionless face on the news and he looks so familiar, like he could be in my family. Just another one of us. But how can he be us when what he has done is so terrible? Here is where I can really envy white people because when white people do something that is inexplicably awful, so brutally and horribly wrong, nobody says – “do you think it is because he is white?” There are no headlines calling him the “White shooter." There is no mention of race because there is no thought in anyone's mind that his race had anything to do with his crime.

So much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter, how the Korean community is reacting to it, South Korea's careful condolences and cautiously expressed fear that it will somehow impact the South Korean population at large.

Sweetie, you haven't even studied criminology in the way that my fuzzy-headed 70-year-old mother has, or my 54-year-old husband (who is also a comic, by the way), or . . . or the way nearly any other sentient creature has.

Take if from a short, young, homely white chick (who just happens to be a crime writer)—

If there is any industry other than "NASA engineer in the 1950s" that says "White Guy" with a capital W andG, it is the field of multiple-victim homicide. Whether expressed in serial killings or in the type of "mass murder" young Mr. Cho perpetrated at Virginia Tech, the first picture anyone get in his/her mind of a mass murderer/serial killer is that of a pale white male loner. Or, sometimes, two pale white male loners who work together. (See Columbine, or the Hillside Strangler[s].)

Sure: there have been blacks involved in this type of crime. And even Asians, though I've been told it isn't fair to count Pol Pot or Chairman Mao. And Aileen Wuornos tried to make us—the women of the world—slightly less underrepresented in the annals of multiple-victim homicide. (Bloody Mary helped there, too.)

But the undisputed champs in this particular arena of evil are pale white men.

If people discuss his Korean-ness, Margaret, it's because that factor makes it different from the norm. It's because this very disturbed young murderer doesn't fit the mold, racially. It's the "man bites dog" element in the story.

Young Mr. Cho has no more in common with you than I do with that white guy who executed people in the cafeteria in Texas, or with Ted Bundy. [Well, there is the name, Cho, but that's just the luck of the draw, and it will give you great material over the years, once you've absorbed this horrible shock.]

Evil is its own ethnicity. Count on it, Margaret. Rational white/black/brown/Asian people all over the world aren't suddenly looking at their Korean friends/neighbors/colleagues/schoolmates/vendors/clients any differently.

It's a stupid world, Baby-Doll. But not quite that stupid. Not quite.

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So. Should we have a national "report the weirdo" hotline?

Sean: No.

Ace: Maybe.

Me: Absolutely. But I shall report myself, so as to beat the rest of you to it.

Seriously—as a creepy strange person and part-time crime writer, I don't know how far I want to go down the road of judging people on the basis of the shit they come up with for their fiction. You know?

I mean, I've got some nice landscaping in my backyard, and I'd prefer that the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department avoid digging it up just because I'm writing about disembodied, semi-decomposed corpses right now, and my last manuscript discussed the sexual side of serial killing.

But the fact that his classmates were thinking about what they would do if he showed up one day with a loaded gun suggests to me that we might need more citizen-driven threat assessment.

How that's consistent with the Bill of Rights isn't clear to me. Unfortunately.

Please discuss.

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Hackbarth has the story of a Virginia Tech professor who gave his life to save the students in his classroom.

Details are still sketchy, but the way I got the story, he bought his students enough time to escape via an open window—and was shot and killed while he tried to block the murderer's path.

Just when I'm ready to weep at the utter blackness of human nature, I hear a story like this, and start to weep again at the good.

I was raised on bromides about how "everyone has some good and some bad in him/her." That's true enough, as far as it goes. But which part of you is stronger? Is it the beast who might kill, or the angel who could save others at the cost of your own life?

It's the part you feed.

Feed the good: Ninety-nine percent of the other stuff we worry about is bullshit.

UPDATE: Darleen weighs in on the hero of the Virginia Tech massacre.

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