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.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:21 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 553 words, total size 3 kb.