a killer's manifesto

He had it all planned out. During the time between the first and second shooting sprees, Seung-Hui Cho went to the post office and mailed NBC a package containing photos and videos of him brandishing his guns and delivering a rambling, incoherent manifesto: Va. Tech gunman sent material to NBC. The package arrived at NBC's headquarters in New York this morning. As the article points out, the mailing helps explain one of the biggest mysteries about the massacre: where Cho was and what he did during that two-hour window between the shootings at the dorm and the classroom building. Watching the video, which will surely be replayed ad nauseum in the coming days and weeks, you get a chilling, more complete sense of this guy's anger and isolation—something previously reported details about him didn't quite fully convey. He let his hate and rage fester until he became a full-fledged monster. The guy was completely lost in his own world, but he knew exactly what he was doing. And that is scary.

UPDATE: Some people are comparing the image of Cho brandishing a hammer in his video with the a scene from Park Chan-wook's film Oldboy: An Image's Ties to a Dark Movie. While the two still frames placed next to each other appear similar, other than they both involve a hammer and are Korean-related, I'm failing to see a strong connection. Granted, Oldboy is a dark and violent movie—about as dark and violent as it gets—but highlighting the obvious similarities between the two images really doesn't get us any closer to understanding Cho and his motivations. It just connects a killer, already perceived by many as "foreign," with more reason to do so.

UPDATE: What's also somewhat disconcerting to me is how some media outlets continue to refer to the killer as "Cho Seung-Hui"—surname first, accentuating this idea of his "foreignness." If the guy has been living in the United States, growing up and going to high school here, shouldn't he be referred to in the same way as everyone else? Seung-Hui Cho. What it says on his driver's license. In no way am I trying to stick up for him, and it seems like a minor quibble, but it makes a huge difference in perception. He was a homicidal psychopathic. But we have to come to terms with the fact that he was an American homicidal psychopath. Here's a great, reasoned editorial from NPR's Robert Siegel: Weighing Cho's Heritage and Identity