Peter Krupa

It’s hard to explain, but the writings of a crazy person are at once recognizable and deeply affecting. Sure, characters like Patrick Bateman are all about chopping women up and killing people with axes and whatnot, and it’s good fun. But in retrospect that sounds like play craziness. Real craziness - the kind that makes you back away slowly - is both veiled and earnest.

All that to say, Cho Seung Hui’s plays have been posted on the Web. Mr. Brownstone. Richard McBeef. It’s pretty clear to me now that all those 20th-century novelists and playwrights trying to channel the malaise and darkness of their generations were just dabbling. They should be damn glad they never got it right.

It’s a rare YouTube video that’s worth nine minutes of internet browsing time, but trust me. This is one of them. I do not recommend watching this video with small children around, unless you want to explain a lot of complicated - and potentially embarrassing - words and concepts. No dirty images though. Just public access television. It’s educational! Enjoy.

(hat tip Gawker)

As America’s fearless punditocracy rushes to politicize the tragedy at Virginia Tech, my ever-clever comment section has put together a handy little scapegoat list for them to consult. So far, we’ve got drugs, videogames, Buddhism/Atheism/lack-of-monotheistic-Christian-God, immigrants, liberals, conservatives, guns, bullying, and racism.

It’s a good start. Of course the school administration is taking a hit, and I imagine we’ll have some people losing their jobs over missed warning signs and whatnot. Predictably, the shooter was a “loner.”

Aside from all that, however, it’s remarkable just how random, unpredictable, and non-stereotypical this shooting was. First of all, the kid was a Korean immigrant, making vague accusations of an American culture of violence kind of toothless.

Second of all, the manner in which the shooting took place was unique, what with the dorm hit, then the classroom shooting spree. Third of all, I’m standing by my amazement that a lone gunman with two small-caliber handguns could kill so many people. There is so much that could have gone wrong for the shooter, and unfortunately for his victims, none of it did.

By all accounts, this just looks like some really, really awful luck.

Nevertheless, within a week or so the finger pointing will start in earnest. It’s part of the anatomy of a tragedy these days. First the shocking details trickle out. The President expresses horror. More details come out. The next day, we learn who the shooter was. A few days later, though the actual news has been beat to death, we still want to talk about it. So we turn to the op-ed pages. Blogs. Shouting matches on Fox News. There are news conferences where people resign. Maybe other news conferences announcing lawsuits.

The media dances its tragedy dance. Let’s dance along.

Details are trickling out little by little about the shooting at Virginia Tech. A few observations:

- From what we know at this point, we should probably cut the school adminstrators some slack. Everyone’s looking for a theodicy, a reason that this happened. These days, it’s never God’s fault (or Satan’s) but one of our leaders who is supposed to protect us. But who, in all seriousness, could have predicted that one shooter, having fled, would come back two hours later, in a different section of campus, to kill more people? Until we get more details, the mainstream media - which did such a competant job of covering Katrina - should probably keep its rabble-rousing to itself.

- Shooting at and hitting 50 people (killing 33 of them) in the space of a few minutes would be very, very hard. Like, three-head-shots-from-the-book-depository hard. I’m betting this means that either our shooter had serious military training, or he had an accomplice, or both.

- Early reports have demostrated just how laughably inept our American racial ID rubrics are. So he’s “Asian,” eh? You mean South Asian? East Asian? Persian? Arab? Or did the girl mean “slanty-eyed and brownish”? In which case the shooter also could have been of indigenous Latin American descent. At least maybe we can all agree that it’s a bad idea to repeat totally useless and stereotypical racial tags, eh?

On a weekly basis, I consume a hellish amount of media. No television though - I stick to magazines, newspapers, internet, you get the idea. I read… crap. Most of it is crap, anyway, but there are a few magazines that are pure gold, magazines that make me glad to be a subscriber. The Atlantic comes to mind, as does the New Yorker.

Anyway, Conde Nast (is there an accent mark in there somewhere? I can never remember) today came out with a brand-spankin’ new title: Portfolio. It’s supposed to be, I don’t know, Vogue for businessmen (and women!). I like business reporting. I read the Wall Street Journal at least three times a week. Business and commerce are fascinating. So I thought I would check out this glittering new fragment of the Conde Nast empire to see if it would blow my mind to a degree worth the $125 million they shoveled into it’s development.

So let’s take a look. First, there are a whole bunch of short, chirpy features with flurries of illustrations and info-whatsits (graphs, timelines, etc.) Think Maxim, without the tits, and with much nicer wrist watches. But that’s the front of the book. See, they’ve got to ease you into the heavy stuff with appetizers and a few million bucks worth of ads.

OK, so getting to the heavy stuff, we have:

1) “Learning to love global warming” (cover story in the Atlantic, two months ago).

2) Ya heard? The newspaper business is in trouble! (Um, yes. I had heard that.)

3) Green technology is the New Thing In Silicon Valley (Economist, last year).

4) Hedge Funds! (New York magazine, all of last week’s issue).

5) Hedge Funds again! By Tom Wolfe! (In a nutshell: “These new money people are uncivilized brutes.” Sweet baby Jesus.).

6) So what is the deal with that Valerie Plame thing? (killing self now).

7) And to wrap it all up, have you heard they do Crazy Expensive Things In Dubai Like Thoroughbred Horse Breeding? (Decided not to kill self, now looking for someone else to kill).

And that’s what you get for $125 million and three years of development. Seriously. It occurs to me, therefore, that Portfolio is not aimed at intelligent or well-read business people, but perhaps just at business people who are really, really, really, ridiculously filthy fucking rich. You know - people like the hedge fund managers Tom Wolfe abuses.

I’ll let you unpack that irony. Meanwhile, I’m off to read a book.

My time in New York City is drawing to a close, faster than I thought it would. On May 19^th I will pack up my life and board an airplane one more time, to a place I thought I had seen the last of: Costa Rica.

It’s a long story, involving various triumphs and not-quite failures, plenty of learning experiences, and all sorts of stories which I will let percolate and ripen until I’m mature enough to tell them.

Meanwhile, the skinny is that I’ve been hired by Costa Rica’s English language newspaper – the Tico Times – to cover business, the economy, trade, etc. It’s an old role, the staff writer thing, but a new one too, since this time instead of writing about political intrigue in the Village of Hampshire I’ll be covering international free trade agreements in a foreign country.

I think it will keep me entertained.

Ona is taking a job in Costa Rica as well, as a senior lawyer at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where she will fight for justice and whatnot. We’re going to rent a nice apartment, get a dog, and spend our weekends on the beach.

We will buy furniture. Frame some paintings. Think about kids.

It’s like I’m finally becoming an adult.

What is it that makes the children of famous writers so publishable? Is it their precociousness? Talent? Is it in the genes, maybe? Are they socially conditioned to be brilliant? Or did they learn everything they know at Harvard, pulling themselves up by their Ivy League bootstraps?

Speculation is endless. Meanwhile, Frank Rich’s son (whom Mr. Rich describes as a “22-year-old … humor writer”) just published his first book.

I know, I know. He’s probably just a hard worker.

If there’s one thing we can all learn from this ridiculous Don Imus scandal it’s that there is definitely such a thing as a face for radio. Sweet Jesus.

I liked Sen. Jim Webb’s response to Bush’s last State of the Union address. It was short, pithy, and elegant - pretty much everything a typical State of the Union address isn’t. But his call to arms for some sort of new class war left me confused. According to Webb, America’s Middle Class is getting screwed. Plenty of people have been taking up that battle cry recently, from Lou Dobbs, to the adorable little Marxists at The Nation, to some Italian investment fund manager who talked my ear off during a very long train ride.

The situation, the Italian told me with his bushy eyebrows furrowed madly, is desperate - a creeping malaise that threatens to overwhelm America’s innocent, helpless middle class in a flurry of medical bills, outsourcing, and shitty compensation. When I did manage to slip a word in, I mentioned that, well, my family is middle class, and they’re doing just fine. He scoffed.

But I think I had a good point. Going down a list of my friends - all of who are middle class like me, some college educated and some not - I’m failing to see any systemic problems. One friend is an architect, recently married, with a kid on the way. Another does something with insurance, and is also married. A third is an engineer and just bought his first house. My brother who recently got married also just got hired as a fire fighter.

Meanwhile, scanning down the list of my friends from school, there are at least two future lawyers, one current lawyer, a steel salesman, a couple of journalists, and a future Marine Corp officer. I should add also that a large majority of my friends - say, 85 percent or so - have achieved a higher level of education than their parents, and that includes myself.

Those of my friends who haven’t “made it” either aren’t really trying to, or would tell you themselves that they kind of fucked up, but they’re working on it.

Yes, all my evidence is anecdotal, and I’m sure there are economists out there who want to throw numbers around that demonstrate our impending economic doom. But if we’re to believe there is some sort of phenomenon sweeping the Heartland, I think I would have heard something about it. Granted Detroit doesn’t seem like a nice place to raise a family these days, and neither does St. Louis. But can one generalize these local economic catastrophes over the entire population?

That’s not to say there aren’t problems. Of course the healthcare system is a disaster, of course immigration needs to be addressed, of course globalization has caused some growing pains.

But war on the Middle Class? Maybe we’re all just too busy with our jobs, families, travel, and leisure time to notice.

Didja hear? Heckling is in! Thank God we have professional journalists to explain to us What This Means. (9/11 is in there somewhere, I’m sure of it.)