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The Search for Meaning in a Killer's Hieroglyphics
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There's something very human in all this, something akin to our tendency to see faces in knots of wood. We look for reason in the nonsense. We look for ourselves. (Let's see, how would I justify the murders if I were Cho? . . . No, no, no.)
Cornwell has made several trips to England to study the letters allegedly written by Jack the Ripper, which were sent to police and newspapers during his lifetime. These letters are filled with hieroglyphs, she says; she studies them for clues as to who he was and why he was.
"Why did he choose this type of handwriting? Why did he draw this doodle?" she asks. "Is he simply making fun of us and it doesn't mean anything?" Each one might be a clue to the bigger why, the why that scares us, the why we'd like to answer and thereby emasculate. In the case of Jack the Ripper, Cornwell says: "Why do you cut someone open and dump their intestines to the pavement? Why do you flay somebody to the bone?"
What's scariest is that we can't see ourselves in Cho. The hieroglyphs are meaningless. If he was invoking the Bible or "Moby-Dick" with those words on his arm, it doesn't make any more sense than if he wasn't. Try parsing the sweeping rage in those writings he sent to NBC News, or in his violent plays. No way to reason with the anger. No one to blame but him. That's what's scariest.
"We cannot predict who is going to do this type of thing and who is not with any more accuracy than guessing and that's just a fact," says Jeffrey Schaler, a psychologist at American University. There are people who "write much more disturbing literary messages than this guy did and never commit acts like this."
Todd Cox, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, says it's misleading to search for too much meaning in the intricacies of a psychotic person's thoughts. Psychiatry was "led astray for decades" by those looking for such underlying symbolisms, Cox says. Sometimes a cigar is -- you know the rest.
"It is much more important to look at the form as opposed to the content of the illness . . . the fact that this is delusional, as opposed to, 'What is the delusion?' " Cox says.
Ismael Ax stands for nothing. Symbolism is cheap. In the video he sent to NBC, Cho compares himself to Jesus and Moses. So what?
