America gave the world the suicide bomber. Not Hamas. Not the Tamil separatists or al-Qaeda. America.
The template for Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho (and Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman and countless other suicide bombers) had been set as far back as May 18, 1927, when a Bath, Michigan farmer named Andrew Kehoe killed his wife and set fire to his farm, then drove a truck, in which he'd planted a bomb, into a crowd that had gathered outside the local elementary school, killing 45 and injuring 58. The suicide-bomb seed had likely been planted well before that: in 1884, the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the seven men found guilty of and hanged for the deaths of at least seven policemen and four civilians in the May 4, 1886 uprising at Chicago's Haymarket square, stated that tramps intent on drowning themselves (due to their dire conditions) should instead take as many others as possible with them by becoming suicide bombers; a suggestion spurred in part, no doubt, by her husband's declaration at trial: "Dynamite is the diffusion of power. It is democratic; it makes everybody equal." This is what guns do, too: they level the playing field.
The difference between guns and bombs, and the basic reason why Americans cannot and do not want to make the connection between suicide bombers and suicide killers is that a gun represents the individual, the personal, the apolitical, whereas bombs reek of groups, causes and politics. Cowboys, gangsters (or nowadays, gangstas) and rebels personify the gun; cowards, anarchists and revolutionaries deal in bombs. Bombs kill indiscriminately; guns are nothing if not discriminatory. These are, of course, mostly myths. But why these myths persist explains why it is Americans continue to hang on so desperately to this notion that there exists anymore -- if ever there really did -- any significant difference between Cho and any of the dozens of other so-called suicide bombers killing themselves on a daily basis in Kabul and Tal Afar, in Santa Cruz and Houston. To put it rather crudely, and not at all delicately, no American suicide murderer would be caught dead blowing himself up in Israel, Iraq, Chechnya or anywhere else where he'd be expected to declare allegiance to some higher cause; and vice-versa, the selfish goals of the average American suicide bomber offer little to no higher-power, big-picture satisfaction for the typical jihadist.
Defined as the exacting of revenge on those whom the suicide-killer feels are responsible for his sufferings, suicide-murder is now an international phenomenon. According to a 2002 study conducted by the Violence Policy Center (based on work done prior to September 11, 2001 -- and so well before the growing climate of stress, violence and anxiety that now plagues the United States even more so), there are anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 of these types of killings in the U.S. each year. Compare those numbers to Israel (130 suicide attacks between 2001-06, with 540 killed) or Iraq, where maybe 1,000 such suicide attacks have occurred since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
If there's any doubt at all, then, about our American footprint being found in the obliterated marketplaces of Baghdad or Kabul, ask yourself this: If Seung-Hui Cho and his family had remained in South Korea, would Cho have exploded on a level there equivalent to the way he erupted at Virginia Tech?
Why, then, the shock? The surprise? Why do we continue to marvel at the disturbedness of these geeks gone haywire? Why such disbelief at the thought of so many young men -- from Blacksburg to Baghdad -- feeling so dispossessed, so alienated from their own society and so enraged at people they do not even know, that they'd then want to kill as many strangers as possible while taking their own lives as well? Maybe Cho's outburst will finally put to rest all this ethnocentric, paternalistic handwringing over suicide bombers and shame all these Westerners who've been wagging their fatherly fingers at Islam for having "condoned" such a morally corrupt tactic. As if there aren't significant similarities between the suicide bombers over there and the perpetrators of equally heinous random violence over here. As if American suicide killers aren't practitioners of pretty much the exact same sort of violence, as if American suicide killers haven't been motivated by many of the same sorts of frustrations and fantasies of revenge, glory and narcissism -- only Americans tell themselves the suicide-killer's motives are anything but all of the above; instead, they're idiosyncratic, they're private, they're things like autism, lax gun control, women, and Satan.
Isn't it interesting, too, how desperately people wanted to point the finger at Islam: from the moment it was first revealed that the Virginia Tech killer was an "Asian male" (wherein "Asian" equals Arabic, all Arabs are Muslims, most Muslims have ties to terrorists, ergo, the Virginia Tech shooter is an Islamic terrorist) to the mysterious "Ishmael Ax" appellation that Cho used as both a signoff and as a temporary tattoo he scrawled onto his arm. Seized upon by Islamophobes and sensationalists everywhere, these two factoids alone were treated as if they were Cho's personal WMDs. Americans, at first, were all too eager to blame Islamists for Cho's actions, thereby abdicating any cultural or societal responsibility America might've had in Cho's motives, but they remained, and remain, fearful of actually drawing a line between an American suicide killer to suicide bombers abroad. And when this Islamic tie-in fell through, when people finally gave up on connecting Cho to al-Qaeda, they reverted to their usual explanation for an American gone berserk: he's Evil with a capital E, the Devil got in him, guns don't kill people, and people don't kill people, it's evil people who've been taken over by Satan, those are the people who go on these rampages, those are the types who must be prevented from getting guns.
If only these killings were treated as political acts more than personal grievances, then maybe Americans might take a harder look at themselves and at the many social and political forces that motivate a Cho, a Klebold, a Whitman, and maybe then too Americans might not see themselves as so goddamn special, so unique, so above and apart in circumstance from their brethren in Iraq, in Indonesia, in Chechnya and in so many other places around the world. As so different from their suicidal brothers in arms.