The Cho Factor, Part XX

Winking at Hypocrisy

The Graduate — the 1967 movie that launched Dustin Hoffman’s career — is thought by many to be the greatest cult film of all time. The book was written by Charles Webb, a young, privileged suburbanite who based his novel on what he saw as the valueless, hypocritical lifestyle of his parents and their country club friends.

Webb not only dropped out of mainstream society, he and his wife (“Fred”) signed away all rights to The Graduate to charity. To the best of my knowledge, Webb, nearing the age of seventy, still lives a Bohemian lifestyle in a small town in England. Unfortunately, he is reported to be in dire financial straits.

In The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character, Ben Braddock, is a young man just out of college who has no ambition or sense of responsibility. His sexual liaison with suburban queen “Mrs. Robinson,” played by the beautiful and talented Ann Bancroft, was the central hypocrisy of the film. Not only was Mrs. Robinson a close friend of Ben’s parents, she was the mother of the girl (played by Katharine Ross) whom Ben coveted. It was pretty steamy stuff.

I believe that the main reason for The Graduate’s continued popularity is that we all know, in our hearts, that the story reflects real life. There is a litany of truths that we all understand but dare not speak. When we see hypocrisy, we have trained ourselves to mentally wink … and then go about our business. The last thing in the world we want to do is be banished from mainstream society.

Before moving on to specific examples of hypocrisy and how all this helps mold the mind-set of kids who end up shooting their classmates and teachers, let me make it clear that I am a hard-core capitalist. Not a conservative-type capitalist who believes in corporate welfare, “reasonable” government regulation, or “fair trade” policies.

I am a laissez-faire capitalist — meaning that I believe in total non-governmental interference in the marketplace. But this is only part of something much broader — my libertarian belief in total freedom. After all, laissez-faire capitalism is nothing more than economic freedom.

The reason I am taking the trouble to make this point is that a number of (apparently conservative) readers have already jumped the gun, gone ballistic on me, and unsubscribed. Too bad they didn’t hang around long enough to find out what I’m really getting at. To fully appreciate upcoming Cho Factor articles, I suggest you read my actual words … and not try to draw inferences that were not intended.

Again, this is not about so-called liberalism or conservatism. Forget about ideology and politics. What I’m after here is much more important — an understanding of what drives the Chos of the world to kill. We need to know why Seung-Hui Cho felt that his heart was vandalized, his soul raped, and his conscience torched. It seems clear to me that, in his own demented way, Cho knew what the rules of The Game were, but was not emotionally capable of accepting them.

The key to how The Game is played was clearly verbalized by Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine killers, whom Cho, certainly not by coincidence, quoted in his pre-death manifesto. The first step toward solving a problem is to understand it, and, with that in mind, in the next installment we’ll take a look at Klebold’s words and try to decipher what they mean.

Previous – Part XIX, The Good and Bad of Certitudes

Next – Part XXI, Intolerant Sheep