The Cho Show

Harry Shearer wrote today in the Huffington Post:

"So Mr. Cho gets his fifteen minutes. The question bewildering journalism observers--why'd he send his goodie bag to NBC News?--has an easy answer: it was in gratitude for their firing of Imus.

"Not so easy is the answer to the question: what is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing Cho's self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker? Cho's pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from -- in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read/see and parse them. Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time. A society in which it's easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live."

In the 1970s, when I was a good tree-hugger and even the Nixon administration had founded the Environmental Protection Agency, I bought a bunch of beautiful, healthy trees and shrubs for next to nothing from a retired postal employee, a man named Elmer Job, last name pronounced the same way as his Biblical counterpart. An old saw is "to have the patience of Job," which means to have patience abounding long after others have given up.

This gentle man had the patience of his namesake. You have to be patient to grow trees, I thought, planting the seeds, watering, feeding, sheltering from wind and frost. And you must wait.

But it takes no patience whatever to cut trees down, not with a well-sharpened, gasoline-fueled chain saw. I planted those shrubs and trees at the house where we lived then and watched them grow over the next five or so years. (Then every last one of them was cut down by subsequent owners, but that's another story.)

Just up the street, a couple of old ladies moved into a house with seven beautiful, healthy young maples. They promptly hired men to cut down all seven. They had a couple of picture windows in that house and they hastened to cover those windows with shades to keep out the sun. Twenty years of God's work, some would say, destroyed in one day.

The young gunman at Virginia Tech has "earned" his infamy, as did the Texas tower sniper, the black-trenchcoat teens at Columbine, the three little boys who wanted their mommies and teddy bears in jail after the schoolyard killings in Arkansas, the ... well, you know, the list, as we say, goes on and on.

They all did their atrocities in minutes.

How long does it take to grow a human being?

How long does it take to grow a sane, just, merciful, caring society?

Harry Shearer understated it: "A society in which it's easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live."

God have mercy on this world. Amen.