April 22, 2007

Cho wasn't the only violence-obsessed hack writer in his classroom

From my new VDARE.com column:


Ever since South Korean immigrant Cho Seung-hui gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech, there has been much comment that the university should have realized just from his two hate-filled and inept plays that the senior English major was a dangerous creep who needed to be taken away.

For a playwrighting class, Cho penned Mr. Brownstone and Richard McBeef (which, despite the Macbethian title, is a Hamlet-knock off about a young hero's lethal conflict with the new stepfather who murdered his real father). Richard McBeef includes such sterling dialogue as:


"I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick."


Many have asked: "How could the English Department not recognize the horrific implications of these works?"

That might seem like a puzzling question, however, to someone familiar with the poetic oeuvre of one of Cho's own teachers, Virginia Tech's "Univerity Distinguished Professor" of English and Black Studies, Nikki Giovanni.

Among the most celebrated figures of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and recipient of 21 honorary degrees, Giovanni has published poems strikingly similar to Cho's plays in both vileness and incompetence. For example:


The True Import of Present Dialog, Black vs. Negro
by Nikki Giovanni

Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a ni**er kill
Can a ni**er kill a honkie
Can a ni**er kill the Man
Can you kill ni**er
Huh? Ni**er can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
‘68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill
A ni**er can die
We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
[More]


Ironically, the author of these lines was asked to deliver the closing remarks at Virginia Tech's convocation memorializing the 32 slaughtered by Cho. For some reason, Giovanni didn't read aloud The True Import.

[More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

43 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!

Thanks, Steve -- that "we will prevail" chant she led made me want to puke. Glad to know my gut reaction to her was not misplaced!

Ron Guhname said...

Thanks Steve. A blow to the solar plexus of every race hustler and sympathizer.

Anonymous said...

It is perfectly fine to take Giovanni to task for her lack of literary talent, but I hope you only mean this tongue-in-cheek, and if so that your readers pick up on that. It was the administrators who were oblivious in dealing with Cho, not the English professors. Both Giovanni and another English professor realized that this student was seriously disturbed and tried to alert the right people.

Anonymous said...

Giovanni snuck in some anti-American agitiprop in her speech after the shootings. She claimed that we hurt no more than............and then gave a litany of leftist martyrs and causes, even mentioning elephants or some other animal being poached, and then concluded "they would (overcome, prevail, whatever)" because "we are Virgnia Tech" about four good times.

The speech sucked. I had a few professors a million and a half years ago when I was in college who were something like this. I doubted they could change the oil in their cars, and still do.

Anonymous said...

There are not too many black Americans with Italian surnames. (It turns out her dad is Italian and her mom is black.)

I'm glad you caught this.

C. Van Carter said...

If the Eldorado is only good for running down protestants why is it the girls turn the color of an avocado when I drive down the street in my Eldorado?

Her poetry reads like a ripoff of the great Tyrone Green:

Dark and lonely on a summer night,
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

Watchdog barking, do he bite?
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

Slip in his window, break his neck,
Then his house I start to wreck.

Got no reason, what the heck!
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord

C-I-L-L,
My landlord.
---

Regarding Cho, am the only one who thinks his parents hired a ringer to take the SAT for him? Someone should ask them.

Garland said...

"If the Eldorado is only good for running down protestants why is it the girls turn the color of an avocado when I drive down the street in my Eldorado?"

More to the point, why, when you are only five-foot-three, are girls unable to resist your stare?

Anonymous said...

Steve, you're smarter than this. There's clearly a difference between cliched violent political rhetoric, however stupid and hateful it may be, and the full fledged psychotic rantings of Cho. Be serious.

Garland said...

From “Ego-tripping”:

I am so hip even my errors are correct

Who says she has nothing to say about the African-American experience?

Garland said...

Also, come on: “My bowels deliver uranium.” That’s just a great line whatever your politics.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said... "It is perfectly fine to take Giovanni to task for her lack of literary talent"

The issue isn't this particular black bigot's lack of literary talent.

The issue is that this black racist and hater doesn't belong at this or any other university, she doesn't deserve to be given an opportunity to make a speech after the massacre and she should have been called out on her ugly, racist filth a long time ago.

And she lacks literary talent.

James said...

She looks friendly.

Anonymous said...

I had a few professors a million and a half years ago when I was in college who were something like this. I doubted they could change the oil in their cars, and still do.
Ah, but can your auto mechanic write poetry?

OK, I will completely admit the arts are in a really awful state these days when agitprop substitutes for poetry.

Anonymous said...

Like everyone else I have my own half assed theory about spree murders.

These spree murders do seem to have kicked off in the early 1980s, around the same time that political assassinations petered out. Perhaps 30 years ago people with sociopathic tendancies could fulfil their anti social desires by engaging in radical politics.

This would mean that they would mostly be diverted from committing any murders and would drift into academia once they reached middle age. I'm not saying that Giovanni would be the sort of person to commit a massacre but she might well have been a groupie for the sort of person who might have done.

Anonymous said...

This is clearly awful poetry, but are we supposed to assume Giovanni's views are synonymous with those of the speaker? In the original context perhaps it was meant to be parodic of a certain point of view. (The other examples Steve provides do seem to make this unlikely, however.)
The first anonymous is also right that Giovanni was deeply disturbed by Cho and kicked him out of her class. She may have been a hypocrite in doing so, but in this case better a prescient hypocrite like her than an oblivious decent person like the administration.

Anonymous said...

Also, as awful as her speech and chant were, at least she did seem to have genuine Virginia Tech school spirit, unlike so many race hustlers who have contempt for white institutions even after they've conquered them.

Anonymous said...

Uh, yeah. Let's not talk about the Asian lunatic who killed 32 people.

Instead, let's badmouth one of the few professors who took action when she saw that said individual really was a loon.

She is black, after all, at least half (and it only takes a little to make them evil, right?). She said harsh things about white people, and white people never did "anything" to deserve it.

Your racialist ideology has blinded you to basic common sense. In spite of what other posters suggest, you are NOT smarter than this. Good luck w/ your nutjob crusade.

Anonymous said...

Adding the school chant at the end of her speech seems like a cynical ploy to garner cheers.

She had a paragraph that was pure leftist nonsense. A baby elephant "watching" its "community" destroyed?

Then she includes the VT sports theme at the end so everyone will cheer and she can act like they were cheering the bullshit content of her idiot rant.

Anonymous said...

Steve, you're smarter than this. There's clearly a difference between cliched violent political rhetoric, however stupid and hateful it may be, and the full fledged psychotic rantings of Cho.

Do you understand what an analogy is?

Anonymous said...

this is a fucking joke. Some people certainly aren't racist. You are, you dumb fucking cunt.

Anonymous said...

Have to admit,while I had a good laugh at the odious Nikki G.,I didnt quite get what that has to do with her rotten poetry. But then I thought,Nikki may have gutlessly tried to influence younger,more male,less bright,darker negroes to engage in violence (as the scum bag libbies,dykes,womens studies pigs,etc. tried to do at Duke against the Lacrosse guys...),so she is certainly not the one who should be delivering the address. After all she is NOT a deranged psycho;but she is/was a pretty nasty character. Hmmm...I wonder if she wrote a book about searching for her African mother??

Anonymous said...

I noticed she went after Jews and Protestants in her poem. Can we assume she didn't mention Catholics also because her father was Italian?

Anonymous said...

I suspect some of you are missing Steve's point. I think Steve is basically asking you imagine what faculty might have made and should have made of Giovanni's poem if it had been penned by a student instead. Isn't that poem as violent and disturbed as Cho's Mr. Brownstone or Richard McBeef plays?

Exit question: is Giovanni yet another half-black who needs to prove her street credentials by acting "ultra-black?"

Anonymous said...

you, sir, are an idiot.

your anti-professor anti-college bullshit is really wearing thin.

Anonymous said...

No I don't think Giovanni's mixed-race heritage has led her to embrace the thug life, racial violence and bigotry, advocating murder etc. (just like Cho).

It is instead IMHO the bankruptcy, intellectual, moral, and creatively that happened to the African-American community after the end of segregation and the attempt to impose racial and cultural separation.

You read stuff by the Harlem Renaissance authors like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and it's miles away from this derivative junk. Those guys had plenty of resentment towards racism (and real, lynching like racism) but considered themselves Americans first and foremost and wanted larger success and acceptance from America.

That is because IMHO the separatist impulse has cut off African-Americans from the wider cultural sources that provide fodder for re-working or re-inventing to achieve something interesting and fun. All that is left is pseudo-Marxist violent fantasies that are as empty and dead-end as the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Anonymous said...

I also wonder how much some professors' ideology is responsible for the deaths.

In my college days I took some classes with leftists who just hated everyone and made it clear that certain people's deaths would not be a bad thing.

Of course, the guy was crazy, but it seems to me the evidence is that his instructors might have exacerbated the situation and do share some responsibility.

Here's someone else with a similar point.

Anonymous said...

vanya,

Nikki Giovanni either doesn't believe the hate filled bile she writes, in which case she is guilty of bad faith, or she does believe it, in which case she is unhinged and her work amounts to "full fledged psychotic ranting(s)," just like Cho's.

Anonymous said...

From that article:

"There’s little doubt that Cho, a mentally disturbed kid, had been exposed to the “social justice” and “class strife” rhetoric in school. These teachings are a near mandatory supplement served to most American kids, explicitly or implicitly, courtesy of public education. Once in college the intake of the “progressive” formula only tends to increase, involving heavy doses of every grievance man, woman, or beast has ever had from the beginning of time, factual or imaginary. All this is served up under the generic label of “social sciences.” So when a young student’s budding paranoia begins to torment him with phantoms of horrific social injustice, prompting him to shoot indiscriminately at the dehumanized mass of “rich kids” while imagining himself a heroic avenger of the oppressed victims, is it really the fault of the National Rifle Association?"

Anonymous said...

His profs have blood on their hands and are proud of it.

Anonymous said...

Pffft. Cho's murdering spree had nothing to do with oppression studies. The New Left's awful soft on the rich, who were the ones Cho hated if I recall correctly. It's the standard revolt of the frustrated loser.

Anonymous said...

Nearly 140 years later, has there been a better satire of revolutionary personality types than Dostoevsky's The Devils?

Anonymous said...

Am I the only one who thought "Richard McBeef" was sort of funny? Oh, well.

The reason she asked Cho to leave the class was because girls complained that he was taking photos of them under his desk.

Anonymous said...

I actually think most students get very little indoctrination about "class strife" in high school. Most teachers do believe in higher taxes for the rich, expensive social programs, etc., but if you mean honest-to-goodness violent class strife, that has long since taken a back seat on the Left to issues of race and sex. Now in college, he probably did get some of that, but still less than he would have a few decades ago.

Anonymous said...

From VT's website under Giovanni's research interests, which speaks for her faux race scholarship:
"The recognition of Middle Passage as our porthole to prolonged space travel is a unique way to understand both slavery and space which I explore in Quilting the Black Eyed Pea.... My primary interest is the evolution of Black America and the impact of that evolving upon Earth.... I am in search of Darwin by land and sea to put together my theory of luck and happenstance. If luck and happenstance are factors, then responsibility has to change."

Nuff said.
Dick

Anonymous said...

Ironically VT is not a haven for rich kids. It's mostly middle and working class.

Rich kids would have gone to Duke (far less so now of course), or UNC, or far more likely University of Virginia. Or Vandy, Emory, and possibly SMU.

All have bigger "names" and a bigger rep and a bigger alumni base.

For rich substitute "white" and you see the racial agendas and fears.

Anonymous said...

This is the true reason to oppose the white nationalists. Because then we'll have useless white studies departments, alongside useless black studies departments.

"My research is on interpreting NASCAR racing as an allegory for the class struggle which grinds down Persons Sans Color as they eke out a grim existence working at Wal-Mart and paying off their trailer."

Anonymous said...

I sold a black man named Giovanni a beat up Cadillac several years ago. I was going to part it out, but he offered $800 for it. A year later I saw it on the road, pimped out to the max. I think he used the same Schwinn bicycle paint Eddie Van Halen used on his homemade guitars.

Maybe he was related.

It was one of those made with the piece of shit 4100 V8. Someone put a Buick engine in it, before I got it.

Unknown said...

This is the true reason to oppose the white nationalists. Because then we'll have useless white studies departments, alongside useless black studies departments.

Lol, shouldn't that read "multiculturalists," not "white nationalists? Can a whole joke be a Freudian slip?

Love how "anti-racists" are so free with the anti-white ethnic slurs. Love 'em folks, keep 'em up!

Anonymous said...

Nikki might feel that that actor who made the movie starring as a school shooter

Anonymous said...

Svigor:

Identity politics created black studies, womens' studies, queer studies, etc. In my cynical moments, I imagine that white identity politics will likewise, in our environment, create white studies departments. And just as with black studies, this will become an interest group thing--the white lobby fighting to get an expanded white studies department, so that it can demonstrate to its constituents how much it's winning on their behalf.

You can say that whites don't need the boost, but neither do any of those other groups. The need is entirely based on politics--a need by the university to show how tolerant and broadminded and unprejudiced it is, and a need by the racial/gay/feminist lobby to demonstrate a gain for their side.

The NASCAR, Wal-mart, and trailer comments are about class, not race, of course. Shitty, but socially acceptable--about like spouting off about n--rs in most of the US in the 50s.

John C. Hathaway said...

"Vanya,"
Smarter than what? What is the difference between Cho and Nikki Giovanni or Quentin Tarentino or Bruce Willis, for that matter?

The liberals produce all kinds of filth, pollute people's minds with it, say it doesn't matter, and then, when the images they promote are put into reality by mentally unstable kids, they feign shock.

As for "Anonymous" and his/her straw man about being "anti-professor," I for one hate the bad name that people like Giovanni (and, black or white, male or female, they are a dime a dozen in today's universities) give to academia.

Being a "professor" is about "professing" something, preferably something good, preferably the great ideals of the Liberal Arts, which are the foundation stones of philosophy, which is the handmaiden of theology. Without that framework, there is no point to education at all.

Unknown said...

Other ethnically active groups (jews, blacks, mestizos) do not, because they depend on whites.

Sorry, edited in that part about the Taylor camp and didn't account for how it impacted the next paragraph; I mean to say that said groups do not pursue separatism, because they depend on whites.

Anonymous said...

ALI G: Booyakasha, chek i’ out. I is here wif my main man, Nikki G, my bro from Staines. How is you become poet?
NIKKI G: We’re communicators, it’s in our blood.
ALI G: Blood, West Side. Now sis, you, I mean, sorry you is my bro now, you is get some edumacation. You went to America, right?
NIKKI G: I went to Fisk.
ALI G: Tell me about how you is expelled for crack…
NIKKI G: It wasn’t for smoking crack. I began school in 1960, was soon expelled, returned, and graduated in 1968. I did enroll and quickly drop out of two other schools after that, but I completed that one degree, my bachelor’s degree.
ALI G: Wha’eve. You is still my main main, big shout out for poet Nikki G from VT.