“Ax Ishmael”
by Jason GodeskyApparently, between the first shooting at Virginia Tech, but before his main rampage, Seung-Hui Cho mailed a box to NBC Studios in New York, filled with photos, 27 videos, and an 1,800 word manifesto that various news outlets have dismissed as “rambling,” “hate-filled” and a “diatribe.” It may well, of course, be all those things, but the mainstream media also has a track record of employing such words for propaganda of its own. The package had a return address of “A. Ishmael.” Later, Seung-Hui was found with the words “Ax Ishmael” written on his arm in red ink. The news is rife with speculation about what it means, and despite Seung-Hui’s religious Christian upbringing and his comparisons of himself to Jesus and Moses in his videos, or even Genesis 16:12 (”He [Ishmael] will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”), many of the reports continue to bring up Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael.
To their credit, the mainstream media has so far mentioned this theory only in passing, spending more time on the obvious religious, Christian intent of the pseudonym. Others have used it to fuel their Islamophobia. But online, as usual, things are a lot sketchier. Most refer to the Charleston Post & Courier article by Prentiss Findlay, which reports:
Dr. Larry Carlson, chairman of the English Department at the College of Charleston, recalled a novel, “Ishmael,” by Daniel Quinn, that Cho might have read while a Virginia Tech English major. …
Carlson said “Ishmael” has violent themes. “It’s a book about setting things right. If you have a student who is disturbed, about anything can happen,” he said. Carlson said “Ishmael” is not taught at the college.
“Ishmael” is about a disillusioned modern writer who answers a personal ad and thereby meets a wise, learned gorilla named Ishmael that can communicate telepathically, according to Publishers Weekly. Ishmael lays out a theory of what has gone wrong with human civilization and how to correct it, a theory based on the tenet that humanity belongs to the planet rather than vice versa, The Library Journal states.
It’s hard to tell if the fault lies with Prentiss, or Dr. Carlson, but to that Ishmael “has violent themes” is the kind of ridiculous statement one could make only by assiduously avoiding any actual reading of Ishmael. There are violent elements in primitivism—I’ve written against them before—but Daniel Quinn’s work is essentially the rallying point of the non-violent wing of primitivism. Hueng-Sui’s Christian upbringing introduced him to far more violent themes than he would find in Quinn. And where is the rest of the evidence for this? Where are the videos with Hueng-Sui talking about Takers or Leavers? Where does he mention the Thunderbolt? The Law of Life? Any of it at all, except the name?
Of course, a simple fact like that won’t stop online speculation from boiling over.
This story seems much more in line with Cho’s personna. And it also has the feature of the telepathic communication since we are learning Cho had speech problems and that is probably why he shied away from verbal interactions with people. Clearly the “Ishmael� personna is key to understanding Cho’s internal demons.
Update: There is a website with the domain “ishmael.com� interestingly enough dedicated to Daniel Quinn’s writings. It appears this site is under the direction of Quinn. Here is the site’s page on “Ishmael�. An excerpt from Amazon which has some interesting parallels to Cho’s manic writings.1
And worse still:
Cho talked a little about the “end times.” Ishmael begins at the beginning times, in Eden. Very, very interesting…I don’t believe this was about a jilted lover. He was like David Koresh, Jim Jones, and The Heaven’s Gate assembly. There may be much more to this.2
On the day of the shooting, Giuli made a short post in response to the media coverage, particularly the claims of how baffling this was, how they couldn’t understand why this had happened, and how this was the work of a monster. She titled it, “Listening to the Monsters,” and it merely juxtaposed Sueng-Hui’s actions against Quinn’s prediction in the chapter by the same name from Beyond Civilization:
It’s estimated that, since the days of my youth, depression among children has increased by 1000% and teen suicide by 300%. Since 1997, classroom-assassins have killed two in Mississippi, three in Kentucky, five in Arkansas, and thirteen in Colorado. Make a graph of these numbers and watch them go exponential in years to come—unless we start giving our kids a new way to go and some real hope for the future.
There’s the clearest proof that Sueng-Hui never read Ishmael: he has no idea why he’s as upset as he is. He blames rich kids, he rages against society, he knows something’s wrong, but he has no idea what it is. He has no hope for the future, and that’s what Ishmael is all about. As Ran Prieur put it:
For that matter, we shouldn’t trust Cho himself to honestly say or even know why he did it. There’s a famous line in an old Marlon Brando movie where someone asks him what he’s rebelling against, and Brando answers, “What have you got?” The truth is, the horrible wrongness of industrial civilization, especially the American variety, is very difficult to put into words. Even the people who suffer most from it are likely to misdiagnose it. Cho ranted against rich kids who had never felt pain, but he was covering up his own pain, which he shared with them but felt more strongly: the pain of isolation, of overwhelming social shallowness, of cutthroat status climbing, of biophobia in every sense, of never having anything real to fight for. I think he was angry because he wanted to make a prison break from this world of psychic pain to an easier world of physical pain, and none of the other prisoners wanted to join him… so he forced them.
Quinn predicted actions like Sueng-Hui’s would continue precisely because our society offers no real hope for the young. That’s what turned Sueng-Hui Cho into “Ax Ishmael,” a “wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” Ishmael is about ending the bellum omnium contra omnes, about how to no longer be at war with all our brothers and the whole world that gives us life. If “Ax Ishmael” had read Ishmael and taken it to heart, he wouldn’t have become “Ax Ishmael.”
Apparently, it’s no longer safe to name fictional characters after Biblical figures…
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 19 April 2007 @ 11:18 AM
Well, the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) put an obnoxiously twisted face on primitivism, and deliberately so by the media’s design. I’m not surprised to see the media continuing in that direction.
It’s probably for the best that Cho was never exposed to primitivism. With his psychological baggage, he probably would fallen in with the “Dr. Tiresome” crowd.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 19 April 2007 @ 11:47 AM
The Unabomber was undeniably a primitivist, and primitivism in general has a problem with violent madmen, but Sueng-Hui Cho and Daniel Quinn? The only connection here is the name “Ishmael,” and willfully ignoring the obvious connection to Sueng-Hui’s Christian background.
If we’d be talking about a reference to Zerzan, or even Jensen, I could understand, but Quinn? You don’t do something like this because you were inspired by Ishmael. At best, Ishmael led you to Green Anarchy, and you were inspired by Kaczynski.
I emailed Dr. Carlson this morning, asking for clarifications on his comments about Ishmael. Hopefully, we’ll hear what exactly he was thinking soon.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 12:30 PM
Dr. Carlson got back to me, and as I suspected, the mention of the “violent themes” in Ishmael had more to do with the reporter’s cursory internet search than the professor’s own comments. This happens a lot in the press, and I generally blame lazy journalists. He said that his statements were “garbled,” and that he mentioned Quinn’s work primarily to be complete in answering the question of possible literary bases for the pseudonym. He also said he was surprised to see the article’s emphasis on Ishmael, rather than the more obvious Biblical parallels.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 1:43 PM
All your empathy are belong to us.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 6:23 PM
Wow. I do hope this doesn’t catch on. Having a book even casually associated with something like this could quite conceivably prevent a number of otherwise open-minded people from reading it. As in:
A: You should really read this book Ishmael!
B: Err… Isn’t that what the Virginia Tech shooter was reading?…
As for the hypothetical reference to Zerzan or Jensen… Well, I’ve never read anything of Zerzan’s, but Derrick Jensen… I guess it is conceivable that someone might be ‘inspired’ by Derrick to do something monstrous like this, but the person would first have to completely and utterly distort everything that Derrick has ever said or written, and take in only the references to violence in Derrick’s work in their crudest possible form, with all intended context stripped off; and of course, the person would have to be really, really disturbed.
Oh, and: Welcome back! I’m very glad to be reading you again.
Comment by Hasha — 19 April 2007 @ 9:30 PM
Amen. Fortunately, it seems like most people are getting the Biblical reference. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of ignorant Islamophobes convinced he’s some jihadist, and they’re using it to trumpet their favorite cause of conquering the Muslim world, followed by forced conversions to Christianity.
Well, at least he talks about blowing things up. Dams, yeah, but it’s more than Quinn.
That part’s taken for granted, no?
Thanks.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 9:44 PM
Those people are retarded. Thanks for speaking out about this Jason. They may as well say it had something to do with his love of the movie Kingpin, where Randy Quaid plays an amish bowler named Ishmael. You know? BLAME ANYTHING ISHMAEL!!! Hahaha.
Comment by Urban Scout — 20 April 2007 @ 1:20 AM
theories, theories, theories…i hate mass media.
here is what we know:
Name: Cho Seung-hui. Leaving date: 19 August 1992. Reason for
departure: Relocation overseas.
When the record was filed, Cho was eight. He had done one year and one semester at Shinchang primary school in the suburbs of Seoul when his family decided to make a fresh start across the Pacific. Why they moved is unclear, but economic reasons played a part.
South Korea in 1992 was one of Asia’s tiger economies. But Cho’s
family were getting left behind. A year earlier they had moved out of their first-floor home to a gloomy basement flat a few hundred yards away.
Their landlady of the time, Im Pong-ae, told local reporters the
family had had money problems. She said the father, Cho Sung-tae, was never at home, the mother, Hyang Ai, was working as a cleaner in the houses of wealthier neighbours, and the children wore old, unfashionable clothes. “Before our contract was up they announced they were moving to the US … they want to make a new beginning,” Ms Im told the Chosun Ilbo.
“I remember the little boy being a very quiet kid. It is shocking that
he did such a thing,” Ms Im said.
*
The relocation can not have been easy. There were 47 students in Cho’s class when he left Shinchang. They studied Monday to Saturday but not one of the 25 hours in the weekly curriculum was devoted to English.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usguns/Story/0,,2060580,00.html
NOTE: Chantilly VA is in Fairfax County–second richest county in the U.S. and extremely fat on defense-related government contracts, not unlike Columbine, actually. you can find more on Wiki about the High School, and on American FactFinder:
FF County Median family income (in 2005 inflation-adjusted dollars) $110,107
FF County Owner-occupied homes–Median value (dollars) $517,600
the parents worked in a dry-cleaners…not unlike many Koreans in America they put 110% effort into financing an “American education” for their children, but the family was probably quite isolated here. one child graduated Princeton, the other…
Lucinda Roy, head of the English Department & tutor:
‘During those sessions, she said in an interview, he always wore
sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low. “He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,” she said.’
‘He also took a prescription medicine. Neither Mr. Aust nor Mr. Grewal knew what the medicine was for, but officials said prescription medications related to the treatment of psychological problems had
been found among Mr. Cho’s effects.’
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18gunman.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) - Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the
Washington suburbs, former classmates say.
Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore
attempts to strike up a conversation.
Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.
“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,’” Davids said.
*
Among the victims of the massacre were two other Westfield High graduates: Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson. Both young women graduated from the high school last year. Police said it is not clear whether
Cho singled them out.
Stephanie Roberts, 22, a fellow member of Cho’s graduating class at Westfield High, said she never witnessed anyone picking on Cho in high school.
“I just remember he was a shy kid who didn’t really want to talk to
anybody,” she said. “I guess a lot of people felt like maybe there was a language barrier.”
But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with Cho told her they recalled him getting picked on there.
“There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said Wednesday. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.”
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8OJPBU00&show_article=1&catnum=-1
are “monsters” born? or are they made? many children survive such horrors more or less intact, and do not break, do not turn their rage suddenly outward upon any and all around them. i do not seek to excuse Sueng’s actions, but he was born human, after all. by the time anyone tried to reach out to him, it was already far too late in his case.
(J & G–it’s nice to see you back in text, for those of us who do not do the whole podcasty lifestyle!)
Comment by patricia — 20 April 2007 @ 3:19 AM
[quote]are “monsters” born? or are they made?[/quote]
by and large, they’re made.
and it’s really no surprise that these events happen, which is why i get so upset with our media when they say things like “unimaginable”, “unfathomable”, and “impossible to predict”, because it’s none of those things, not to anyone who took the time to pay attention to him….
Comment by jhereg — 20 April 2007 @ 7:52 AM
Actually, the podcasts have been on hold, too–but they’ll also be back soon.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 April 2007 @ 9:18 AM
I will admit, the thought of Quinn’s book flashed briefly into my mind when I heard about this, but it came after the traditional meaning of the name.
I’m glad you did such a thorough takedown of the notion, it’s good information.
Comment by perianwyr — 20 April 2007 @ 12:45 PM
Perianwyr,
It is one thing for the book Ishmael to flash through your mind upon reading the report (it flashed through mine, too), and quite another to write an article alleging that the book may have ‘inspired’ Cho to do this. If your grandfather’s name was Ishmael, your first association upon reading about ‘Ax Ishmael’ would probably have been your grandfather; that doesn’t mean you would’ve speculated about the possibility of the old man’s somehow being in on this.
Comment by Hasha — 20 April 2007 @ 2:48 PM
Oh, I totally would. You don’t know Grandpa Ishmael like I do. He’s a crazy old muthafucka who’d kill you in a second. They never did find the bodies of the last kids who wouldn’t get off his lawn…
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 20 April 2007 @ 3:43 PM
Oh, I totally would. You don’t know Grandpa Ishmael like I do. He’s a crazy old muthafucka who’d kill you in a second. They never did find the bodies of the last kids who wouldn’t get off his lawn…
LOL!
Comment by Hasha — 20 April 2007 @ 4:18 PM
i agree that monsters are more made than born. one might have a propensity toward violence or chemical imbalances that make emotional outbursts difficult to control, and in that sense be born into the possibility of acting violently. but to make so many conscious decisions toward purchasing weaponry an ammunition, killing two people, mailing your manifesto and visual documentation to the news, and then going on to finish your planned scheme… it takes more than propensity to carry that out.
i worked for a year with adolescent sex offenders, many of whom had chemical imbalances, and even for those kids, often the imbalance was more brought on than inherited.
Comment by Rix — 20 April 2007 @ 5:53 PM
I believe we can all look forward to the day when the systematic killing of innocents is not the project of armed madmen, but of software, designed by enlighted and well-meaning computer programmers.
Comment by Chuck P — 21 April 2007 @ 3:29 PM
I’ve read that what was written on his arm was “Ismail Ax,” in reference to an Islamic figure.
Of course, it’s been conservatives peddling this story in their on-going effort to demonize everything Islamic. Here is a link:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=041807B
In the end, I think our media will focus on guns (too many or too little?), violent video games and everything else they can in their on-going effort not to look at the culture these people are being raised in. Cho wasn’t born a killer, but somehow through his experiences with our culture he was made one. No-one should be surprised by any of this.
Comment by Peter D — 21 April 2007 @ 3:32 PM
That’s how it was originally reported, but that appears to have been a mistake. Take a look at the return address: not much is clear in this picture except “hmael.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 April 2007 @ 10:44 AM
On the meaning of Ismail Ax, here’s a parlor trick. Do a search of blog postings before the horrible shooting of April 16th, 2007, at Virginia Tech for the word string “Ismail Ax”. On all the days prior to the mass murder in April, you’ll get a single blog result back: http://akhbarekhouzestan.blogfa.com/post-2.aspx
It’s an Arabic blog from November 2005, and a rough translation of the site (Systran) basically gets into something involving old Islamic parables.
So does this mean that the wingers posting up an “Islamic connection” for Cho’s murders are right? Almost certainly not. The presence of “Ismail Ax” on the akhbarekhouzestan blogsite from November 2005 is either (1) coincidence or (2) maybe in some distant way filtered into the troubled, violent mind of Cho, but almost certainly didn’t involve a “Muslim conversion” of any kind.
Maybe Cho in some perverse way was inspired by suicide bombers or by the ancient story of Ishmael and Isaac, Abraham, Hagar and Sarah (which the 2005 blog does seem to refer to).
But he wasn’t Muslim himself, and he certainly wasn’t “put up to this” like a Manchurian candidate. That’s just getting too much into the realm of X-files goofulating.
The ancient Biblical/Koranic story of Abraham/Isaac/Ishmael involves some very powerful themes that have been taken up in the literature of many countries– including in the USA by Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper, who incorporated characters with the name “Ishmael” in no small part as a reference to the ancient character. And an ax(e) did indeed figure prominently in the tale (been talked about at length elsewhere).
So the fact that akhbarkhouzestan mentioned it in a blogpost from 2005, and Cho took it as an apparent moniker, probably both stem from the power and significance of the original story itself.
Honestly, the news of these murders bummed me out even worse than other depressing mass murders recently that seem to occur with such painful frequency in the USA.
Besides my own VA Tech connections, just reading the biographies of those Virginia Tech students, professors and others who were murdered– it almost brought me to tears, thinking about the wasted potential and prospects of those people.
It also brought me to DETEST idiots like Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire, two right-wing nuts who faulted the VA Tech students for not pulling a “Die Hard” and rushing Cho when he was shooting or reloading. Do they really think, in the heat and uncertainty of that moment (not to mention the cramped quarters of the classroom where Cho did most of his killing) that anybody would have been able to bum rush Cho, especially considering that Cho had somehow achieved a quite terribly impressive technical mastery of the weapons he was wielding?
I hereby nominate those two jerks, Steyn and Derbyshire, for posting the most callous, asinine comments of the month on the Virginia Tech shootings.
And Steyn and Derbyshire are hereby referred to the local US military recruiting service, to be drafted immediately for duty in Ramadi, Iraq, without body armor, where they will have plenty of opportunities to demonstrate their purported “courage” against heavily armed dudes who really do hate and aim to kill them.
I’d bet a season’s worth of Lakers tickets that Steyn and Derbyshire would both be crapping in their pants at the first unholstering of a nearby weapon– an Iraqi insurgent’s or their own colleagues’.
I hope we never, ever speak ill of those people on the Tech campus. Both that school and the people therein deserve our utmost support at this time– we really are all Hokies now, at least in the immediacy of this terrible moment for the nation at large.
Comment by Jakob Walter Uhlen — 23 April 2007 @ 1:04 AM
Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael has the same origin—Ishmael, the first son ignored by his father in favor of his second son, is how the civilized world thinks about the relationship between nature and Abraham’s god. But it’s painfully obvious that Cho was referring to Abraham’s son, and not any of the later figures that drew on those themes. Of course, this continued speculation on the media’s part has everything to do with trying to shift the blame away from a crazed Christian nut, trying to fit him into the mold of the Unabomber (when arguing it refers to Quinn’s gorilla), or better still, a jihadist (by misspelling it as “Ismael”).
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 April 2007 @ 9:44 AM
I am surprised the Ishmael Sect of Islam hasn’t been mentioned anywhere, especially considering they were an order of assassins.
Weird.
Comment by Rory — 23 April 2007 @ 3:53 PM
That’s how it was originally reported, but that appears to have been a mistake. Take a look at the return address: not much is clear in this picture except “hmael.”
OK, thanks Jason.
I need to start checking my references
Comment by Peter D — 24 April 2007 @ 1:03 AM