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Mo Rocca has appeared on a bunch of shows, including 'The Daily Show,' 'I Love the 80s,'...

How Cho Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"His name was R.P. McMurphy. They said he was crazy." I still remember the trailer for the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And the movie was even better, one of the dozen of so truly great movies that Hollywood has produced in the last few decades. But now I realize that the message of the film--that insanity is nothing more than social nonconformity, and that attempts to institutionalize the insane are a form of fascism--is foolish and destructive. In fact, precisely this sort of thinking prevented the Virginia Tech shooter from being institutionalized. If that had happened, all those victims would be alive today. Even Cho could have gotten the help he surely needed.

I'm not saying Jack Nicholson, or even his character, is personally to blame. But the movie was part of a larger cultural movement pioneered by such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz. Foucault is dead but Szasz remains a kind of libertarian hero. These gurus have gone much to establish the notion that "social deviancy" is mostly harmless and should not result in confinement against one's will. In the 1980s, you may recall, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups filed lawsuits that forced asylums to open their doors and let the lunatics out. They weren't crazy, you see, they were merely unconventional. And to hold them against their will! What about their constitutional rights? In Washington DC I would pass homeless people every day who had a dazed look in their eye and didn't seem to know which planet they were living on. Even as I handed them a dollar, I knew that what they needed was treatment, and this they were not getting, courtesy of our constitutional guardians at the ACLU.

The question to ask in connection with the Virginia Tech tragedy is, quite simply, why was Cho not committed? Pediatrician Jonathan Kellerman asks this question in the April 23 issue of the Wall Street Journal and comes up with the right answer. "No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did," Kellerman writes. From what we know Cho showed all the signs of "a fulminating, serious mental disease." Despite this, "Minimal care wasn't given." The reason? "The shooter didn't want it and no one tried to force him to get it." On one occasion in December 2005 he was sent to a behavioral health center, but he was out the same day.

Kellerman concedes that, yes there is a danger of making a mistake but "if the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would have been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might even have learned to be more polite." Instead Cho's civil liberties were assiduously protected, and more than 30 people are dead. I don't think I'll see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in quite the same way again.

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Mo Rocca appears on a bunch of shows, including CBS News Sunday Morning (with the indescribably wonderful Charles Osgood), The Tonight Show on NBC, and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He's a sometime judge on Iron Chef and was featured on Telemundo's Amore Descarado. Last year he starred on Broadway in the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. His expose "All the President's Pets" was published by Crown in 2004.



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News Bloggers

Mo Rocca appears on a bunch of shows, including CBS News Sunday Morning (with the indescribably wonderful Charles Osgood), The Tonight Show on NBC, and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He's a sometime judge on Iron Chef and was featured on Telemundo's Amore Descarado. Last year he starred on Broadway in the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. His expose "All the President's Pets" was published by Crown in 2004.

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