The world of any is not completely healthy. Actually, society has never been completely healthy, and Seng-Hui Cho follows a century-old tradition. But only in our time of warp consumption, where we consume things the instant they are conceived and immediately forget about them as soon as something new appears (fractions of a second later), could this tradition produce a 15-microseconds-of-famer.

I am pretty confident that you are not sure who Seng-Hui Cho is. Or rather, was. He died, by his own hand, on April 16 of last year. Together with 32 other people, also dead by his hand. Maybe now you remember – the tragic Virginia Tech massacre.

Here is one of the about 600 clips from youtube. I know you have seen this before. Everybody has. Virtually every TV station in the world aired it, no online news or magazine site failed to link to it.

Massacres, mass murders, killing sprees – tragedies following mankind throughout the ages, gaining publicity longer back in history than the word publicity has existed. But never before have they so totally eclipsed everything else in the global news flow and never before have they vaporized so quickly into oblivion.

Killers have turned into icons before, just like Seng-Hui Cho did. But previously, those who became icons were rather charismatic, and their stardom lasted (like Charles Manson). Totally lacking charisma, Seng-Hui Cho reached rock star status: with regard to attention, in everybody’s mind, and in the form of admiration in a shockingly huge amount of people’s minds (this scary fact is another story, that I have much more detail on for another occasion) .

But only for 15 microseconds.