Digging in the Dirt

Earlier today, I listened to an interview between NBC's Chris Matthews and Karan Grewal, one of Cho Seung-Hui's apartment-mates. I was genuinely interested in what light Grewal could shed on the matters at hand, but unsurprisingly, Matthews was more interested in interrupting him, and pursuing his own agendas. Among other things, Matthews asked utterly irrelevant leading questions, in some kind of bizarre attempt to establish some kind of video game connection. I've provided a partial transcript, so you can see just how ridiculous this truly became:

Chris Matthews: Let me get into this video game thing. Do you know anything about Counter-Strike, as a video game?

Karan Grewal: Yes.

Chris Matthews: Was he into it?

Karan Grewal: But I, I never saw him play any videogames on his computer. Most of the time, like I said, he just WROTE on his computer. He had a word document open, and he just kept on typing away for... sometimes, you know, I'd see him typing at ten o'clock in the morning, and I'd come back at twelve, and he would still be there.

They go on to talk about some other things, but Matthews inexplicably feels that it's necessary to bring up Counter-Strike again, for no apparent reason:

Chris Matthews: Let me ask you about... You have... Is there any culture at Virginia Tech about video games? Anything that guys talk about like video games like this Counter-Strike game?

Karan Grewal: Well, there's a lot of, uh, tournaments that, that, uh, people do by themselves, but... uh, there's no formal club, uh...

Chris Matthews: [interrupting] But what about the informal? The sub... Is there a SUBCULTURE around video games?

Karan Grewal: Not really. Uh, people are... some people are interested in it, some are not. There's no big culture about any kind of violent games or anything, no.

Chris Matthews: [interrupting] Let me ask you about...

Karan Grewal: [finishing] Mostly sports, I would think.

Chris Matthews: Mostly sports. So, mostly, if you talked about stuff, you'd talk about basketball, and stuff like that.

Karan Grewal: Exactly.

What a pathetic fishing expedition, Mr. Matthews. When confronted with the ever-so-disappointing news that Cho was not a rabid video game addict, you were determined to beat that dead horse some more. As a card-carrying member of the dreaded video game subculture on the internet, I'd like to say, "Get a grip." Charles Joseph Whitman never played a single video game before picking up his gun. Sometimes, a psychotic is just a psychotic.