Here's a depressing thing: I wasn't sure I should do a critique of the week about the Columbine High School massacre because there's a mass-murder-at-a-school critique up here already. But so be it. This trend is something that disturbs the hell out of me, and as long as kids continue to mow down their classmates en masse, well, I'll be doing critiques about it.
Except it's hard to know what to critique. I've been listening to media pundits wrestle with that one for a long time now. The race is on for something to blame, and most people are not finding anything that I would consider convincing or adequate as an explanation for evil on this scale. I heard that one high school in Denver has banned the wearing of trenchcoats, and that more high schools are considering adopting dress codes as a result of this phenomenon. If that doesn't scream "cosmetic solution" I don't know what does. But then so do all the other solutions. Gun control? Well, sure, it would help. It's true this particular duo was industrious enough to use homemade bombs as well, but it was the bullets that actually killed people. And given the eyewitness descriptions of the two murderers, who were apparently laughing and "having a great time" as they shot their classmates, I would suggest that if they hadn't been able to actually take the hardware into their hands and do the killing themselves, this whole mass-murder plan would have been vastly less attractive to them. But I can't go so far as to blame the presence of guns for the existence of two people who are able to laugh while they're shooting their peers.
The Internet? Please. It's true that people can certainly use the Internet for evil purposes, but we don't blame the post office for mail fraud. People who are interested in doing evil have always been able to find others who are interested in and capable of helping them out, whether it was on line or in a beer hall somewhere in Germany. We could shut down the whole Internet and people like these two kids would still be able to find guns and recipies for pipe bombs.
The cruelty of high school culture? OK, maybe. It's true that, as I pointed out in the Jonesboro critique, children and adolescents are mean to each other, and high school is a time of supreme narcissism for most teenagers. It's the peak period at which a person might not only be feeling intense rage and hatred toward a peer group that is making his life hell, but also be convinced enough of the fact that the world revolves around him and him only to be able to take out a dozen or so of his tormentors and feel nothing but joy and elation while doing it.
But I can't help feeling that something else is going on here. The police are investigating the question of whether these students had outside accomplices. Well, I don't know whether they'll find any actual humans who lent a hand. But I certainly do think these students had some outside help. This tragedy is distinctive in scope, but not in kind; that as shocked as we all are by the sheer scale of the murder, this is not something we haven't seen before. This is fast becoming an American story. This is not just about two psychos out for revenge. There is something else out there that makes this possible.
I teach literature that involves political violence, set in a community still divided by an actual civil war. If an event like this happened there, everyone would understand it as an act of war. Here, we don't see it that way. It's a tragedy, it's some kind of freak expression of a national neurosis, it's a sign of the decay of American values, it's all kinds of things. But nobody thinks of it as being about war.
I don't know. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that somehow, on some level beyond what can be consciously grasped or ideologically articulated, we are at war. I think about how often this kind of thing seems to be happening. I think about how in every instance I know of it has always been a white boy behind the gunsight. I think about how the Jonesboro students targeted girls, and the Columbine killers dressed themselves and their hatred up in neo-Nazi supremacist trappings. I think maybe we can start to see who's on which side. Or at least, who's on one side.
What turns someone into an angry white man? Two things: a sense of entitlement, and a sense of deprivation. The sense that you are being deprived of what is rightfully yours by virtue of your straight white maleness--by people who do not deserve that which they have taken from you, by virtue of their not being straight, white and/or male. And the knowledge that it is acceptable for you, because you are straight white and male, to make those non-straight non-white non-male people who have taken all of this from you pay for it.
The sense of entitlement goes way back past slavery to the original rationalization on which this country was founded. We had to believe that the white man was entitled to this continent and everything on it--because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to justify taking it away from the people who were already living there. Consequently most of American culture for most of America's history has worked to shore up the sometimes explicit, sometimes unstated presumption of white entitlement. We talk a lot about equality and liberty but in reality the presumption of white entitlement is absolutely foundational to our society, and if that presumption ever really changes there are a lot of other American institutions that are going to have to change too.
But as foundational as that premise is, capitalism is America's other foundational premise. And that's where the sense of deprivation comes from. White entitlement says that as a white man you should get what you want; capitalism says that if you are born into poverty you ain't gonna have that, whether you're white or not. So working from our twin foundational premises, we create these monsters, who are convinced that America promises them everything and enraged to discover that it has not delivered. And although these two premises work at cross purposes, the conjunction is sometimes convenient, in that when these angry white men are looking for someone to hurt, the premise of entitlement offers up those who happen not to be straight white men as plausible scapegoats and acceptable targets.
But then you go back to Columbine High School. Are these kids angry white men? Well, they're not old enough, for a start. They're sure angry and white. But if they did intentionally do this on Hitler's birthday, and if they are lackeys of one of America's many white supremacist movements, that in itself won't explain why they were targeting athletes. Hitler loved athletes, as long as they were white. There's only one thing that explains that: athletes are popular, these kids weren't.
Entitlement and deprivation--made worse by the kind of intellectual snobbery that bright misfits in high schools everywhere fall back on. You can look at Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment as the archetypal example--I'm brilliant, but I'm surrounded by morons who are richer, happier, and more popular than me, so somehow this means I have the right to commit murder. I can see what they were thinking. Here we are, a couple of really smart white kids, and we're being made miserable because instead of respecting our massive intellectual capacity these jackals run to lick the boots of a bunch of rock-stupid morons who are good at sports. We'll show them. And while we're at it, we'll go after students of color--because they too are eating our lunch, getting handed scholarships and jobs because of reverse-racist affirmative action policies when rightfully it should be we who have our pick of them.
Or maybe I’m making this too complicated. Maybe it's just that their desire to avenge themselves on the popular and the powerful came into conflict with the irrevocable fact that violence is only sanctioned when it moves from the top down. These kids made one attempt to hit people who were above them on the pecking order, and the devil allowed them to do it but only on the condition that they also hit downwards.
I just finished teaching one of Yeats's last plays and at the end of it he asks himself, thinking about a long-past military rebellion in Dublin, "What stood in the Post Office with Pearse and Connolly?" It's a question to which, twenty years earlier, he thought he might know the answer; by 1939 he's no longer sure. That question has been in my head since the shooting happened, only in a slightly different form. I don't know what stood in Columbine High School with Eric Harris and Dylan Kleebold. But sure as trees show you the wind, I can see something standing there. And we better find out what it is before it kills again.
P.S.: For a very intersting analysis of the role race plays in this phenomenon, see Tim Wise's excellent article on Alternet.org.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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