Minority Report
Beat Them And They Will Understand
WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 3:56 PM
This has been a terrible period for our country, especially for those who wear black trenchcoats. Lucky for the kids out there, summer is approaching, which means no more school and no more senseless killing. Not until August, at least. That gives us all time to settle back into our comfortable, oblivious lifestyles, to take our predigested news at face value and to assume, in the face of so much contradictory evidence, that America is okay. How can it not be? The stock market hovers near its all-time peak, so high that the kind of large Dow drops that once rendered the CNBC set positively apoplectic...Well, they still do, but it's just not the same.
Even I had begun to resume normal function in the wake of the Columbine snuff-a-thon. I had done so much praying that my rosary disintegrated in my hands sometime during the Columbine memorial service, and I was forced to substitute with Mardi Gras beads. Granted, I was asking God to please kill the satellite feed before any more weepy teens mounted the stage with an acoustic guitar, but my eyes were aimed Heavenward, and I did look sad, and that's the point. Grief. Large-scale, coast-to-coast grief that unites us all as a nation. As I sat at home, staring blankly at the television set and the horrifying scene that evolved upon it, I felt like I needed to think it away. If I could reduce the tragedy to nothing but a set of cultural equations that, when taken together, can explain right down to the tiniest sociological indicators why two fairly normal kids would go Full Metal Jacket on the senior class, perhaps then it would make sense. Maybe I could stop thinking of them as dead children, and start thinking of them as statistics, numbers to be manipulated for cuts of the budget and prestigious seats on the many conferences and commissions amassing to address the downward slope of adolescent morality. If anyone out there is reading this who's in charge of putting together such an event, you can keep your plane tickets and send me the cash instead, for I will say now what nobody else will (though I'm sure it may have crossed a few minds by now). The massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado was not preventable. It was simple evolution. It will happen again, and it will get much worse before it ever improves.
I have read all the headlines, sampled the empty, weightless prose of assbrained academics and syndicated propagandists, each with their own theories as to what flaws in our society led to Bulletfest [OE]99: Marilyn Manson, The Basketball Diaries, the internet, the separation of church and state, the NRA, marijuana, and who knows what else. While watching the computer-generated tragedy graphics, the screaming kids, the blood, the anchorscum looking so pious day after day, I began to develop my own ideas. The networks' ceaseless coverage of the Colorado carnage has been burned into my hard-drive of nightmare images to the point that all that registers is profound anticlimax. "Oh, come on, are they still talking about this?" I thought, before recalling that repetition is the backbone of democracy.
Nothing guarantees success in a majority-rule state better than aggressive thought control, and it is teenagers who are most susceptible to media influence. A teenager will believe anything that anyone tells them, as long as it's not their parents. The popular kids are the ones who have fully assimilated the values of the majority of their peers, whereas the nerds are the ones who, either through choice or bad luck, have not taken the easy route to social acceptance. The youthful assassins, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had the misfortune of being less than popular because they chose not to subscribe to the tastes of their peers. It's an old story, partly because we've been hearing it for weeks, but mainly because social dysfunction is as common to teenagers as is hair in new places. They must have found it very confusing that everything that felt right to them was wrong to the others. Daring to be individuals had gotten them nothing but derision and ridicule from those whose approval they craved the most. Having been rejected by the most immediate source of moral reinforcement, what else was there for them to do but rebel?
(Caution: McLuhanisms approaching!) The speed-up of information dispersal, facilitated by the expansion of oral, written and visual media to the point of saturation, has led to a systematic intensification of the stimuli that leads the potential consumer toward a particular product. Make no mistake, humans are little more than consumers and potential consumers; the stimuli is like bait on a hook, and each year the bait gets shinier, more lifelike, more real. Everything is more of what it was. Those traits that best influence perception are more overt so as to capture and maintain the audience's attention. So of course the reactions to such stimuli are going to be more intense. Values cannot be properly assimilated without active participation from the marks. The youthful assassins were driven by the scorn of their peers into a crisis of self-conception. Having lost control of their public and private image, they sought to reconstruct it according to what they had come to believe were the hallmarks of nonconformity in 1999 America: black clothes, guns, fascist flirtation, pidgin Deutsch. Their peers at Columbine High must have thought the Trenchcoat Mafia was so weird, and that's why they behaved in that way. Anything that implies a distinct identity, even if it's "Nazi poseur in black coat," is welcome within the delicate teenage psyche.
Of course, us older people, we who have lived through such phases ourselves, regard the youthful assassins as a couple of walking cliches, which they were. America is a cliche factory, where impressionable youth can build their personalities from the raw materials given to them by the mass media, at which point their individual values usually adapted from those of their parents, and thus highly vulnerable to usurpation are subordinated to the doctrines imposed by consumer culture. Empty calories and instant gratification, for the corporations, anyway. The human personality occurs at the intersection of actual self and idealized self, so by connecting the product to the latter, a free-thinking individual becomes a craven mark who exists only to buy the product, because the product is now a vital facet of their personality. This affects people of all ages, races and economic backgrounds, though it primarily manifests itself in so-called urban areas, where poverty and bad family structure exacerbate the hopeless feelings that are common to teenagers anyway, leaving the wide open to absorb the messages of, say, gangsta rap, which preaches violence and materialism almost as alternate religions. We're all used to black kids killing each other for stupid reasons, but this whole white-kid-goes-nuts-at-school thing is new. I've heard people ask why the children of affluent families would do what they did. Eric Harris drove a BMW that ended up filled with bombs that didn't go off. I'd guess that any high-schooler driving a BMW is headed for trouble of one kind or another. It demonstrates a clear understanding of the basic tenets of our material culture, and only reinforced the lessons learned from their peers through social stigmatization. "What you own is who you are" sets them up for commodification by those who would say "Buy this and be a rebel!"
Add to this the violence that is a hallmark of the American way of life. After the United States asserted its dominance in the world at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the second most evil action of the 20th century after the Holocaust, our leaders have invented reasons to bomb, shoot, invade, restore democracy, whatever, in country after country after country that had no hope of fighting back. The Columbine massacre happened in the midst of a war in Kosovo in which civilian deaths are shrugged off, except the four dead Chinese, and that's only because they have the bomb. The overwhelming message of the past half-century is that human life has no fundamental value, unless the dead people are somehow connected to the ruling elite in this country. Is it any wonder that Harris wanted to be a Marine? Sure, he was rejected because his prescription Luvox was not biologically compatible with miltary brainwashing techniques, but clearly he was cut out for the job. We could have sent those two to Kosovo, and all the refugees would be home by now.
It seems that Harris and Klebold may have been emulating Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Basketball Diaries, whose dream of redemption by shotgun is the closest approximation of the massacre that can be found in the cinema. Conservatives would love to establish a solid corollary between art and life, so that their arguments in opposition to certain types of art may appear more valid. I feel that art has the power to modify behavior, for better or for worse, by altering the morality of those who need something to believe in. But is censorship the only way to stop people from getting the wrong messages?
I've always thought that music, which predicates itself on a pseudo-realism that mirrors the lives of its fans, lent itself more to violent emulation than movies, which are so transparently false that only the truly depraved could see anything worthy of duplicating in real life. But then it occurs to me that movies, television, music, popular magazines and books, etc, probably exist only to incite emulation. All these Americans, trying to live like their favorite sitcom characters, working long hours at thankless jobs so as to afford the products that we've all been trained to want so desperately, all these idiots in line to see a movie that will be in theatres and videostores until Christ himself comes back to direct the sequel, all symptoms of the same disease that drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to kill a dozen of their least favorite people.
Shelton Hull (aka Archibald Bobo) has been writing professionally since 1995. He also does the column "Money Jungle" for FolioWeekly (Jacksonville). His work has appeared in places like Section 8 Magazine, Movement, CounterPunch, Lew Rockwell.com and the Florida Times-Union. He was a 2002 Fellow at the Academy of Alternative Journalism, AAN/Northwestern University. He works for himself.
