Draft.
- Marilyn Manson, "Cruci-Fiction In Space"
Ten days from now marks the decade anniversary of an event which ruptured the idyll tranquility of a small school on the outskirts of Little, Colorado. In the ensuing decade similar explosions of passion would erupt throughout the nation, although taking directions quite different from the one which found expression that day. And in the meantime the forces unleashed in Columbine High School would herald a shift in the perspective of a generation.
For, to the generation that grew up in the placid banality of post-Reagan America, where middle-class conformity is the iron rule of social law and American Presidents have ascended to the Godhead, enumerated in the pantheon of Western civilization, such an occurrence is little surprising. We grew up inundated with tales of the martyred Kennedies, and King; those of different political persuasions might look back on Wallace with the same regard. At any rate, the man in charge at the time was certainly only an ersatz Kennedy, a poor man's Kennedy, however much he might have aspired to be the real thing. Such was the nature of life in 1990's America. What was unique at Columbine, however, was the pronounced effect it had on the nation's attitudes towards its youth, and the moral panic it instigated against all things perceived to be out of the ordinary.
As for myself, I was quite young on April 20th, 1999 - ten, to be exact. I remember it quite well. I had sprained my wrist in a game of touch football and was on my way to the emergency room (overprotective soccer mothers was another facet of the American Way at the time) when I heard about the shooting on the news. Details were scarce in the immediate aftermath; a rumor had been circulating that the shooters had worn make-up of some kind, and that they'd cornered a girl in the school library and shot her for being a Christian - a myth later debunked, but one which doubtless helped the shattered community rally to demonize the killers further.
The news of others' pain is always the most effective painkiller one has. We get angry and lash out when we stub our toes, for instance, and this makes us feel better about the situation. For me it is no different, and on that day I listened intently to the waiting-room radio, possessed with a rather childish sense of
schadenfreude at the goings-on in the Empty Quarter.
Immediately obvious to me even then, if on a non-intellectual level, was the
drama of the shooting. If the killers - and at this point the police were rather sure that there was only two of them - were the villains, then there
must have been a hero to compensate. And there was: a star was born in the form of Cassie Bernall, the Nathan Hale of American fundamentalist Christianity. She, when asked by her diabolical assailants if she believed in God (the Judeo-Christian God, of course; villains are uninterested in persecuting heathens), Said Yes, and was martyred.
In the days and years since, of course, new light has been shed disproving this assertion. A student named
Valeen Schnurr has henceforth come to light and claimed that
she was asked that question, and was spared. Moreover, Emily Wyant, the sole Columbine survivor to witness Bernall's murder,
told Salon magazine that such an exchange never took place, that, in fact, Cassie Bernall had merely been praying when shooter Dylan Klebold executed her.
But truth and desire are frequently at loggerheads in the collective mentality of the mob, and certainly so in this instance. Cassie became an overnight celebrity amongst the rank-and-file of the American fundamentalist movement, beginning with a clever bit of aggrandizement on the part of her mother with the publication of a book,
She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall (ISBN 0-7434-0052-6) in September of that year, not six months after the attack. News of her sacrifice quickly spread throughout the nation, culminating in a 2000 hearing on
Youth Culture and Violence before the House Committee on the Judiciary, in which Donna Hearne, executive director of the arch-conservative Constitutional Coalition, said of Ms. Bernall:
Like all collectivists, Mrs. Hearne would go on to lambaste what she perceived to be the degradation of American culture through individualism as the root cause of the massacre:
Such a conclusion - that the killer's motivations were formed as the result of a societal loosening of moral strictures, facilitated through the media and the educational system - is the only one logically tenable from Mrs. Hearne's foundational premise: that individuals are the products of a society, and not of psychological impulses and drives; that human beings are molded and sculpted from sociological clay; that a man's destiny lays, not in his own hands, but on a social assembly line, where it is stamped by the media and cut into shape by the schools. Harris and Klebold, if we follow this line of reasoning to its core, were in fact
not responsible for their rampage - hence, according to Mr. Hearne's own reasoning, they are not ethically liable,
either in this life or the next (I presume that such a conclusion would have stopped her in her intellectual tracks). Her own absolutism - the belief that morality exists as an interpersonal, social force, and that society has a duty to maintain this untenable web of valuation - actively undermines itself.
