Paul Bryant's Reviews > Columbine

What does it matter that two crazy teenagers shot 12 other teenagers and one teacher to death at a school somewhere in the American Midwest over ten years ago? It was just another school shooting and since then we have had Virginia Tech which accounted for nearly three times as many victims, didn’t it, not to mention any amount of death and catastrophe in places other than schools. Why should anyone want to write a book about this particular school shooting a decade down the line? Why should we waste one more thought on this loathsome pair Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? It’s a reasonable question and this book has a 400 page answer.

Eric was the driving force and Dylan (named after Thomas not Bob) was the depressive suicidal kid who was sucked into Eric’s mania. They planned the whole thing for a year. They called it “NBK” after the movie Natural Born Killers. Eric chose the date.

David Koresh’s Waco siege ended : 19 April 1993
Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing which was his revenge for Waco: 19 April 1995
Columbine : 20 April 1999. Ah yes, it was going to be on the 19th, but Eric screwed up getting the right quantities of ammo, so it had to be put back by a day.

In the 12 months before Judgement Day they wrote reams of journals, Eric had a website, they bragged about their plans to various pals who of course didn’t take it seriously, and starting on March 15th 1999 they made many videos of themselves acting out mass murder or explaining why they were going to do it, or apologising in advance to their parents. Eric described his parents as “the best” and said

“It fucking sucks to do this to them. They’re going to be put through hell.”

and he quoted Shakespeare on that point :

“Good wombs have borne bad sons.”

He also said:

“I’ve narrowed it down. It’s humans that I hate.”

and regarding the 1993 Brady Bill which had restricted the law on the sale of semiautomatics:

“Fuck you Brady! It’s not like I’m some psycho who would go on a shooting spree.”

and

“It’s kinda hard on me, these last few days. This is my last week on earth and they don’t know.”

But the overriding impression from these Basement Tapes (as they have been amusingly named) is one of glee – Eric and Dylan are so excited, they’re gagging for this huge one-performance-only production. They relish the greatness and horror they are about to unleash and express mild regret they won’t be around to enjoy everyone’s reactions or see the movie which will be made about it (that would be Gus Van Sant’s Elephant – sorry, Eric, not Spielberg after all.)

What did they actually want to do? Dave Cullen sorts through all the mountains of evidence and discovers that Columbine wasn’t – actually – a school shooting, it was a bombing which went wrong. Eric and Dylan had been making bombs using internet information. The two big ones were made out of propane gas canisters, and others were in Eric’s car (to divert the police). On 20th April they sauntered into the school cafeteria and dumped down the big backpacks containing the bombs with timers ticking. Then sauntered out. No one batted an eye. The bombs were supposed to blow up the whole school, then E&D would be outside picking off any fleeing students. Death toll : over 500. When Eric’s timing and detonation devices all failed – big disappointment of course – they stalked into the school and started shooting. But within 15 minutes they were bored with that. After the bloodbath in the library, they could have gone round and shot dozens more kids but they didn’t. They sauntered past rooms packed with terrified kids and didn’t glance inside. After half an hour of aimlessness, some potshots at the police outside, perhaps the real point of the whole thing was reached, and both of them blew their brains out.

And in their minds, that was : Cool.

When the shooting began the police made a number of assumptions and a lot of mistakes, some of which they can’t be blamed for – the mayhem and the students’ accounts as they fled made it seem like there was a whole team of gunmen inside the school. This crippled the police response. When the press got hold of the story a whole new series of assumptions erupted - for instance, that Eric and Dylan were loners. That they were unpopular. That they were waging a private war against a target (maybe jocks, maybe Christians, maybe the whole school). That they had horrendous family backgrounds. That they were Goths, or on drugs, or that there was some significant incident which had triggered the rampage. All wrong. Then there was an assumption that there was a conspiracy (the Trench Coat Mafia). It surely couldn’t have just been two kids did all this, there were more involved. The police spent months trying to solve this notional conspiracy. There wasn’t one. The media was flailing : 20/20 on ABC reported an unnamed police source saying “the boys may have been part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement and that some of these Goths may have killed before”. A few days later USA Today began their piece “Whatever these two young men in Colorado imagined themselves to be, they weren’t Goths.” No one knew anything.

Cullen’s simple solution to the why of it all is bathetic. He says Eric Harris was a psychopath, pure and simple, and this, dear friends, is the kind of thing some psychopaths do.

Well. If there is evil, psychopaths are its living breathing rock and rolling embodiment. Motiveless malignity, Coleridge’s phrase describing Iago, catches the horror but we, the unpsychopathic, really struggle hard with it – everything has a motive, surely, we are motive-seeking missiles of brain and spirit, we need reasons like we need food, a reason to learn the violin and a reason to shoot 13 other human beings. Motivelessness offends us. Is there motiveless benevolence? Yes, this is known as altruism. But doing good to others is seen as its own motive – to do good IS the motive, doesn’t need an ulterior. So is doing evil also its own motive and its own reward for some? Do they bask in the pain and misery they cause in just the same way that others might shout with joy and hug each other as another Haitian is pulled from another collapsed house? Then the pain and misery IS the motive.
The existence of psychopaths in our midst has already been addressed in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Children of the Damned, and all those other alien invasion movies in which the aliens look exactly like humans – we thought it was because the movie’s budget was so low they couldn’t afford impressive costumes, but in fact it was because aliens perfectly disguised as humans is the perfect metaphor for psycopathy – you can’t tell ‘em from normal people!
We can’t fill in the blanks. Why would the fascinated, excited contemplation of suicide and mass murder, eventually fused together into one super-cool entity called NBK, so delight the minds of Dylan and Eric that it crowded out all the usual teenage boy obsessions such as having sex with teenage girls or being in a rock band and then having sex with teenage girls? It drives us crazy so we lunge around – where did this evil come from? Why didn’t anyone notice it? Why didn’t anyone prevent it? Who can we blame? – not Eric and Dylan, they were just kids. (You can hear this argument again and again, every time a kid gets caught for something – the parent says “he’s not to blame, it was his bad friends that led him astray”). Let’s blame video games, violent movies, porn, drugs, the devil, goth culture, gun laws, school bullies (uh oh, Eric WAS the school bully so that doesn’t work), the parents. Ah yes, of course, the parents.
“It also appears that even the best parenting may be no match for a child born to be bad” (p241) – Cullen paraphrases Eric’s Shakespeare quote. This is so un-PC it explodes the whole thrust of child-centered theory and whatnot which has been trying to get away from the Victorian view that in a class of thirty children there will be one limb of Satan (hence the old insult “you young limb!”)
Psychopaths know just as well as we do that certain things are considered to be bad, so they try their best not to get caught. But they just don’t agree that these things actually are bad. They think they should be allowed to do whatever takes their fancy. They must be in a permanent state of irritation with the world and its puerile petty rules. A couple of psychopaths once lived in a world where there were absolutely no restraints because they themselves made up the rules. Bliss! These were the Roman Emperors Caligula and Heliogabalus, and we may read about their idea of fun in Gibbon’s dolorous history.

There are so many breathtaking side-stories in Cullen’s compelling, brilliantly organised book. Like Cassie Bernall, the Christian martyr who wasn’t, like the guy who made crosses for all the Columbine dead – 15 of them, one for D & E too (guess how long they stayed upright – 3 days). Like the lawsuits (naturellement) – turns out that Dylan’s parents had a home insurance policy which covered them for murder committed by their children. Like the discovery by a detective of Eric’s rampage fantasies in 1997 which Eric, as we know, published on his own website leading to the detective getting an affadavit for a search warrant for Eric’s house and how no one did anything about it, it was just kind of forgotten about, oops! - and how that major cock-up was covered up by county officials… on and on it goes.

In his last year, Eric was constantly badgered by his parents about getting his life on track, having a goal and sticking to it. He couldn’t tell them that he did indeed have a goal, and he was sticking to it, through thick and thin. And it was going to be so cool.

*********************

NOTE

I hope this isn't too creepy, but readers of this review may be interested in my review of Going Postal which continues the discussion of this subject. The author of that book explicitly criticises Dave Cullen, and in many ways Mark Ames' book is a necessary corrective to this one.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...