Beat Them And They Will Understand

by Shelton Hull

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.