1341 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.
THE POET MARCHES ON
The tenth anniversary of the Columbine “shooting” is here and it really does seem like yesterday. Due to the work of journalist Dave Cullen, and others, anyone who wants it can have the truth: The incident was not the shooting spree of two outcast losers revenging perceived slights and abuse by jocks, teachers, popular kids, happy and well-adjusted Christians, blacks, or anyone else. It was a botched bombing, meant to emulate and surpass Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing. Harris and Klebold intended to demolish the school and kill as many people as possible, indiscriminately. Everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. They planned for a year. The “shooters” were teenage domestic terrorists. The shooting was just desultory, ad hoc havoc committed after their bombs failed to wreak the planned dammerung of destruction. Harris and Klebold failed. They meant to kill hundreds and only got thirteen, plus themselves.
The media mythologers of pop journalism got it completely wrong. We all got it wrong, in detail and overall. For an instance, Cassie Bernal, the 17 year old instant Christian martyr, who in the myth affirmed her faith in God before her nihilist inquisitor shot her to death, did no such thing. Valeen Schurr, who was shot but survived, got the loaded question, “Do you believe in God?” and answered “Yes.” However, a proper martyr has to die for her faith, so in the myth Bernal got Schurr’s line.
Harris and Klebold were neither of them members of the “Trench Coat Mafia.” They were not goths or gamer geeks; they weren’t lonely losers. Had friends. Went to the Prom. They were pretty normal. Outwardly. But for the purposes of myth evil must ideally be pure and entirely other. If the facts are inconvenient we tend to alter them towards the mythic ideal. Banal evil must be tarted up. The killer kids must be monsters rather than disturbingly average middleclass teens; their parents demonized for breeding the monsters; outgroups like the above mentioned “Mafia,” goths, and geeks stigmatized as the nests wherein these vipers grew ripe with venom, so that any kid that fit an outgroup profile was looked at suspiciously as a possible mass killer.
Ten years later, some people know better. Some. Myth is a survivor. A wave in the shallows propagates faster than a wave in deep water. Myth is the big wave crashing into the shallows. Hannah Arendt thought evil was flat and shallow, that it had no depth. Seems to me that stupidity, particularly moral stupidity, is out in the flats, in the shallows. Stupid propagates faster than thoughtful.
Harris and Klebold, pop-psychologized to a fair thee well, became ghosts, disembodied animus, boogies in a tale told to give shape and contained meaning to shapeless, uncontained fears. I participated in my own way in this collective endeavor. I wrote a poem (at Clarissa’s request) called Little Mother at Columbine, and it was duly published in Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse, and on my blog. I’m no longer satisfied with this poem, haven’t been for some time, long before I found out about the new assessment of the facts of the case. I really like bits and pieces of it, but as whole it doesn’t hold up–for me–but I’m just the poet and what do I know about it? There’s no irony intended in that last question, by the way. Here is the last bit:
Little mother cannot listen
to the sermon anymore,
its words are too heavy
to lift to her ears.
Such kind words bespeak
a kind of inattention,
a lack of feeling for this landscape
and its inhabiting spirits.
The sentimental journey
in signs and parables;
the ten commandments
in 12 easy steps;
hope, faith, and charity
filing for Chapter 13,
the greatest of these
is no virtue,
when you are trying
to pay attention,
and you can bet her life,
little mother is paying attention.
Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 