Empty lessons: going to lunch on the ruins - the Columbine High School shootings

Reason, July, 1999 by Jesse Walker

Some pundits attacked goths; others took on trench coats; still others, the abolition of school prayer. Tipper Gore called for more therapy. George Will called for school uniforms. Camille Paglia blamed the nuclear family and the industrial revolution. Screenwriter Stephen Schiff blamed shopping malls.

In fact, anyone with an agenda found that, with enough effort, he could find a way to tie his wagon to the Littleton massacre. The Libertarian Party sent out a press release: "Public schools may be a contributing factor in the recent spate of school shootings..." From the privatizers to the proletarians: The People's Tribune, newspaper of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, blamed the shootings on capitalism. "Our youth see what the future holds for them," wrote the revolutionaries. "They know that a society based on a market economy holds them valueless."

The hubbub reached its low point on April 28, when The Washington Post's film critic, Stephen Hunter, decided the dreadful force responsible for the deaths was...irony. After a labored analysis of The Basketball Diaries, Hunter made his point: "Jim Carroll writes a book that becomes a movie; he and everyone between him and the end user gets that it's ironic. The end user doesn't. His name is Eric Harris. The results are tragic....[U]ntil the irony-addicted and the irony-impaired begin to speak the same language and make an attempt to understand each other, it seems unlikely that there will be any healing - and there may even be a lot more killing."

The Littleton murders weren't just terrible. They were mysterious. My pacifist friends have wondered why there have been so few comparisons between the violence in the Balkans and the violence in Colorado. Surely, they say, both are mass slaughter. They have a point, but they're also missing something important. When Serbs slaughter Kosovars or NATO slaughters Serbs, one can at least discern reasons for the butchery, even if those rationales are amoral and offensive. The massacre at Columbine does not yield to such explanations. It hangs in the air, a mystery that can never be completely solved.

And never should be solved. Human beings are ciphers, capable of terrible acts. When someone does something this awful, and this unusual, it does no good to pretend we can reduce it to any simple lesson.

In the weeks since the Littleton slaughter, we've learned that most of what the media initially told us about the Columbine killers wasn't true. They weren't Nazis. They weren't especially racist. They weren't necessarily Goths. They might not even have been members of the clique of outcasts called the Trench Coat Mafia, which, by the way, wasn't originally called the Trench Coat Mafia.

We do know that bullies routinely picked on Harris, Klebold, and others like them. We do know that such behavior goes on in most of the country's schools. But most outcasts do not take weapons to school and kill the people who tormented them. We don't know what it was inside Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that made them into the exceptions. And we never will.