Return To Columbine
By Stephen Amidon April 7, 2009
Columbine By Dave Cullen. Twelve, 417pp., $26.99.
The massacre at Columbine High School, whose 10th anniversary falls this month, remains the archetypal school shooting, even though its body count has since been surpassed by the horrific 2007 slaughter at Virginia Tech and two bloody incidents in Germany. Indeed, the slaying of 12 students and a teacher by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold is etched so deeply in the public imagination that the event is now referred to simply as “Columbine.” This mythical status has its roots in the way the killings were covered by the media, whose feverish speculation in the hours following the attack quickly became accepted as the gospel truth. Just about anyone within earshot of a television on that April day could feel as if they understood what happened: Two habitually bullied, sexually confused members of an occult teen gang, fed on a diet of violent video games and Marilyn Manson, took revenge by targeting their jock tormentors. Harris and Klebold were the dark agents of a youth culture run amok. And they could re-emerge at any time or place. One of the virtues of Columbine, Dave Cullen’s gripping study of the massacre, is the way it defuses many of these myths. Mr. Cullen, a veteran reporter on the event whose work has appeared in the The Denver Post and Salon.com, maintains that the killers were very different creatures from those presented by a superficial media. For instance, although early conjecture pegged Harris and Klebold as members of the Trench Coat Mafia, a gothlike gang of spooky outcasts, this was simply not the case; both boys were a lot more integrated into the high school’s byzantine social structure than many believe, as indicated by the fact that Klebold attended the prom just three days before the spree. “‘Outcast’ was a matter of perception,” Mr. Cullen asserts. “Kids who slapped that label on Eric and Dylan meant the boys rejected the preppy model, but so did hundreds of other kids at the school. Eric and Dylan had very active social calendars, and far more friends than the average adolescent. They fit in with a whole thriving subculture. Their friends respected one another and ridiculed the conformity of the vanilla wafers looking down on them. They had no desire to emulate the jocks. Could there be a faster route to boredom?” There is also, according to Mr. Cullen, no proof that the spree was a reaction to bullying. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the boys were bullies themselves, tormenting younger students; Harris waged a one-man crusade of intimidation against a former friend that was so intense it caused the boy’s parents to file numerous complaints with the local sheriff’s office. (These complaints, never properly dealt with, are an important part of Mr. Cullen’s charges of incompetence against local police.) The common belief that Harris and Klebold sought revenge for bullying is further belied by the fact that their attack was never intended to feature a series of carefully targeted shootings. Instead, it was supposed to begin with the detonation of two large propane tanks in the middle of the packed cafeteria, which would have caused dozens, perhaps hundreds, of deaths. Guns were only brought along for a subsequent mopping-up operation. Their targets were not jocks or preppies or Christians or minorities, but everyone, from the football captains to Dylan’s prom date, from the principal to janitors. “It had not really been intended as a shooting at all,” Mr. Cullen asserts. “Primarily, it had been a bombing that failed. … The media never shook it off. They saw what happened at Columbine as a shooting and the killers as outcasts targeting jocks. They filtered every new development through that lens.” Another myth Mr. Cullen dispels is that the rampage stemmed from failings in the killers’ respective families. Polls conducted after the attack would name the parents as the chief culprits. “They dwarfed all other causes, blamed by 85 percent of the population in a Gallup poll. They had the additional advantage of being alive, to be pursued.” The author draws a very different picture. It will be difficult for any reader, especially those who are parents of teens, not to sympathize with Wayne Harris’ diligent attempts to discipline his unmanageable son, or the Klebolds’ efforts to deal with their boy’s crushing depression. These were not latchkey kids left to rot in basement rec rooms. They were the products of loving nuclear families. And still they slaughtered.
One more fable that Mr. Cullen deconstructs is that of Cassie Bernall, the born-again Christian girl who was murdered after she supposedly answered “yes” when a mocking Harris asked if she believed in God. It turns out that Bernall said nothing at all before her death, and that the exchange, which spawned a best-selling book and countless youth rallies, was an erroneous version of something said by another victim. It speaks volumes about the cynical nature of a fanatical section of the evangelical movement, some of whose members saw the massacre as a ripe recruiting opportunity, that it would continue to hype Bernall’s myth in the face of overwhelmingly contrary evidence, as if getting shot in the back of the head by a boy wearing a T-shirt that says “Natural Selection” was not martyrdom enough
TO HIS CREDIT, Mr. Cullen does not simply tear down Columbine’s legends. He also convincingly explains what really sparked that murderous rage. He labels Harris, the duo’s alpha male, as a classic psychopath, a functioning human being completely lacking in conscience, empathy or emotional nuance. It is a condition that is not caused by trauma or environment, but rather is hard-wired into the psyche. Think of Shakespeare’s Iago, operating with what Coleridge termed “motiveless malignity.” Harris “loved explosions, actively hated inferiors, and passively hoped for human extinction.” He was “a dreamer, but he liked them ugly: bleak and morose, yet boring as hell. He saw beauty in the void. Eric dreamed of a world where nothing ever happened. A world where the rest of us had been removed.” As for Klebold, his problems were less flamboyant but equally grave. He was a suicidal depressive who probably would have limited his death toll to one—himself—had he not known Harris. “Dylan Klebold was not a man of action. He was conscripted by a boy who was.” Combined, these two personalities proved as combustible as the nitric and sulfuric acids that form nitroglycerine.
Perhaps the most disquieting moment in this beautifully written but deeply haunting book comes in Mr. Cullen’s description of the eerily quiet period that fell between the horrific slaughter in the school’s library and the killers’ joint suicides. For nearly half an hour, Harris and Klebold wandered the halls, their shoulders slumped dejectedly as they ignored possible victims and took pot shots at the big bombs they understood would never blow. They seemed to be looking for something more than the blood they had just spilled, something that would quench the dark impulses that had brought them to this hell. They were, perhaps, searching for meaning, even solace, in their catastrophic nihilism. When they realized there was none to be had, there was nothing left to do but turn their weapons on themselves.
From The Sunday Times
March 15, 2009
North Carolina: the USA’s New South
Trendy cities, millionaire’s mansions, Highland Games, mighty fine pubs: the Blue Ridge Mountains is full of surprises (Super Stock) Stephen Amidon We’d been speaking with the two men for several minutes before anyone mentioned their great dane’s pink toenail polish. Its owners were very much a couple. One carried the Sunday New York Times; the other wore a cravat. We’d stopped to ask them if they knew a good place to eat, as the surrounding neighbourhood contained a dizzying array of restaurants, including a Cajun place with a bloody-mary bar, a bistro that featured “French comfort food” and a likely-looking Thai establishment. “Why is your dog wearing pink nail polish?” one of my nine-year-old twin daughters finally asked. “Well, we tried magenta,” the man with the cravat deadpanned, “but it just wasn’t him.” No, we were not in Greenwich Village or San Francisco, but rather in Asheville, North Carolina, nestled in the heart of Appalachia. And we’d arrived just in time. After two days in Dixie, I was beginning to regret my decision to lure my wife, our teenage son and twin daughters on a road trip into the South. Although I’d promised them an encounter with a unique part of America, so far we’d seen mostly strip malls, corporate headquarters and McMansions. The new South, I was beginning to fear, was no different from the rest of America. Then we entered the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, and it soon became clear that we had arrived in a place unlike any other in the United States. Asheville is a case in point. Although the darkly wooded hills surrounding it were full of Baptist churches, barbecue shacks and billboards threatening eternal damnation, the city itself (pop 72,000) proved to be an oasis of stylish liberalism with a distinctly Southern accent. In addition to a diverse spread of restaurants, Asheville’s narrow streets offer an eco-chic boutique, a sustainable-clothing warehouse and a selection of pubs that would not be out of place in a Gloucestershire village: Jack of the Wood, the Green Man and the Thirsty Monk were all within a block of one another. Arriving here, you feel you’ve discovered something increasingly rare in homogeneous America: a regional city with a personality all its own. We had begun to understand we’d left striving, modern Dixie behind earlier in the day, as we followed fog-shrouded Route 74 out of prosperous but bland Charlotte. Our first stop was Chimney Rock, a stunning formation rising from the surrounding forest. On approach, it looks less like a chimney than a particularly obdurate mushroom. After lunching on barbecue ribs beside a turbulent little river that had only a week earlier washed away some picnic tables from our terrace, we tackled the surprisingly gentle 300ft climb up to the summit. The rock’s naked promontory boasts views of surrounding Appalachia that are rumoured to range up to 75 miles, though our vista was considerably less due to encroaching thunderclouds. The hiking trails that vein the park below are well worth the effort, particularly the Hickory Nut Falls route, which leads to one of the East Coast’s more beautiful waterfalls. Next came the Biltmore House, the ancestral seat of the Vanderbilt dynasty and the largest private home in America. Situated just south of Asheville, it was built by George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of the shipping magnate Cornelius “the Commodore” Vanderbilt, America’s first great robber baron. George was a sensitive soul who lacked his forebear’s cutthroat business acumen and decided instead to devote his life (and redoubtable fortune) to the arts. The house he built, which was officially opened on Christmas Eve, 1895, is set on 8,000 acres of rich Southern backwoods, and the 175,000 sq ft structure appears to have been transplanted in its entirety from the Loire Valley. The basement is the house’s most interesting floor, because here you get a sense of what makes Biltmore distinctly American (the other floors being a peculiarly European mishmash of Flemish tapestries, Chippendale furniture and Renoir paintings). There is one of the nation’s oldest bowling alleys, an 1890s “state-of-the-art fitness room” and some of the first indoor toilets to hit the South. There are five distinct gardens surrounding the house, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (best known for planning Central Park), and they’re all stunning. There is also a working winery and a model farm. After spending the night in Asheville, we went to Black Mountain, a few miles east of the city. Home of a famous school of American poetry, it proved a quaint village of shops, beautiful homes and interesting-looking people — the sort of place you want to move to immediately, but are ready to leave after an hour. Finally, we joined the Blue Ridge Parkway, one of America’s most beautiful roads. Running nearly 500 miles from the southwestern tip of North Carolina into central Virginia, the two-lane highway, built by the National Park Service in the 1930s, offers a welcome escape from the strip malls, billboards and building plots that now clutter many Southern roads. Driving along the parkway, which is shrouded by trees and absent of lorries, it’s easy to imagine for long stretches that you have left the modern world altogether. The only stops are rather primitive picnic areas and occasional heritage sites such as the Folk Art Center, which is both a museum and a store selling the latest contemporary Southern arts and crafts. Anyone expecting to be able to purchase crudely whittled items from artisans who look like extras from Deliverance will be disappointed, but the jewellery, cutlery and furniture on sale is truly different from (and generally a lot better than) what you’ll find in Knightsbridge or New York boutiques. The only problem with the Blue Ridge Parkway is its tendency to sporadic closure due to weather-related incidents — on the day we drove it, we were routed onto adjoining country roads for about 20 miles to avoid a rockslide. We took another side trip to Grandfather Mountain, home of July’s annual Highland Games, where descendants of the region’s many Scottish immigrants gather. When the kilted aren’t around, the park’s main attraction is the Mile High Swinging Bridge. Death-wishers will be disappointed to discover that it is neither high (it’s only 80ft above a ravine) nor swinging, though the views it affords are spectacular. We finally left the Blue Ridge Parkway at Fancy Gap, just before the Virginia border. We were all too soon among the 16-wheel trucks, factory-outlet shops and fast-food restaurants. Clearly, our detour into a unique slice of the South was over.
