Columbine, Again

There has been some controversy about the publication of the boys’ words. Public opinion in Colorado seems to hold that the families of the victims ought to have been shown the tapes first. Questions have been raised about why one reporter in particular was allowed access by the authorities, who have come in for considerable and well-deserved criticism for their ultra-cautious performance on the day of the shootings.

But hardly anyone has asked why the tapes were revealed at all. If their usefulness as evidence is at an end, why weren’t they destroyed? If they remain important to the investigation, why were they shown to a reporter? In an introductory column explaining the publication of “The Columbine Tapes,” the leader of Time’s reporting team in Colorado says, “Family after family told us what they wanted most was to know everything about what happened and why.” “I work for the victims,” declares the head of the FBI’s Columbine unit. “When they don’t have any more questions, then I feel I’ve done my job.”

But Time and the Denver authorities didn’t give the answers, such as they are, to the victims’ families. They gave them to the rest of us. As a result, the Columbine killers are winning. They wanted to be famous, and they are. They wanted to echo in our minds, and they do. They demanded on the tapes that they receive attention for slaughtering their classmates, and they have. Every new revelation and account moves toward making the killers more vivid than the victims, more iconic, more memorable, more real.

The heroism of the teacher Dave Sanders in guiding trapped students from the school seems to be fading from public recollection. Though none of the sources for the original story has recanted, reports apparently based on other witnesses and cryptic half-comments from the sheriff’s office have suggested that it was Valeen Schnurr instead of Cassie Bernall who said yes, she believed in God, and was shot for her answer. Or Valeen Schnurr and Cassie Bernall. Or perhaps it was Rachel Scott. And the effect on the media of this natural confusion — in the midst of the smoke and the gunfire and the screams and the sprinkler system drenching everything — seems to be the disappearance of the fact that someone said it, that at least one Colorado high-school girl affirmed her faith, and was killed.

Which leaves us with only the murderers. Our national discussion of the Columbine tapes has disseminated the words they wanted spread across the nation. The words for the sake of which they killed, for whose publication 12 students and a teacher lie dead, with 23 more badly injured.

Those words themselves are shocking, disturbing, and infantile. They waver uncertainly back and forth, like an adolescent boy’s half-broken voice, from Heart of Darkness to I’m OK — You’re OK. Feeble efforts to pose as the stalest of existentialist heroes are interspersed among low-grade attempts at pop sociology, all to justify the hatred of the popular and the successful precisely for being popular and successful. A carefully hoarded scrap of Shakespeare — deployed, with painful unselfawareness, for its tones of profundity — is followed by references to video games and discussions of which directors will make the best movie versions of their killings.

Even the boys’ constant stream of profanity has something servile and ridiculous about it, the falsity of the weak-willed pretending to be strong-willed. And what shows through in every line is not the titanic anger they absurdly imagined they were revealing, the godlike rage they proclaimed, but a whine and a whimper, the cringing snarl of a resentment they cosseted and fed within themselves. They are like suburban high-school Raskolnikovs or imitation Underground Men — characters wrenched from a Dostoyevsky novel and dulled down into something unspeakably murderous, vulgar, and boring.

But nonetheless, we read them, and quote them, and editorialize about them in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, as though we were fulfilling the terms of some satanic covenant, some contract signed in blood to make the killers famous. The blood is Cassie Bernall’s and Steve Curnow’s. Corey DePooter’s and Kelly Fleming’s. It drained from Matthew Kechter and Daniel Mauser. Daniel Rohrbough and Dave Sanders. Rachel Scott. Isaiah Shoels. John Tomlin. Lauren Townsend. Kyle Velasquez. Apparently, these children and their teacher died to ensure that we forget their names and remember their murderers’.

The killers are oddly concerned on the videotapes to let us know that their plan is original, that they weren’t copying the school shooter in Oregon, the school assassins in Kentucky. But, of course, they weren’t original. Not at all. In 356 B.C., the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, was burned to the ground by a man who did it, as Plutarch tells the story, so that his name would be immortal.

In response, the Ephesians passed a law banning any mention of the arsonist, in the hope that he’d be forgotten and not spawn any imitators. They didn’t succeed; you can find his name if you look in any standard ancient history. Friedrich Nietzsche uses him as an iconic figure in Human, All Too Human. Jean-Paul Sartre modernizes him in a short story about a weak and resentful man who imagines becoming important by descendre dans la rue et tirer au hasard dans la foule — by going down into the street and shooting randomly into the crowd — and is arrested before he can fire a shot. The Ephesians didn’t succeed at denying him the fame for which he’d embraced evil. But at least, unlike us, they tried.

J. Bottum, for the Editors