Colorado Uber Alles

Symptoms of the social malaise that provoked the massacre of 14 schoolchildren by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20th last were still apparent in the reports carried by US television networks in the wake of the tragedy.

CBS and NBC's borderline sensationalist coverage laid on the copy-worthy details with a trowel: the killers were reported as being part of the "Trench Coat Mafia", a clique of misfits with a penchant for Goth paraphernalia, violent video games, the occult, Nazism, plus "foreign" (meaning German) hardcore techno and heavy metal music. According to one CBS anchor, these Mafia members "dressed all in black, wore dark glasses and listened to the music of Marilyn Manson". The suicide attack was reportedly carried out in commemoration of Adolf Hitler's birthday.

In the same broadcast, relayed across Europe by CNN and Sky News, the school's doctor Dave Hnida quoted from an advertisement placed by the gang in the Columbine yearbook: "Who says we're different? Insanity is healthy". The gravity with which this piece of adolescent doggerel was reported elevated it to the status of a black manifesto, serving more to romanticise its authors as rebels without a cause than to indict their actions. Footage of Trench Coat Mafia members being spreadeagled on the ground by SWAT teams only increased their outlaw credibility: one could envision similarly disturbed teenagers in other US towns cheering over beers in front of the TV. Such reportage is easily as irresponsible as any amount of Hollywood blood-letting.

In the wake of the tragedy, scores of red herrings floated to the surface, and the media on this side of the water, particularly English newspapers like The Daily Telegraph, seized on the most irrelevant of these. There was much ado about the new Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix, in which a trench-coated Keanu Reeves blasts his way through a world controlled by Artificial Intelligence. There were many references to a lawsuit brought against the makers of The Basketball Diaries by parents of schoolchildren killed in a 1997 rampage in Kentucky (in that film of Jim Carroll's memoir, actor Leonardo DiCaprio wears a long, dark trench coat and fantasises about shooting his teachers and classmates). And, of course, the airwaves resounded with calls for the banning of Marilyn Manson records.

In a country where the right to bear arms is still enshrined in the constitution, and a climate where teenagers can obtain semi-automatic weapons and explosives, the blaming of such tragedies on entertainment could be termed farcical if the consequences weren't so grave. Compared to the many murder ballads included on Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music (which contains recordings made as far back as the 1920s and is regarded as an important document of rural American culture), the lyrical content of a Marilyn Manson record amounts to nothing more than cartoon anti-authoritarian role-playing.

The only difference between the Trench Coat Mafia and similar groups of teenagers elsewhere in the world, is that they possessed the weapons with which to vent their disaffection. Firearms can be legally purchased at the age of 18 in Colorado, the components for pipe-bombs can be obtained at any major store, and the know-how for their construction can be gleaned from the Internet. In many rural American towns, children are taught to handle guns and to hunt from as young as eight.

In this light, Colorado governor Bill Owens' evasiveness about his support for a proposed bill making it legal for anyone in the state to carry a concealed weapon, provided they haven't been convicted of a violent offence, seriously undermines his concerns about "cultural violence". Elsewhere, Bill Clinton's pleas to the parents of America to shield their children from violent images and experiences sounds like the cop-out of a president too weakened by scandal to strike at the powerful gun lobby and the National Rifle Association while the iron is hot.

It's difficult for those of us born and bred in Ireland to understand the deep-rooted sense of disenfranchisement that led to the carnage in Littleton. Irish society, even in the current economic boom, sides with the underdog. Uncle Sam on the other hand, loves a winner. America, for a country which has produced so many brilliant mavericks, is a place where status is achieved through not just ambition and hard graft, but also conformity, an adherence to principles of productivity, respectability and beauty.

It is significant that Harris and Klebold targeted not just ethnic minority students—in keeping with their spurious quasi-Nazi doctrine—but also star athletes, the "jocks" who reputedly made these misfits' lives a misery. There was undeniable irony in seeing the details of the Colorado massacre being reported by straight-talking anchormen with names like Mitch, the kind of square-jawed, straight-toothed archetypes who constituted the very object of the killers' resentment.

Until last week, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were reduced to achieving power by proxy, either on the Net or through video games like Doom. They could never be part of any Aryan race—in America, freaks are only tolerated on trashy talk shows, and even then are invariably subjected to the redemption process of a makeover.

Neighbours described the killers' family backgrounds as all-American, affluent, suburban. The sub-text was that one would not expect the product of such an environment to exhibit psychopathic behaviour, to commit acts of evil. It's an old refrain: "He seemed like such a quiet boy". But behind the picket fence, these teenagers grew up as self-styled outsiders obsessed with weaponry, and probably even came to cherish their social leper status. In the end, the murders in Columbine High School were themselves acts of conformity, of trying to attain recognition through the celebrity of bloodshed, the only way a no-hoper will ever make the cover of Rolling Stone.

Five years ago, Kurt Cobain, archangel of the Loser Generation, ended his own troubled life with a shotgun. It seems horribly inevitable that the next generation of disenfranchised American youth should direct that shotgun at their classmates. But ultimately, no amount of CD, video or book barbecues will take the gun out of the American constitution, and it seems appropriate to rewrite NRA president Charlton Heston's maxim in the light of what happened last week: "People don't kill people, guns do". Or, as Kevin Dwyer, the president of the National Association of School Psychologists put it, "You can't kill or wound 14 people with a knife".