Columbine-+Borg

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Published by //Twelve//, 2009 by Dave Cullen

Had Dave Cullen capitulated to cliché while writing “Columbine,” he would have started his tale 48 hours before [|Eric Harris] and [|Dylan Klebold]’s notorious killing spree, stopped the frame just before they fired their guns, and then spooled back to the very beginning, with the promise of trying to explain how the two boys got to this twisted pass. But he doesn’t. As Cullen eventually writes, “there had been no trigger” — at least none that would be satisfying to horrified outsiders, grieving parents or anyone in between. Eric Harris was a psychopath, simple as that. Dylan Klebold was a suicidally depressed kid who yoked his fate to a sadist. Instead, what intrigues the author are perceptions and misperceptions: how difficult a shooting spree is to untangle; how readily mass tragedies lend themselves to misinformation and mythologizing; how psychopaths can excel at the big con. The broad outlines of what happened at [|Columbine High School] in Colorado one decade ago are well known. On April 20, 1999, just weeks from graduation, Harris and Klebold murdered one teacher and 12 of their peers, making this the most lethal high school massacre in the nation, and wounded two dozen. Then they holed up in the school library and turned their guns on themselves. Yet what’s amazing is how much of Cullen’s book still comes as a surprise. I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — //Columbine, right, wasn’t there something going on there between goths and jocks?// In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren’t the intended targets at all; the //entire school// was. Columbine, it turns out, was a failed attempt at domestic terrorism. Shortly after 11:14 a.m., the two boys hauled a propane bomb into the cafeteria, programmed to go off at 11:17. It never did. Had the massacre gone as planned, it would most likely have killed more than 500 people, yielding far less readily to rumors about high school’s tribal politics. It’s to his credit that Cullen, a Denver journalist who covered the story for Salon and Slate, makes the reader care about getting it right. “Columbine” is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, foreshadowing many of the same reactions to Sept. 11 (lawsuits, arguments about the memorial, voyeuristic bus tours); and, at the end of the day, a fine example of old-fashioned journalism. While Cullen’s storytelling doesn’t approach the novelistic beauty of “In Cold Blood” (an unfair standard, perhaps, but an unavoidable comparison for a murder story this detailed), he writes well enough, moving things along with agility and grace. He leaves us with some unforgettable images — like the pizza slices floating aimlessly about the school commons, which was flooded with three inches of water because the sprinkler system had gone off — and he has a knack for the thumbnail sketch. “He was a shrink turned hostage negotiator turned detective, with an abridged version of the complete works of Shakespeare in the back seat of his car,” Cullen writes of Dwayne Fuselier, an [|F.B.I.] agent and one of the book’s heroes. “He could be a little stoic. Hugging his sons felt awkward but he would reach out to embrace survivors when they needed it.” Fuselier is one of the people Cullen spotlights in his retelling in order to clear up the historical record. Some of the confusion generated by Columbine was inevitable: Harris and Klebold started out wearing trench coats, for instance, but at some point removed them, giving the illusion that they were four people rather than two. The homemade pipe bombs they were tossing in all directions — down stairwells, onto the roof — only seemed to further the impression that there were more of them. And then there were the SWAT teams: students trapped inside the building would hear their rifle fire, assume it was the killers and report it to the media by cellphone, complicating the cops’ efforts to keep them safe. “This was the first major hostage standoff of the cellphone age,” Cullen notes. The police “had never seen anything like it.” But the most subtle distortions of the media echo chamber, it seems, did not concern logistics. They concerned motive. As early as two hours into the live coverage of Columbine, news stations began to report that something called the Trench Coat Mafia, a group of disgruntled goths, was possibly behind the attack. Many of the students, watching this coverage on classroom televisions while still trapped inside the building, began to repeat this information to reporters on the outside once they’d escaped. (And it made sense: the killers were wearing trench coats.) And so a loop began, reinforced by four eyewitnesses who said the gunmen were deliberately targeting their victims. One offered such a precise level of detail — the killers were taking aim at “anyone of color, wearing a white hat or playing a sport” — that it proved irresistible, both to students and to members of the media, who (Cullen speculates) were out of their element in this teenage universe, and therefore willing to repeat this rumor whether their “witnesses” had seen the gunmen or not. “Reporters,” the author points out, “would not make that mistake at a car wreck.” Of course, tragedies often lend themselves to myths, so as to meet the needs of the day. For weeks after Sept. 11, the lovely legend persisted that the Rev. Mychal Judge, a New York Fire Department chaplain, died from falling debris when he took off his helmet to give last rites to a firefighter. As I wrote sometime later in New York magazine, that’s not how he died. But people had a stake in that belief. And Columbine generated a similar tale of spiritual martyrdom. A boy who witnessed the murders in the school library told people afterward that a slain student, a fellow evangelical named Cas­sie Bernall, was asked by one of the killers if she believed in God. “Yes, I believe in God,” he said she replied. Two other witnesses, both sitting near Cassie, heard no such thing, and Cullen goes on to say that a 911 tape from that day “proved conclusively” that she hadn’t uttered these words. It didn’t matter. The story caught the imagination of the evangelical world, and Cassie’s mother, Misty Bernall, wrote a book, “She Said Yes,” that has since sold more than one million ­copies. “Columbine” is weakest when Cullen tries to channel the voice of Eric Harris. (“Five or six hundred dismemberments ought to be enough for one awesome afternoon of TV” is one such example.) As the author himself makes clear, Harris’s mind isn’t a particularly interesting place to inhabit — just sneering and young and unfathomably angry. But his nuanced dissection of the differences between Harris and Klebold is first-rate, leaving readers in the strange (and challenging) position of feeling pity, almost, for Klebold. Cullen walks us carefully through the definition of psychopathy, and how it differs from insanity, noting how perfectly Harris met the profile — particularly in his egomania, outsize contempt for humanity and talent for manipulation. (Just months before the attack, a teacher wrote on one of his essays, “I would trust you in a heartbeat.”) Whereas Klebold, for most of the book, seems forlorn, awkward and miserable. “The anger and the loathing,” Cullen explains, “traveled inward.” In case you’re wondering, we don’t get the granular details of Harris and Klebold’s last 48 hours until the end of the book, when we know so much more it’s almost beside the point. Which isn’t to say some of the testimony still isn’t chilling. That Sunday, in a homemade videotape, Harris addressed his parents. “They could not have stopped him, Eric assured them,” Cullen writes. “He quoted Shakespeare: ‘Good wombs have borne bad sons.’ ”

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