Nights in Columbine

Townes Van Zandt--"Columbine" (mp3)
Sparrow and the Workshop--"The Gun" (mp3)


These days, I do most of my reading before I go to sleep. It's an interesting challenge. Do I choose a book that I want to read because it's an exciting, well-written thriller, say, a Nelson DeMille, do I choose a book that I bought because I thought I should read it, like Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, do I skip over the list of books stacked by my bed and go for the one I just bought, Dave Cullen's Columbine?

You can tell from the title of this post which one I chose. The DeMille is waiting and I know it will be good when I get to it, I'm part way through the Pollan book (the same thing happened with his first book, The Omnivore's Dilemna), but from the second I cracked the spine, I was hooked on Columbine.

There is a price you pay when you decide to spend your last conscious moments each night with a dissection of the tragic high school shooting incident that put the concept on the map. To be sure, there has been a larger school tragedy since then at Virginia Tech, but Columbine remains the reference point, the event against which all others will be evaluated. Fortunately for Virginia Tech, the incident there has not defined the school, but when you hear the name Columbine, you only think of one thing.

The price is not bad dreams exactly, and it isn't sleeplessness. There's just a kind of uneasiness that comes with a nightly reading of this book, and even if you sleep fitfully, as I did sometimes, even if you fall asleep reading the book, as I did sometimes, you still walk through your waking hours interpreting much of what you see through the lense of Columbine. And you want to tell other people what you know.

I don't want to give away the book, and, believe me, there are things to give away, because EVERYTHING that you think you know about Columbine is wrong. Except that it happened in Colorado. That's true. Everything else, from how the killers Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold fit into the social structure of the school to the story of Cassie Bernall, the Evangelical Christian girl who supposedly said "Yes" when one of the killers asked her if she believed in God and then shot her in the head, to the Jeffco County cover-up that was only fully resolved in 2007. None of it is what you thought.

I remember when our school, back in the 1990's, dealt with the suicide of a student who had another student buy him an assault rifle and then put on a Nazi uniform and shot himself in the head in the middle of a stormy night in the middle of campus while eating a Snickers bar. Had things gone differently, we could have been Columbine years before Columbine. After all, why does one need an assault rifle and a Nazi uniform just to take one's own life?

But what I remember most about that event is how the school very quickly made the boy's taking of his own life into a very understandable event--the boy had been rejected that day from a number of top-notch colleges. We had to make it understandable, I'm reasoning, because we had to compartmentalize and distance ourselves from the dead boy so that none of our students would want to follow in his footsteps. But suicide is arguably the most irrational of acts and any attempt to make it rational, explainable, and dismissable is perhaps necessary, but, by definition, false at its core.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not faulting the school. I think they had to do that. But on a national scale, our media did the same thing at Columbine to such an extent that it gave an entire society a false impression of what happened. I guess we average Americans couldn't possibly handle a couple of shooters who actually had a lot of friends, who weren't part of a Trench Coat Mafia, who didn't have a list of students they intended to kill, etc. It's kind of like if a bunch of Saudi Arabians flew planes into our buildings, someone would have to alter our perception of who was behind that act because, hey, the Saudi Arabians are our allies. Aren't they?

What Columbine does is to give us a snapshot, a moment in time for our entire society--children, adults, police, parents, lawyers, reporters, politicians, religious leaders, haters, blamers, good girls who buy guns, people who miss signals from seriously disturbed people they know, people who just want to live, teachers and principals who in different ways give their lives for students--and to force us to look at it, not to turn away, to stay with it far beyond our original impressions through a full 10 years of sorting out the truth of what happened and how a community and the people in it changed during that time.

Oh, and the book has no photographs. Somehow, that works. Do we really need photographs of the killers as young children or the victims or the crime scene?

We accept that we live in an Information Age. Part of the daily acceptance of that fact is the corollary that when something happens, something bad, we should have known. Shouldn't we have seen it coming? What kind of parents are we? What kind of community? I mean, all of the information was there. How could we have missed it?

Given that it took author Dave Cullen 10 years to correct all of his own misperceptions about this awful event, one might be tempted to suggest that, unfortunately or not, there isn't a simple, rational explanation for everything. Especially why people do what they do.

Columbine High School is named after a local flower. I found both of these tracks at Hypem.com. Steve Earle has recently released a CD of his versions of Townes Van Zandt songs, available at Itunes.