Now concerts of Marilyn Manson and KMFDM have been canceled. President Clinton will probably propose laws soon banning long black coats and making it an indictable offense to use the word "gothic." In his radio broadcast last Saturday Clinton said piously-amid celebrations of the violent NATO alliance-that "every one of us must take responsibility to counter the culture of violence. The government must take responsibility to counter the culture of violence. The government must take responsibility."
In terms of hypocrisy, this is on a par with
Clinton telling little kids in a school in Anacostia to conduct
themselves in an upright moral fashion not long before he was
unzipping his pants for Monica L. There'll be further vindictive
assaults on the rights of young people, who as usual will incur
collective guilt. Meanwhile the obvious lesson-that war breeds
violenceóis once again being carefully ignored. Watch the
bombs fall and watch the indices of social violence here in the
U.S., which had been falling, begin to rise again. As Malcolm
X said when JFK was assassinated amid rising U.S. commitment to
the war in Vietnam: "The chickens are coming home to roost."
By now apologies for what happened at Columbine High are mandatory for Marilyn Manson, video-game manufacturers, Hollywood, publishers of Mein Kampf, the Internet. The only people who apparently don't have to apologize are the U.S. military and their civilian overseers, who trained and paid the pilot dad of one of the teen killers; who sent F-16s over the funerals in Littleton; who are now pounding the Serbs each day and night; who mint the currency of violence.
In the aftermath of the Littleton shootings in Colorado there's been collective determination among editorial writers to omit from possible motivating factors the U.S. bombing of Serbia. The typical editorial response has been "keep guns out of the hands of troubled youngsters." Of course the institution most adept at putting guns into the hands of youngsters, many of them troubled, is the US military which insists on the right to accept teenagers at an age younger than most nations
People bicker endlessly about the effect splatter movies have on people. Doubtless the Dan Quayle candidacy will roll forward on this issue. Japanese films and tv offer blood-soaked stuff on a round-the-clock basis, but the level of social violence in Japanese society is exceptionally low, so it's hard to figure. But one thing is indisputable. Wars are always accompanied by a rise in criminal violence on the domestic front. This applies both to the victorious and defeated countries.
The Boston Globe's editorial writer avoided
the usual call for accelerated gun control, but emphasized the
theme that "Adults should have noticed and intervened...
Better to speak up and take the heat from a rebellious teenager
or a defensive parent than to risk the eventual explosion of rage
into bloodshed. This emotional war zone demands the attention
of every community before there is gunfi
re."
How about the actual war zone? Bombing campaigns encourage the idea of invulnerability of the bombers, and the illusion of omnipotence. Not so far from Columbine High School in Littleton is Fort Carson Army base, where they practice invading countries like Serbia. One of the families of the killers (two-parent, suburban) had a breadwinner retired from the military. This is Harris' dad. His mother works at a gourmet food shop. Mr. Klebold is a geophysicist and Mrs. Klebold works with the disabled. Klebold Jr. drove a BMW.
If the parents had been single mothers on welfare, or hippies, or in a small religious sect, we surely would have been inundated with preachments against single mothers, hippies and religious sects as trainers for mass murder. But there's been a certain embarrassment about the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who appear to have embodied the suburban American dream.
Commentators have fastened onto the fact that one of the two youths had a personal website "espousing an addled philosophy of violence." Those were the words of The New York Times' editorial writer, either Howell Raines or one of his stable. Yes, the same editorial team that espoused an addled philosophy of violence a few days earlier, suggesting that NATO "intensify the bombing" of Serbia. Perhaps nytimes.com was the website the kid had in his computer. CP
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