UBC: Cullen, Columbine

Columbine by Dave Cullen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an excellent book about a horrible subject.

Cullen provides a panoramic view of the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. He talks about the students, the teachers, the parents, the media, the investigators, the clusterfuck of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office's official response(s), which included outright lying and destructive of evidence, and of course the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Cullen is careful, dispassionate, working hard to present all sides of an event that was like a devastating cyclone that spawned cyclones of its own, whirling off on new paths of catastrophe. Cullen follows them all as far as he can, tracking the lives devastated and destroyed (and in some cases rebuilt) in the wake of the catastrophe.

Cullen, like Ron Rosenbaum and David Grann, shows me what journalism ought to be and what it so often isn't. One of the things I like about him is that although he is careful and dispassionate, you can nevertheless feel him there, a human being struggling with the unfolding tragedy. I like him for being absolutely willing to dissect the media's errors (which were many), while at the same time being unstinting in his praise of journalists who did their jobs right. I like him for his efforts to understand the gunmen (who left a wealth of writing and video about what they were planning to do and why), and I like him because he lets his loathing of Eric Harris show through.

Harris was a psychopath (in the psychiatric sense), the same kind of person as Ted Bundy or Gary Ridgway; he just blew his wad (and, yes, I am using that phrasing deliberately) early in an attempted Armageddon, rather than spacing it out victim by victim. (And if Harris' actual plan had worked, there wouldn't have been anything left of Columbine High School but smoking rubble and piles of corpses. Mercifully, he wasn't as smart as he thought he was and his propane tank bombs failed.) Harris hated everybody, considered himself inherently superior to everyone on the planet, and thought--as psychopaths think--that he was entirely justified in killing as many people as he possibly could. Harris was nothing but smugness, hatred, and lies.

Klebold was different. Where Harris needed to be stopped, Klebold needed to be helped. He was struggling with crushing depression, had been struggling with it for years, and one of the many tragedies of Columbine is that nobody recognized it. (And because one of the symptoms of Klebold's depression was a yawning lack of self-esteem, he was never going to be able to ask for help, because he was never going to be able to imagine that it was possible, or that he deserved it if it was.) His parents loved him, but they clearly didn't know that he was suffering from anything more than teen-angst bullshit (to quote Heathers). And even though he was in counseling (as part of a program for teenage felons), his counselors . . . didn't see it, didn't look for it, I don't know. Cullen uses Klebold's journal to show how the impulse toward self-destruction (which he never acted on) turned outward, and the way that Harris took the lead, the way that Klebold was just grateful to have someone to follow.

Both boys prided themselves on their self-awareness. The awful thing is that both of them were wrong. Harris' self-awareness was delusions of grandeur. Klebold's self-awareness was self-hatred.

Cullen also does an excellent job of deconstructing the myths of Columbine, tracking down their origins and differentiating them scrupulously from the truth. There was a Trench Coat Mafia (which itself is a quote from Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic, which Cullen does not note), but Klebold and Harris weren't really part of it. They didn't get their guns at home. (They bought them at a gun show.) They weren't Goths. They weren't loners or outcasts. They weren't gay. They weren't bullied. (They were more likely to be doing the bullying, as it turns out.) They weren't targeting jocks or blacks or Christians. They had no reason for what they did, and what the myths of Columbine have in common is their desire to give Klebold and Harris a reason. Even a bad reason. Because we are story-telling animals and pattern-seekers, and we need there to be a reason. But there wasn't one, except that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was in such a nihilistic state of despair that a massacre sounded like a good idea.

It's hard to wrap your head around the massacre at Columbine, but Cullen does an outstanding job of making it possible.



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