"We need to fucking kick-start the revolution here!" - Eric Harris, 1999
4/20 was the last youth (a more apt term than "school," perhaps) shooting that stood on its own two feet, so to speak. The narrative of every shooting since then has been shaped (and to some degree diminished) by the template created by the initial media coverage of Eric and Dylan's crimes. This template has been distorted by the would-be chroniclers of NBK, but even after five years of Dave Cullen's incessant self-promotion, it retains a surprising degree of cultural currency.
If tradition is a tyranny imposed by the dead upon the living, then Klebold and Harris are the tyrants of postmodern adolescent-male rage expression. They are the progenitors of a ghastly new breed of man - the disaffected millennial who externalizes his self-loathing with the trigger of a gun. (One can easily find similar archetypes in earlier periods of American history, of course.) James Holmes, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Behring Brevik - all dwarves, lurching on the stooped shoulders of two boys who blew their brains out early on a Tuesday afternoon in the third full week of the fourth month of the penultimate year of the second millennium. (There was no year zero, you see.)
Eric and Dylan never succeeded in their attempts to initiate (let alone complete) male-to-female sperm transmission. But they ended up giving birth, nonetheless.
Subject: Fathers of the revolution 
Tue Apr 15, 2014 8:06 pm
