My Columbine is not your Columbine

It pains me to say this, but I have to admit that I can't fault Dave Cullen for doing the things he's done. He studied the massacre, drew his own conclusions, wrote a book, promoted the hell out of that book, and then spent the next decade or so hanging around in the CNN lobby like a desperate $10 hooker, hustling for free publicity. Certainly I would not dispute the fact that he has the right to believe anything he wants, and to attempt to persuade others that his beliefs are correct.

I guess what bugs me is the same thing that bugged Eric and Dylan - most folks are drooling morons. Most folks will pick up his book, say, "Ooh, this man speaks DA TROOF!", and then waddle through the rest of their miserable lives thinking they know everything about Columbine. But, as I've said before, that's not really his fault. He's a slithery leech, happily sucking on the fat teat of mass ignorance. If the masses were not ignorant fools, then he would starve. But he doesn't.

The bottom line is that everyone who studies Columbine forms his or her own perspective. My perspective might be in general accordance with yours, but there are bound to be subtle differences. In the end, the only thing I can say is that I believe A, B, and C, and that others believe X, Y, and Z.

Let's say that everyone else in the world was totally convinced of the incontrovertible truth of Cullen's viewpoint. Let's say that I was the only man alive, the only man who ever had lived or ever would live, who disagreed with Cullen. Would I be inclined to change my perspective to go with the flow?

Not one bit.

Columbine, to me, is about Eric's inferiority complex. Maybe he was a quote-unquote "psychopath" and maybe he wasn't. But I do believe, beyond all doubt, that he was utterly consumed with self-loathing. That boy couldn't stand himself. He felt weak and small and pathetic and he hated everyone and everything who reminded him that he wasn't the swaggering stud that he wanted to be. The magnitude of his rage was truly pathological, but I think that lots of guys can relate to the frustration of not being able to get laid, of not being respected, of not having what you want and knowing that you're probably never going to get it.

I truly believe that Dave Cullen's book is a lot of bullshit mixed with a little bit of truth. But there's so much bullshit in the world that it hardly seems worthwhile to harp so much on this one particular example of it.

But anyway...

Columbine is also about ... dissatisfaction. Emptiness.

Modern life is soulless and empty. We have nothing to live for, nothing to believe in. No God, no heaven up above, no greater purpose, no nothing. Just be a good little drone, work your ass off for some mega-corporation, and mortgage yourself to the hilt.

Most folks can bullshit themselves into believing in one comforting delusion or another. For whatever reason, Eric and Dylan couldn't. Maybe they would have grown out of it eventually; maybe they would have ended up doing something worse.

I keep thinking about the community around Columbine. Look at the school itself: lots of clean-cut kids, almost all white, diligently following society's rules. In the late '90s, nearly everyone in that neighborhood had enough money to get by, and more than a few folks had quite a bit of extra cash to throw around. (Rocky Hoffschneider wasn't the only rich kid whose daddy bought him an expensive car - or two.) Lots of evangelical Christians - some true believers, but a few hypocrites in the mix. Not a bad place to live, but somewhat stifling and sterile for someone who didn't toe the party line.

I can relate to the feeling of being a freak in a sea of normals - zombies, Dylan called them. You hate the zombies because a) they are mindless sheep, b) they are happy, c) they are happy because they are mindless sheep, d), you can never be one of them, and thus e) you can never be happy. You hate them and resent them and envy them all at the same time.

Now, it is true that there are lots of folks out there who are not particularly happy to be alive, and there are vanishingly few who hatch and attempt to carry out grandiose plans to kill hundreds of people. Those kids had something wrong with them, at some level. But the basic feelings that Eric and Dylan had - Eric's rage, Dylan's malaise, and their shared hatred of their surroundings that bound them together - are not at all alien to me.

You pretty much summed up what I felt/feel in a nutshell.

I also wonder why it stays with us for so long, why after all this time we are still researching and I can still get teary eyed over a recount of what happened. I recently read that Lauren put her arm around Val when the shooting started and told her it would be ok. I then got something in my eye that made them both water...

Screamingophelia wrote:

You pretty much summed up what I felt/feel in a nutshell.

I also wonder why it stays with us for so long, why after all this time we are still researching and I can still get teary eyed over a recount of what happened. I recently read that Lauren put her arm around Val when the shooting started and told her it would be ok. I then got something in my eye that made them both water...

I felt the same after reading about John Tomlin's and Corey DePooter's final moments.

So in other words they really did have self awareness.

LPorter101 wrote:

You hate the zombies because a) they are mindless sheep, b) they are happy, c) they are happy because they are mindless sheep, d), you can never be one of them, and thus e) you can never be happy. You hate them and resent them and envy them all at the same time.

I can't help but be reminded of Cho - "Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you" - when reading this statement.

When you're alone in a crowd, life is a living hell.

>I guess what bugs me is the same thing that bugged Eric and Dylan - most folks are drooling morons. Most folks will pick up his book, say, "Ooh, this man speaks DA TROOF!", and then waddle >through the rest of their miserable lives thinking they know everything about Columbine. But, as I've said before, that's not really his fault. He's a slithery leech, happily sucking on the fat teat of mass >ignorance. If the masses were not ignorant fools, then he would starve. But he doesn't.

Eric and Dylan were themselves not much better than drooling morons. If you're going to condemn society for being a bunch of moronic sheeple, then you have to go out into the world and be better than that, accomplish something or do something that makes the world better. Even a lot of moronic sheeple know this. Eric and Dylan's "intellectualism"--which they did possess--didn't amount to much more than a fascination with Nazis and a lot of hate. In the end, all they did was inspire other psychos to do what they did--to kill a bunch of people that they didn't know, didn't have the intellectual capacity to get to know them better and so it's all the easier to categorize them as nobodys or targets to kill. Which means they weren't any better than Rocky Hoffschneider or Evan Todd or whoever.

>Let's say that everyone else in the world was totally convinced of the incontrovertible truth of Cullen's viewpoint.

They don't. To some extent, the haters have made themselves heard. But even people who disagree with Cullen end up characterizing E & D not that much differently than he did--Dylan is always the "nicer" one, and Eric is always the pissier one.

>Columbine, to me, is about Eric's inferiority complex.

What about Dylan's? If you make it primarily about Eric isn't that what Cullen did, at least in part?

>Maybe he was a quote-unquote "psychopath" and maybe he wasn't. But I do believe, beyond all doubt, that he was utterly consumed with self-loathing. That boy couldn't stand himself. He felt weak >and small and pathetic and he hated everyone and everything who reminded him that he wasn't the >swaggering stud that he wanted to be. The magnitude of his rage was truly pathological, but I think that lots of guys can relate to the frustration of not being able to get laid, of not being respected, of >not having what you want and knowing that you're probably never going to get it.

I myself was a wimp in high school who came to hate the high school system for seeming like little more than a glorified day care center for student athletes, whose best teachers were being increasingly marginalized by the turn of the millennium, where real intellectual discussion was neither encouraged nor stimulated, where classes sucked, where all sorts of redneck kids who had little use for education came to throw food at me. I often hated myself over a few humiliating incidents when that didn't even happen most of the time. Two weeks at college confirmed I was right. And yet I don't feel like blowing away innocent bystanders because of it.
Part of it is that I threw out my fantasies--I convinced myself that getting laid in high school for example probably wouldn't have actually been that great, that I was only interested in certain girls because of their prettiness and that they were actually uninteresting people, etc. Guess Eric and Dylan's "intellectualism" couldn't provoke them to do the same.

>I truly believe that Dave Cullen's book is a lot of bullshit mixed with a little bit of truth. But there's so much bullshit in the world that it hardly seems worthwhile to harp so much on this one particular >example of it.

I don't hate the book quite like you do but go ahead, I guess.
If the REAL "truth" about Columbine were to come out and become the dominant perspective, whose life would be saved by it? It's not like Cullen is some right winger who thinks all the anti-bullying stuff that's popped up since 1999 is a bad idea (his reason for opposing the bullying theory is EXCLUSIVELY a desire to prove that the media got it wrong--he even admits he was smacked around himself in high school.)

>Modern life is soulless and empty. We have nothing to live for, nothing to believe in. No God, no heaven up above, no greater purpose, no nothing. Just be a good little drone, work your ass off for >some mega-corporation, and mortgage yourself to the hilt.

Unless you find some beauty in the world to save you from your boring job. Maybe you could even do something constructive and helpful for others and see if it saves your soul, rather than being all wrapped up in self. (Not you LPorter I mean people in general) Maybe you will get something in return. Eric and Dylan were both self-loathing and yet there's never any hint that any of the two of them ever stopped thinking the world revolved around THEM no?

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What about Dylan's? If you make it primarily about Eric isn't that what Cullen did, at least in part?

Over the years, I have gone back and forth on the issue of which of the two boys was the driving force, the dominant personality. I'm not entirely sure where I stand at this point.

Honestly, Eric's psychology is easier for me to grasp than Dylan's. Dylan's thought processes seem highly distorted to me.

I do believe that neither of the two boys would have gone NBK without the other.

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I don't hate the book quite like you do but go ahead, I guess.
If the REAL "truth" about Columbine were to come out and become the dominant perspective, whose life would be saved by it? It's not like Cullen is some right winger who thinks all the anti-bullying stuff that's popped up since 1999 is a bad idea (his reason for opposing the bullying theory is EXCLUSIVELY a desire to prove that the media got it wrong--he even admits he was smacked around himself in high school.)

Bullying fascinates me because it's an expression of man's powerful urge to rule, to dominate, to conquer. It's all about power. All relationships are power struggles, at some level.

A girl who went to Columbine the year before NBK once told me something interesting: She said the jocks (including Hoffschneider) only bullied other boys *when girls were watching*. The harassment was a form of masculine competition - the stronger boys attempting to cull the weaker members of the herd from the dating pool.

(Arnold Schwarzenegger used to do the same thing - humiliate other guys in front of their girlfriends.)

She described one incident in which Hoffschneider pushed a kid *up* the stairs as he was walking next to a girl. He denigrated the boy, saying, "Your boyfriend fucked you so hard last night that you can't even walk up the fucking stairs." Then he turned to the girl and said, "This guy is a faggot. You should get yourself a real man."

She said that such incidents happened all the time. She also said that, ironically, Hoffschneider had kind of a high-pitched voice. He was also shorter than most of Eric and Dylan's friends - she guessed 5'11" or 6'. (He was listed at 6'4", but apparently that was bullshit.)

Landon Jones, whose girlfriend (Caitlin Marquez) accused him of being an abusive stalker, said on the old board that he loathed Hoffschneider. Evidently ol' Rocky used to spit in his helmet.

Jones was a star fullback at Columbine and ended up playing four years at the University of Colorado. Supposedly he left the library at 11 a.m. on 4/20.

Comprehending Columbine touches on some of these incidents. Langman recounts an interview in which someone tells Marquez that, when he tried to talk to her in the cafeteria one day, Jones (or one of his buddies) told him that he was too much of a faggot to talk to a girl, or something like that. She claimed that, if she had heard that part of the conversation, she would have said something. You'll have to look it up.

More about Landon Jones:
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LPorter101 wrote:

Quote :

What about Dylan's? If you make it primarily about Eric isn't that what Cullen did, at least in part?

Over the years, I have gone back and forth on the issue of which of the two boys was the driving force, the dominant personality. I'm not entirely sure where I stand at this point.

Honestly, Eric's psychology is easier for me to grasp than Dylan's. Dylan's thought processes seem highly distorted to me.

I do believe that neither of the two boys would have gone NBK without the other.

Quote :

I don't hate the book quite like you do but go ahead, I guess.
If the REAL "truth" about Columbine were to come out and become the dominant perspective, whose life would be saved by it? It's not like Cullen is some right winger who thinks all the anti-bullying stuff that's popped up since 1999 is a bad idea (his reason for opposing the bullying theory is EXCLUSIVELY a desire to prove that the media got it wrong--he even admits he was smacked around himself in high school.)

Bullying fascinates me because it's an expression of man's powerful urge to rule, to dominate, to conquer. It's all about power. All relationships are power struggles, at some level.

A girl who went to Columbine the year before NBK once told me something interesting: She said the jocks (including Hoffschneider) only bullied other boys *when girls were watching*. The harassment was a form of masculine competition - the stronger boys attempting to cull the weaker members of the herd from the dating pool.

More about Landon Jones:
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I've read that thread pretty extensively, actually--Rocky is probably the most fascinating of the peripheral Columbine figures to me. Landon comes across as very sympathetic. And that pic of Rocky in 2007 with his wife, eaaggghhh.

My main interest in the case is the details--the bits of photo/video evidence, and a cataloguing of all the related players at the school. I'm no longer very interested in E&D's motive--I just don't see why it can't be a *mixture* of their personality problems AND the rather awful atmosphere at the school. I cannot dismiss the latter, simply because there's too many awful stories about the place, not just about Rocky but about all sorts of people. Sounds way worse than most high schools, even the kind of redneck dump I attended in Kansas. Why does it simply have to be one or the other? Aren't the people who go "BULLYING BULLYING BULLYING BULLYING" over and over identifying a bit too creepily with Errogant and Dyldo?
Cullen's 2016 addendum to the book (where he deleted the Brenda Parker thing but left in the "Eric got lots and lots of chicks" bit, stupidly enough) claims that Eric and Dylan "exhaustively listed their grievances" yet never mentioned specific bullies? Well, are there specific people they named who hurt them? All I know about for certain is Eric getting decked in the face by Kristi Epling's boyfriend.

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My main interest in the case is the details--the bits of photo/video evidence, and a cataloguing of all the related players at the school.

Columbine is like a soap opera.

The 11k is the key difference between Columbine and Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and all the other stuff. Both Cho and Lanza killed more folks than E&D, but we have tons more information on E, D, their victims, and everyone else who went to the school. If we didn't have the 11k, there wouldn't be nearly as much to study.

That, and the fact that E and D were normal enough to invite speculation as to what went wrong. Both Cho and Lanza were so whacked out that they couldn't lead even semi-normal lives.

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I'm no longer very interested in E&D's motive--I just don't see why it can't be a *mixture* of their personality problems AND the rather awful atmosphere at the school.

It can.

I have said before that Columbine was a "perfect storm" - the social atmosphere had an effect, but Eric and Dylan's personality defects were also to blame.

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I cannot dismiss the latter, simply because there's too many awful stories about the place, not just about Rocky but about all sorts of people. Sounds way worse than most high schools, even the kind of redneck dump I attended in Kansas. Why does it simply have to be one or the other?

It doesn't.

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Aren't the people who go "BULLYING BULLYING BULLYING BULLYING" over and over identifying a bit too creepily with Errogant and Dyldo?

Well, yeah.

LPorter101 wrote:

Columbine is like a soap opera.

The 11k is the key difference between Columbine and Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and all the other stuff. Both Cho and Lanza killed more folks than E&D, but we have tons more information on E, D, their victims, and everyone else who went to the school. If we didn't have the 11k, there wouldn't be nearly as much to study.

we have tons of info on stair, he isnt that famous

-warrior wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

Columbine is like a soap opera.

The 11k is the key difference between Columbine and Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and all the other stuff. Both Cho and Lanza killed more folks than E&D, but we have tons more information on E, D, their victims, and everyone else who went to the school. If we didn't have the 11k, there wouldn't be nearly as much to study.

we have tons of info on stair, he isnt that famous

Who is Stair? Joe Stair?

LPorter101 wrote:

-warrior wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

Columbine is like a soap opera.

The 11k is the key difference between Columbine and Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and all the other stuff. Both Cho and Lanza killed more folks than E&D, but we have tons more information on E, D, their victims, and everyone else who went to the school. If we didn't have the 11k, there wouldn't be nearly as much to study.

we have tons of info on stair, he isnt that famous

Who is Stair? Joe Stair?

he was a fourm member, the guy who did the weis market shooting

-warrior wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

-warrior wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

Columbine is like a soap opera.

The 11k is the key difference between Columbine and Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and all the other stuff. Both Cho and Lanza killed more folks than E&D, but we have tons more information on E, D, their victims, and everyone else who went to the school. If we didn't have the 11k, there wouldn't be nearly as much to study.

we have tons of info on stair, he isnt that famous

Who is Stair? Joe Stair?

he was a fourm member, the guy who did the weis market shooting

Ah.

I was on the old board when Adam Lanza was a member. To say that I was disconcerted when I learned that I had interacted with a spree killer would be an understatement.

LPorter101 wrote:

I can relate to the feeling of being a freak in a sea of normals - zombies, Dylan called them. You hate the zombies because a) they are mindless sheep, b) they are happy, c) they are happy because they are mindless sheep, d), you can never be one of them, and thus e) you can never be happy. You hate them and resent them and envy them all at the same time.

Now, it is true that there are lots of folks out there who are not particularly happy to be alive, and there are vanishingly few who hatch and attempt to carry out grandiose plans to kill hundreds of people. Those kids had something wrong with them, at some level. But the basic feelings that Eric and Dylan had - Eric's rage, Dylan's malaise, and their shared hatred of their surroundings that bound them together - are not at all alien to me.

Did the conclusion that you can relate to the emotional landscape which created Columbine have an effect on your life?

LPorter101 wrote:

I was on the old board when Adam Lanza was a member. To say that I was disconcerted when I learned that I had interacted with a spree killer would be an understatement.

Don't let it get to you. It's happened to plenty of people before, and it'll happen to plenty of people in the future.

sscc wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

I can relate to the feeling of being a freak in a sea of normals - zombies, Dylan called them. You hate the zombies because a) they are mindless sheep, b) they are happy, c) they are happy because they are mindless sheep, d), you can never be one of them, and thus e) you can never be happy. You hate them and resent them and envy them all at the same time.

Now, it is true that there are lots of folks out there who are not particularly happy to be alive, and there are vanishingly few who hatch and attempt to carry out grandiose plans to kill hundreds of people. Those kids had something wrong with them, at some level. But the basic feelings that Eric and Dylan had - Eric's rage, Dylan's malaise, and their shared hatred of their surroundings that bound them together - are not at all alien to me.

Did the conclusion that you can relate to the emotional landscape which created Columbine have an effect on your life?

Well, it led to my joining the old board ... talking about the massacre helped me, in a roundabout way, to work out a lot of my issues.

So, yeah, it did have an effect on my life. A good one, more or less.