[T]here's a chasm between normal human understanding and what happened there. Confronted with the lack of recognizable human logic, we have provided our own, to make us feel better, to profit, to justify the way we see the world. If we are Christian, the shooting showed the imperative of others sharing our faith. If we were unpopular in high school, it cast a light on the dangerous petri dish of public schooling. If we believe in gun control, it reflected the recklessness of the gun lobby and our country's frightening obsession with firearms.
To be honest, I was a little put off by his opener, in which he announces he spent "a week" in Littleton, CO back in 2000 "looking for answers". A whole week! I hope his expense account wasn't overburdened.
As far as "looking for meaning", while I recognize the human tendency to seek a "lesson" in an event of the magnitude of the Columbine High School massacre, to want something as large and ugly as that to have something to tell us, I would insist that the recent revelations that pretty much everything we knew about the event is wrong - it was the result of a sociopathic folie a deux, an attempted bombing of the school cafeteria that went awry - should once and for all set aside any thought that events of monstrous evil have something to tell us, as individuals or society. They just are; wanting them to mean more, in the odd belief that the dead would have died in vain without some "good" being dragged from the rubble doesn't change that fact.
Leitch is relentless in his criticism of those who sought either to profit from the horror, or to put their own spin on "what it all means":
Columbine brought out the worst in everyone. The famed story of Cassie Bernall, the "She said yes" martyr supposedly killed because she professed her faith in God, was quickly debunked, but that didn't stop publishers--who knew about problems with the story long before publication--from rushing a book by Bernall's mom into production. (It sold over a million copies.) Cultural commentators from Jerry Falwell to Eddie Vedder took advantage of America's hysteria to shoehorn the incident into a promotion of their own agenda. At least twelve different films have been inspired by Columbine, each with its own interpretation--from Gus Van Sant's "They were into violent video games ... and secretly gay!" in Elephant to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, which allowed Marilyn Manson to bemoan that he would have listened to Eric and Dylan, "and that's what no one did." Everybody had something to say, even though none of them had the slightest idea what they were talking about.
While the whores behind the "Cassie Bernall" story deserve no quarter, Marilyn Manson's expressed desire to "listen" at least has the virtue that he was expressing something that far too many weren't saying - that our youth need understanding rather than hectoring.
The ending of the piece is interesting.
I want answers. I know I won't find them. But I want them, nevertheless. I can't stop looking for them.
Since you know there's no "there", you can, too, stop. This article is the end of your search, I think.
