Columbine, by Dave Cullen, Twelve, 417 pages, $29.99
An erroneous detail sneaking into the obituary of my great-aunt caused one relative to comment sardonically, “Makes me wonder how much other fact was created.”
The danger is real to every journalist. Mistakes are made, sources are sometimes wrong, officials can lie and witnesses are notoriously unreliable. And once errors appear in print, they have entered the permanent record.
This is particularly dangerous on big, emotional and fast-developing stories. The 1999 massacre in Columbine High School in Colorado was all of those, and the myths sprang up, veteran journalist Dave Cullen notes, before the bodies of the killers even were found. They were fed by a credulous public accepting hearsay as fact, police deception and the urgent desire for a tidy explanation.
Cullen, who keeps himself almost entirely out of the story, admits in an author's note that he was among the guilty in “the great media blunders” of the early coverage. And there are hints throughout of the frustration he must have felt with the long-running cover-up. He describes the authorities acting “comically” in their attempts to hide information, in one case numbering trial transcript pages, removing thousands and then releasing the remainder with obvious gaps in the sequence.
This book, the product of 10 years on the story, is an attempt to tell the entire truth. It puts to rest many of the myths that linger in the public consciousness.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did not consider themselves part of Goth culture and did not listen to Marilyn Manson. They did not target jocks and were not bullied, and both had plenty of friends.
The book also takes on some of the most treasured legends surrounding the massacre. It debunks thoroughly the story of an evangelical girl being shot after professing her faith and dismisses as “simplistic ... and absurd” the rush to blame violent movies and video games.
But Cullen goes farther, arguing that this was not really a school shooting at all. It was an attack on society itself, intended to instill fear across the nation and secure the boys eternal notoriety. It was largely planned by Harris, who had no political demands but clearly grasped the terrorists' need to create spectacular mayhem.
Successful execution of his plan – which included propane bombs in the school, sniper fire to kill those fleeing and car bombs to take out media, first responders and grievers – would have wiped out hundreds. The shoddily built bombs did not detonate, though, and the boys settled for a traditional school shooting.
The attack still sent out shock waves. It ended with 12 students and one teacher dead. Harris and Klebold killed themselves. At the time, it was the worst such massacre and it capped a seeming epidemic of school attacks in the late 1990s.
In the paranoid aftermath, Gus van Sant released Elephant , a brilliant movie about a school shooting. Though a work of fiction, the 2003 film reflects much of what was popularly believed about the Columbine killings. It exposes the inanity and petty cruelty of school culture and, during the attack, one of the scorned kids offers a terrible prophecy. “You know there's others like us out there too, and they will kill you if you fuck with them like you did me and Alex,” he warns.
That was exactly what many parents feared.
Of course, there had always been violence in U.S. schools, but the deaths of poor urban students didn't make the news the same way. Societal outrage was reserved for killings in white suburban United States, a hypocrisy noted by Eminem. “Look where it's at; Middle America, now it's a tragedy; Now it's so sad to see, an upper class city; Havin' this happenin',” he rapped in his 2000 single The Way I Am .
Eminem correctly identified the double standard, but himself fell for the convenient explanation of “a dude's gettin' bullied and shoots up his school.” Columbine, whose very name became shorthand for a school shooting, was anything but the lashing out of high-school victims.
