Return to normalcy: The Onion's "Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying" parody

The Onion has a way with rubbing up against uncomfortable truths at the least comfortable moments. The satiric weekly's coverage of 9/11 was shrewd and hilarious, yet also oddly tasteful—a near-miraculous editorial feat in the somber weeks of late September, 2001. But if The Onion ever stumbled in its coverage of disaster, it was in "Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying," published four months after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris machine-gunned their classmates and teachers:

Thanks to stern new security measures, a militarized school environment and a massive public-relations effort designed to obscure all memory of the murderous event, members of Columbine's popular crowd are once again safe to reassert their social dominance and resume their proud, longstanding tradition of excluding those who do not fit in.

"We have begun the long road to healing," said varsity-football starting halfback Jason LeClaire, 18, a popular senior who on Aug. 16 returned to the school for the first time since the shooting. "We're bouncing back, more committed than ever to ostracizing those who are different."

The dubious subtext of this parody? The cool kids had it coming.

Let us at once agree that many teenagers are mercilessly tormented in high school, which is essentially an adolescent caste system where good looks, athleticism, and sociability determine one's status. You can choose your pop culture referent here, from Rebel Without a Cause to The Wonder Years to Freaks and Geeks. (John Hughes's contribution to the genre was to argue that money is also a factor, especially in economically mixed school districts.)

But now that a psychotic South Korean undergraduate has outdone Klebold and Harris for intramural violence, and even bucked the pattern of school slayings by perpetrating his on the campus of a college rather than a high school, we've been presented with two explanations of what went wrong.

The first is that Seung-Hui Cho was clinically insane and as such could have been preemptively "profiled." Nothing conditioned him into slaughtering 32 people with premeditation but his own diseased mind. Easy access to semiautomatic weapons enabled him to manifest his psychopathology on a disturbingly large scale, but he was a homicidal maniac to begin with.

Blaming the victims: Ames's book says the fault lies with American culture, not massacrists

The opposing line of thinking is a po-faced caricature of The Onion’s caricature: It runs that Cho was himself the original victim, the inevitable product of his cruel environment. His schoolmates baited him for his race, his shyness, his nerdy interests, his awful, tenebrous poetry, and more or less everything that made him different from themselves. So they had it coming. That Cho finally "snapped" (a quaint characterization of a very deliberate process) and demanded the lives of as many people in his immediate vicinity as possible—and that he tried to maximize that number by chaining the exits and studying his terrain to ensure the greatest carnage—should surprise you in only one respect: that it took him so long.

This is the view that has been taken up by Mark Ames, the editor of the eXile magazine and the author Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

Here is Ames’s latest piece for AlterNet, adapted in part from his book:

Like their rage counterparts in the adult world, school shooters could be literally any kid except perhaps those who belonged to the popular crowd, the school's version of the executive/shareholding class. That is to say, about 90 percent of each suburban school's student body is a possible suspect.

And once again, I believe this at the very least suggests that the source of these rampages must be the environment that creates them, not the killers themselves. And by environment I don't mean something as vague as society but rather the schools and the people they shoot and bomb.

It isn't the schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled -- they can't be. It is the schools that need to be profiled.

A list should be drawn up of the characteristics and warning signs of a school ripe for massacre:

* complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;

* antiseptic corridors and overhead fluorescent lights reminiscent of mid-sized city airport;

* rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and

* maximally stressed parents who push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.

If the goal here is to expose the "root causes" of these crimes in order to avoid them rather than justify them, then Ames is already hopelessly lost. For one thing, if severe emotional distress and persecution were sufficient conditions for "about 90 percent of each suburban school's student body" to start massacring the other 10 percent, then we would surely have suffered many more Columbines and Virginia Techs. Thirty-two dead bodies would not now be the record to beat, and we’d have long grown inured to "rage, murder, and rebellion."

Mark that last item in Ames’s subtitle: according to him, these blood-soaked affairs are deliberate insurrections against the established order, comparable to North American slave uprisings of the 18th and 19th centuries! Abraham Lincoln was wrong to call John Brown a "fanatic," and Ames thinks we are similarly wrong to call Seung-Hui Cho a psychopath.

It hardly matters to Ames that Brown led an organized revolt of abolitionists and formulated a provisional constitution (vetted by no less a figure than Frederick Douglass) that would govern Virginia after his militia freed the state. After all, doesn’t Cho have a manifesto, too? And whereas Osama Bin Laden has Islam’s climacteric at the Gates of Vienna and square dancing in Greeley, Colorado to justify his “rebellions;” the trench coat mafia has…fluorescent lighting.

The silent, troubled majority?: Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui

Ames also blames Reaganism (yes) for turning mind-numbing consensus, overweening parents, and petty teen hypocrisy into the enriched uranium of a one-man WMD such as Cho. That these phenomena long predate Columbine or Virginia Tech seems lost on our Marx of Manslaughter. Getting shoved into one's locker, or having one's underwear run up a flagpole are clichés of teen angst. Marilyn Manson and Kurt Cobain didn’t have to invent these things, and the movie Heathers didn’t have to find a smirking, black catharsis for them. They’ve been around as long as there have been teenagers. But Ames thinks it’s supply-side economics that unleashed these beasts upon us.

What prevents the vast majority of student bodies around the country from buying semiautomatic weapons and perforating their cohort? Are those demented figures who will now look to Cho as a martyr but never follow in his footsteps somehow more stoic than he? Answer came there none. Ames drowns in his own sociological reductionism only to wash up on the shore of moral cretinism by suggesting that the "people [school gunmen] shoot and bomb" are responsible for their own murders.

I’d quite like to know, then, how Liviu Librescu—the aeronautical engineer and Holocaust survivor whose only offense seems to have been shielding students and thus reducing the number of corpses Cho produced—did anything to add to the killer's encyclopedic list of grievances. Was Librescu among that vicious 10 percent that must have got Cho down? Or would Ames—who professes a staunch hatred for both the war in Iraq and the linguistic evasions by which the President obscures the war’s failures—prefer to term the scientist "collateral damage"?

Ames's proposed remedies are as inexpensive as his rhetoric: Alert bulletins about imminent hallway berserkers! And how might an unsympathetic school administration that ignores complaints of teen abuse suddenly flag itself as an accident waiting to happen? "This is your principal speaking: Due to that bitch Stacey Petersen's queen bee antics, I've decided to call a lock-down on the premises, effective immediately." Will an outside party be in charge of monitoring the in-crowd to make sure the North Face fleeces and Dave Matthews tracks remain at an unprovocative minimum?

It would be all too easy to write off Ames as a crackpot theorist with good intentions—namely, to forestall future school massacres by anatomizing the conditions in which previous ones have occurred. However, judging by the content of his shabby polemic, and his other writings on the subject, his intentions are more in line with those hapless victims of circumstance he shamefully exculpates and, indeed, lionizes. Nor is his avowed disdain for abstract terms like “evil” when used to describe the Chos and Klebolds and Harrises of the world anything but disingenuous.

One of the survivors of the Columbine nightmare was a state wrestling champion named Rocky Hoffschneider. A school bully right out of central casting, Hoffschneider actually did shove someone into a locker (his own girlfriend); he routinely beat up weaker students, both on and off the wrestling mat, and even sang pro-Hitler songs and shouted “another one in the oven!” whenever a Jewish student scored a basket in Phys Ed.

In an article published in the eXile, entitled “Columbine’s Most Wanted,” Ames encouraged readers to track down this now graduated thug’s home address, which the magazine would then publicize for the purpose of… well, better let Ames tell it himself. Note especially the use of the term “evil” here whereas he thought it semantically void when applied to Cho:

Rocky Hoffschneider may be a symptom of some larger evil, but he is also a perpetrator, a willing, enthusiastic executioner. We have given you his name and his general whereabouts. Now I’m asking readers to hunt him down and find out where he lives, so that we can publish his address here in the eXile. If you do, you'll get a very sweet prize from us, I assure you.

I’d also like to ask readers to consider what justice would be appropriate, and send in your entries. I can’t call for something like physical harm or property damage, although I would certainly UNDERSTAND it. Remember, Rocky is a big, mean hog, but he’s also an incredibly stupid, evil piece of shit. That means he’s got vulnerabilities wider than the Maginot Line which you can exploit. The goal is justice. Let’s ride the fucker straight to alcoholism and anti-depressants. That is the best way to mark April 20th.

And if after the alcoholism and anti-depressants Hoffschneider decides to open fire on the readers of eXile, we at least know who will be first to jump to his defense.

 [This post has been edited since publication.]