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You’re Not a Rebel, You’re Psychotic!

by
April 24, 2007

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.

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:

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Michael is an editor of Nextbook and a contributing editor of Jewcy. His work has appeared in Slate, Gawker, New York, Democratiya, Reason, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, City Journal and Standpoint. His blog is Snarksmith.

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