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Sympathy for the devil?

By Adrien Swords - posted Friday, 4 January 2008


Is Oswald a patsy? Yes and no. As far as the conspirators are concerned he’s a fall guy. Set him up as a Castro sympathiser, have him take a shot at Kennedy but have real marksmen there to do the job proper. Rendezvous in a cinema and shoot him. But Oswald shoots Officer Tippit on the way. The cops nab him. He f**ks it up. A patsy? Yes. But a compliant one. He takes a shot at Kennedy and misses. He’s involved.

But I digress. This post isn’t about the Kennedy assassination. It’s about men in small rooms. The second exhibit comes from the closing moments of the 20th century: lunchtime in a high school cafeteria. Two kids armed with shotgun, Tec-9, Hi-Point carbine. Dressed to kill these kids. What goes on?

Then as now there were the same debates regarding guns and American culture. Michael Moore got a hit film out of it. In 1999 the same phenomena: the Time magazine cover, the collective American soul-searching, the condemnation of guns. Klebold and Harris were goth-nerd types the classic stereotypical targets of Jocks in the high school heirarchy. On April 20, 1999 they declared open their rampage, stating: “All the jocks stand up, anybody with a white hat or a shirt with a sports emblem on it is dead.”

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Much was made of the tyranny of Jocks during the Columbine aftermath. The supposedly Nazi jock Rocky Hoffschneider was mentioned in several articles on the subject. Strangely enough neither Hoffschneider nor any of his friends were killed by Klebold and Harris that day.

Other scapegoats were touted. Video games like Doom; rock stars like Marilyn Manson. Manson was for a short while so associated with Columbine that he wrote a reasonably articulate piece for Rolling Stone in self-defence:

America puts killers on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when they plastered those dipshits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’ pictures on the front of every newspaper. Don’t be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols.

By the end of the year the whole thing had been forgotten. It was time to celebrate the new millenia, time to cross our fingers lest the Y2K “bug” should bring civilisation crashing down, time to go out and party …

Eric and Dylan who …?

There have been massacres since. Ironically the last one at an Amish school of all places. Try as you might to escape the violence of modern society, it seems it’ll find you out.

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And then in April again (is there something about April) a terminally lonely kid who barely spoke to anyone kills 32 people at his university. What follows? The same Time magazine cover story. The same collective soul-searching. The same reasons: it was popular culture, it was lack of gun control, it was video games.

But there was something slightly different at work here. Cho’s actions in many ways mirrored those of his predecessors. He prepared for the day buying his weapons well in advance. He dressed for the occasion. But he also took time to record a diatribe on video, to take photographs of himself and to mail these to NBC the morning of the massacre. In addition to the catalogue of images of Cho wielding his guns, Cho holding the hammer, there are plays by Cho, poetry, even a novel.

The package from Cho to NBC is now labelled his manifesto.

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First published at Adrienswords on May 2, 2007.



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About the Author

Adrien Swords (a pen name) is a copywriter and occasional journalist in his 30s. He lives in Melbourne. He was born in London and grew up in various parts of Asia and Africa: most especially Cairo and Tarbella (a small village in Pakistan's North-West Province) but he also spent a lot of time in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok etc. He graduated from Griffith University some hazy time in the last decade of the 20th century. Apparently he studied the media, history and literature. Adrien blogs at Adrienswords.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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