Culture Vultures: Littleton America

...feminism, which began in part as a rebellion against the stultifying isolation of suburbia (at the time, Betty Friedan was stuck outside New York in Westchester County...

...The so-called Information Age is actually an Entertainment Age in which violence is the most routine entertainment of all: On the accelerating descent into a "virtual childhood," violence requires nothing so humdrum as a cause—no motivation, no narrative drive, no character...

...N o man is an Island, said Donne, but he never foresaw a world where being able to be served cheeseburgers in your truck or to order pizza by e-mail would be trumpeted as progress...

...Feel no remorse, no sense of shame...

...But we've spent the best part of a century chipping away at the foundations on which this society was built...

...I knew Miss Dando barely any better than most of her admirers (I was interviewed by her twice), but I like to think she'd have found that woman only slightly less loopily obsessive than the guy who killed her...

...You can imagine the lawsuit that'd prompt over here...

...I live in Denver and god dammit I would like to kill almost all of its residents...

...Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main...

...F--k people," wrote one of the killers on his website...

...Cumulatively, they're wearing them out—and all these trends are too big and too interconnected for any politician to rail against...

...A century ago, no one had heard of demographics, and popular culture was truly popular...

...Not because I think "it can't happen here" but because, even if it did happen here, I don't think that that's justification: we need to re-establish trust in our communities, and, in that sense, a metal detector isprofoundly anti-social...

...But only in the grave can the adult world re-impose the PG rating America's children wiggle free from ever earlier...

...This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an electronic whimper...

...Philip Steele and his villainous prey agree to the terms of their duel to the death and then have a gentlemanly smoke: "Do you mind a little sleep after we eat...

...There were, as there always are now, hundreds of teddy bears and balloons—as if, in death, the slain could somehow be returned to the comforting innocence of childhood as it used to he...

...If you had time, you'd sit at the mom'n'pop lunch counter, yakking to the waitress and the guy on the next stool...

...It's that all these low-tech forms required, on the part of the reader, acts of imagination...

...President Clinton's solution to our woes is a federal grant to pay for a metal detector and an armed guard in every school...

...and, of course, a massacre in a Colorado high school...

...46 June 1999 • The American Spectator Whenever this topic comes up at my little grade school in New Hampshire, I excuse myself from the discussion: I had part of my education at an English public (i.e., private) school, and, with hindsight, it seems to me the entire system was expressly intended to lower your self-esteem to statistically unmeasurable levels...

...If you're in one of the oxymoronic "bedroom communities" served by Columbine High, you and your spouse get out of bed and drive to work somewhere else: You're an island, and your town is an archipelago...

...We cling to the reassuring vocabulary of community even as we lack the will to maintain it...

...It would be nice if the school could encourage him to join the band and learn to play "76 Trombones" on the kazoo, but he's an island there, too: If, like Columbine High, you have 2,000 pupils, the principal can't be expected to know everyone, and it's easy to fly just below the radar screen for four years...

...He has his friends, sure, but they're an island in the wider community: They have their own demographically targeted TV shows and radio stations,44 Most of the kids would not have wished to be memorialized with teddy bears...

...It's a success story: It has a median household income of nearly $51,000, and its teen killers weren't the only boys in town driving around in BMWs...

...Something of the same wistful nostalgia pervaded the ad hoc memorial in Littleton...

...When Kip's taste for violent cartoons, the "music" of "Antichrist Superstar" Marilyn Manson (who claims to be the Antichrist), throwing rocks at cars, torturing animals, and making pipe bombs began to get out of hand, his parents took him to the doctor...

...is that in small British towns the children are segregated virtually from birth —the posh kids go off to private schools, the rest go to the run-down ‘'comprehensive" — and from that initial division of community much else follows...

...A nd through it all the TV flickers away—on the bored clerk's checkout at the all-nite convenience store, in the sports bar, above the heads of commuters at the airport gate...

...Watching the week unfold in Littleton and London, you couldn't help feeling the reaction to these brutal killings A country without community is doomed...

...No man is an Island," wrote John Donne...

...the evening meal you pick up at the drive-thru...

...In Belgrade a couple of nights before, NATO had dropped several million bucks' worth of cruise missiles on the Jill Dandos of Serb TV...

...Instead of the communal pleasures of Tin Pan Alley, it's a furtive pleasure for the back alley, the dead end of American popular culture, the mutually hostile cul-de-sacs of various strains of unpopular popular culture...

...In the previous week, the news shows had been filled with images of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, a vicious nail bomb attack on a crowded shopping street in Brixton, MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...Mowing down stick figures, blips on a screen, requires no such emotional engagement: It's a pure sensory jolt, the thrill of action divorced from human motivation...

...But no longer...

...And then you laugh...

...After all, what else can we do...

...Your family is an island in your town...

...You can't be in the FAST squad, or a volunteer firefighter, or a relief librarian, because you're always miles away...

...And, needless to say, the teachers, counselors, cops did nothing: We must respect his boundaries—the boundaries of his island...

...At the BBC, e-mails from grieving fans poured in at the rate of one every two seconds...

...I'm [Insert Name Here...

...48 June 1999 • The American Spectator...

...But, at least in 1911, a lad could come in and read Steele of the Royal Mounted, in which in the frozen wastes of the far north Pvt...

...So, too, is that, in Bob Dole's pre-Viagra commercial where he goes into the diner back in Russell, Kansas, they won't accept a personal check from him, so he has to use a debit card...

...He would have been surprised at the elimination of so much routine social interchange from daily life: at the supermarket, the check-out clerk wears a badge saying "Hi...

...and the cash registerflashes up "Thank you...

...The slaughter-in-the-schoolyard graphics are on permanent standby...

...education system is mostly conditioned by my experience of the British education system...

...Have a nice day...

...But in prostrating themselves before the god of self-esteem, the nation's school districts have pretty well abandoned the latter function...

...The reality—the disintegration of American community, the retreat into social isolation—is too awesome to contemplate...

...You'll invariably find that, ahead of educational attainment or civic values, the school sees its primary purpose as inculcating a sense of "self-esteem...

...It's possible to be cautiously optimistic: One of technology's benefits is that it's spurred the creation of small businesses which can be operated almost anywhere...

...Then again, he never gunned anyone down...

...Every few months, as the screen fills with students talking about the murder of their classmates, glassy-eyed, in dull, unexpressive monotones, you begin to wonder if to teenagers the very idea of something causing violence isn't hopelessly quaint...

...The industries of the zest century will not involve long commutes...

...But this blase BBC viewer could barely stifle her yawns: It had taken the death of a television celebrity to touch her heart...

...During the "Six O'Clock News," which Miss Dando used to host, one missive briefly flashed up on screen behind her successor— a message from a woman who said she thought she'd become desensitized to violence until now...

...Most of those kids would not have wished to be memorialized with teddy bears...

...the no-fault divorce...

...Instead, in small towns across the land Americans built schoolhouses across the common from the church and the general store and the library because they believed that, like those institutions, the school contributed to the civic good...

...The American Spectator June 1999 47 The New England town meeting, according to Tocqueville, was the best system of government ever devised...

...Remember Kip Kinkel, the alliteratively appellated assassin of Springfield, Oregon...

...By the age of 14, the yobs from the comp are cheerfully burgling the snotty kids' mansions...

...But beyond all these, our new Island status is approved philosophically: Put a pin in the map anywhere you like and then ask that town's public school to send you its "mission statement...

...M y view of the U.S...

...For the news shows, it gets a little easier each time...

...But, when Marilyn Manson releases "S- - - y Chicken Gang Bang" and "Everlasting C r," it's reasonable to deduce he's given up on Grampa...

...But in a virtual world, the girl on the TV is more real than the real girl next door—just as Oprah's faux "book club" is more real to more Americans than the real book clubs organized by their next-door neighbors and her so-called "townmeetings" more real than any real town's real town meeting...

...It was the physical layout of postwar suburbia that pioneered the defining problems of the age: the long-distance commute...

...Between the millions of kids on Prozac and the millions on Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder, American schools are becoming one huge experiment in mood suppression...

...On my first day, a classmate forgot his bathing suit and not only did he have to swim in the nude, but on a chilly September day— it was an outdoor pool—he was made to stand on the top diving board so we could all laugh at his rapidly shrinking willy...

...It's not so much that dime novels, pulp magazines, and superhero comics dealt with codes of honor, duty, redemption, vengeance, and responsibility...

...They understood all too well how to work a system principally dedicated to making you feel good about yourself...

...The reality is that, until those two losers opened fire, the principal was barely aware of them...

...She was, everyone agreed, "the girl next door" — though, technically, the only person she was really the girl next door to was her neighbor in Fulham, who heard her screams and ran out to comfort her on their shared doorstep...

...But who cares about them...

...On American TV, it was Littleton, Colorado...

...I haven't slept a wink in three days and nights...

...Cool, man...

...Not just any celebrity, mind you...

...If a swastika's your bag, well, who are we to tell you otherwise...

...Fifteen crosses...

...Fifty-one percent of mothers work full time...

...How may I help you...

...The American Spectator • June 1999 45 was at least as weird and unhealthy as the killings themselves...

...The only wonder is that, growing up in generational, cultural, and moral isolation, beached on their desert islands, so few teen students go berserk...

...I'd far rather an adolescent boy was out in the woods learning how to hunt deer and bear and wild turkey...

...In many smalltowns, the computer guys have more in common with the foresters and dairy farmers than they do with the fellows who drive zo miles up the highway to the office: The high-tech boys are in town all week, available for the fire department and the FAST squad...

...Indeed, they managed their anger with an enviable efficiency: They knew the buzz words the counselors liked to hear and as soon as they got home they dumped 'em in the trash...

...With half the students, you don't want to be around when the medication wears off...

...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Littleton America 2 0 t's not quite routine, but it has become I eerily familiar: thousands upon thousands of pilgrims piling up mounds of flowers to people they never knew...

...with the other half, you don't want to be around when it kicks in...

...In truth, the difference between the leisure activities favored by the victims at Columbine High School and by their killers is mostly one of degree: Almost all cutting-edge teen-friendly pop culture is ugly, moronic, and anti-social...

...I don't want to use MasterCard in the diner...

...But it's 7 o'clock, so it's easier to pull into the Taco Bell drivethru on your way back, and besides, it's so long since you've been on Main Street you're not even sure if the mom'n'pop place is still there...

...America's public schools, by contrast, have traditionally had a twin responsibility: teaching little Johnny math and English, and history, which is of benefit to him, and molding him into a good citizen, which is of benefit to us all...

...Half a century ago, the suburbs were sold to those Americans fleeing urban decline as the natural repository of family values: all the traditional virtues of civic life, without the contemporary problems of the inner city...

...I don't want a metal detector in my school...

...But, when these atrocities occur, we agree to observe a pretense—that these are "closely-knit communities...

...But the question is whether the transformation of work patterns will happen before what Tipper Gore calls the "toxic culture" has contaminated every aspect of American life...

...You're an island, and if a Nazi insignia strengthens your self-esteem, then good for you...

...I want a world where Bob Dole's check is good enough for his neighbors...

...But it's mourning again in America —and everyone wants a piece...

...Your child is an island in your family: He stopped at Burger King on the way home...

...Sleep until you're ready," urged Philip...

...Look at the guys in Pearl, Mississippi, or the two boys who shot up Jonesboro, or the students in Springfield—all with the same dead-eyed look of a blank computer screen...

...The doctor put him on Prozac...

...In fact, they've turned out to be precisely the opposite...

...the working mom...

...But, for hassled parents and busy school administrators, rewiring is the easiest option...

...More to the point, instead of the Princess's heat-seeking glamour, Jill had, as her BBC boss put it, an "extraordinary ordinariness...

...Junior and Mom and Gram-pa could all bellow along to: "Casey, he waltzed with the strawberry blonde, And the band played on...

...the drifting, rootless population (2o percent of Americans move every year...

...Our determination to be scrupulously non-judgmental extends even unto mass murder: In Littleton, they put 15 memorial crosses on a hill above the town, 13 for the victims, two for the killers—for we must honor them as victims, too...

...I don't want to fight bad eyes...

...half of those would prefer not to...

...it's just a question of finding this week's blood-spattered grove of academe on the gazetteer and dispatching the chief massacre correspondent to interview surviving students, bewildered relatives, and the local cops, all of whom tend to talk like the students, relatives, and cops they saw on TV after the last massacre, and at least one of whom can be guaranteed to say, "We thought it couldn't happen here...

...Public education is a public good, not an individual right...

...Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind...

...Mom's wishes notwithstanding, more and more children are strangers to their parents...

...If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we'd say they had ADD or a conduct disorder," says Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Boys...

...Today's bedroom communities have all the contemporary problems, without the traditional virtues...

...likewise, at Columbine High School, you zap the jocks and blacks and religious believers because that's the game...

...But these deaths diminish us because they make us awkwardly aware that nowadays we are, in ways Donne could never have imagined, islands...

...You can't run on a platform of getting the American people to admit the way they live their lives doesn't work—even though, in private, many individuals feel that way...

...The thousands who descended from Denver and beyond on the shopping-mall parking lot for the Columbine memorial service spoke of their "need" to be there...

...and they barely connect with other generations except at Christmas and Thanksgiving...

...They are who they are and we need to love them for who they are...

...Jill Dando's murder provoked the biggest outpouring of public grief in Britain since the death of the Princess of Wales, to whom she bore a superficial similarity—they were both short-haired blondes, although Miss Dando's passing moved the Queen to a somewhat warmer and less forced tribute...

...There are no causes of violence any more: you zap the aliens because that's the game...

...If the only issue were SAT scores, we'd be better off giving each child a check and letting him spend it at whichever private academy best suited him...

...When the media describe Littleton as "a community united in grief," they may have a point: Certainly, it's not a community united in any other way...

...day care...Any one of these innovations would have stretched the fabric ofAmerican communities...

...the Rolodex is bulging with telegenic anger-management experts...

...They didn't know these adolescents, any more than they know the adolescents who live in their streets in Denver, Boulder, out of state...

...One reason England and Wales have twice the property crime rate of the U.S...

...on British TV, the very same week, it was a residential street in West London, where a popular anchorwoman—the BBC's "Golden Girl" — was shot and killed outside her home...

...After being convicted of breaking into a car, they passed the "anger management" program with flying colors...

...The requirement to be "part of the main" is gone...

...How many victims...

...Let's not try to rewire them...

...It should be clear from Littleton that those two homicidal jerks' problem was not a lack of self-esteem...

...But, as it's hard to tell which is which, you're best to steer clear entirely...