Profane Exegesis: If... (1968) And Columbine

Profane Exegesis: If... and Columbine Robert K Hogg (Email section) Movies eh. Here’s something I wrote quite recently, for myself of course, though there’s nothing to stop me finding some film site or a blog or whatever. I barely think that far ahead. I look on it as a novel excerpt. Observational sections within the story itself. I just wonder what a tutor would make of this sort of thing. I picked up a copy of Tell No one for cheap along with Choke – Chuck Palahnuik – I’ve had it before but gave it away. And Cerebrus part One, a graphic novel, from Tills bookshop, but I’m reading Ballard’s Kingdom Come. I’ve a number of his novels and begin one then get distracted, but I’m finding it quite easy to stick with it this time. The similarity in outlook is quite striking. None of this is very funny, though I do write some quite darkly amusing stuff. This was the easiest to find as I want to get out while the shops are still open. I sold a couple of prints at the time, on the Mound, to a woman with her female friend from Columbine who had been on holiday for two weeks when the massacre happened. (Journal section). It’s 2.38 am. Isn’t it always. It seems like it sometimes. Earlier I watched Lindsay Anderson’s If…again. It sank in again just how dark it is. Darker than dark. It’s positively death-obsessed my dear. All this nihilistic talk about revolution; and death. “The world will end says Travis, in burnt, crisp bodies”. He could be right. That would make the film prescient in its way in more ways than one. He and his buddies collapse in hysterics while speculating on what would be the worst way to die. Later, after acting the goat during a session of war-gaming out in the field, they’re assigned to clean out the basement as constructive punishment by their liberal-minded and well-meaning headmaster. Among all the assorted junk, they come across a cabinet full of medical curios. The girl they 'met' in the café earlier, who is with them, takes the specimen in the jar from Travis and puts it back. Whether this is to signify her motherly and protective instincts and that some things are best left alone, I don’t know. The implication might also be that if she hadn’t, Travis may have done something unspeakably abominable with it. Or is that just me? Again, the incident contributes to the atmosphere of nihilism, of the horror and chaos that lies just beneath the surface of things, as if to say all the routine, rules and tradition that seems to govern their lives is just so much superficial BS, barely containing it if at all, and neither will it as it turns out, as shortly after they find a cache of weapons; machine guns, grenades, ammunition. The school’s fate is sealed,

as is theirs. Ominously, Travis was improving his aim with an air pistol in his room, after the caning. They consolidate their pact. “Death to the oppressor”. Earlier, there was an interestingly contrasting metaphysical theme introduced, when the geeky kid at the window is peering out at the stars through his largish telescope. (Just before the caning of Travis and co., he's looking through a microscope; the macrocosm and the microcosm). Travis is there, and the other boy tells him it’s a scientific certainty that among all those millions of stars there's another planet and they speak English”, and offers Travis a look through his telescope. (I was hoping it would be pointed towards Saturn, reminded of seeing it at Dundee Observatory in my early teens; an incredible sight). But then it would be too small to see the rings. I think. Instead, he tilts it downwards, and there's the girl from the café waving at him from her window. Wholly unlikely, but the film blends fantasy with realism. The sexual undercurrent that permeates the school and the boys thoughts is suggested by the guilt feelings of one of the more mediocre pupils because of them, as well as an amusing scene with Travis and chums during lunch hour when their attractive and generously proportioned matron is sitting at the head of the table. Maybe she's the headmistress, I'm not sure. Later, when they’re all out during the war-games sequence, there’s a scene where she walks naked through the their wash-up and shower area, so the inflection is, she is as repressed or sexually frustrated as they are; and as attracted to them. There’s another scene where the boys have to help themselves to a bun each, at tea, and she rounds harshly on a kid who tries to filch an extra one. Clearly, she is as petty-minded and as mean-spirited as the rest of them. There's an understated theme on homosexuality. Some of the older prefects attraction to a 'pretty' blonde-haired boy, who they get to fag' for him, but one of Travis' athletic buddies befriends him. They even lie together sleeping in bed. It’s the sadistic caning Travis and his room-mates receive at the hands of the prefects...head-boys...that sets off the impulse for revenge in Travis. His punishment was more severe than the others, as he made no attempt to disguise the contempt he has for one prefect in particular, after he 'confiscates' Travis’ necklace made of his own teeth; by pulling it from his chest. The beating was for their general “attitude.” Travis repeats the word in contemptuous bemusement when they’re called to the prefects’ study. I take the film as an indictment of arrogance, narrow-mindedness, and hypocrisy. The powers that be worship force, war, and death, in the name of tradition, 'goodness' and religion. 'Petty cruelties and humiliations carried out in the name of authority.' Sounds familiar and all the more apposite almost forty years later. They are of course, deranged. Travis and his buddies react in kind. The mediocrities on some level, recognised the potential threat they represent, and attempted to break their spirit. All

hell breaks loose, and a bloodbath ensues. They can be dismissed as a few very/bad eggs. End of story. In a sense, Travis did bring the end of the world for them, as I brought it with me so to say, when I was at school. The pity is he equates it with death and annihilation – of his perceived oppressors, along with himself and his friends. The ego gets everybody, as always. Not this time, if I can help it, along with some help from above, so to speak But it makes a great movie of course. I thought I just might go the same way. There was always a distinct possibility, or a potential one. And look at what the future brought. Now as I get older and life seems to blend into the mundane and unexciting, meaning emotional stability seems to be creeping up on me over the years in spite of myself, things paradoxically, become far more interesting than I ever dared dream. And I take it all very calmly, as if almost there is an believability about it. If the transcendence of the small sense of self in the face of hast larger Self is the truest definition of success, then perhaps success is the best form of revenge after all, as Seinfeld once said. But then it depends on your definition of revenge. (He touched on that later too, in the stand-up at the end). And success. All a matter of interpretation, as is everything in this world. The real fear is that the end of the world is the beginning of love. And that the beginning of love is the end of the world. Which it is of course. But as love has always been here, and is renewed in every kindly thought, however infinitesimal, then so has the end of the world always been with us. Even in the midst of death and seeming despair we’re surrounded by and are eternal life forever more. Sometimes you’ve got to give yourself a little boost. I just look forward to the day when I hear the same sentiment expressed on my latest favourite sitcom on Paramount, whatever it may be. At the moment, I’ve drifted into watching Scrubs after ignoring it for the most part for months. Clever, witty, and touching. The standard of most American comedies is pretty incredible, and has been for years. Don’t get me started. Comedy is getting more innovative all round I think. It’s my daily dose of sanity/happy pills. Who needs drugs when you have cable TV? Neither am I being ironic. Intriguing time-travel stories and Heroes on Sci-Fi, the wonderful world of weird on all the Discovery Channel’s, the frightening phantasmagoria that is our nightmare dream of history on, you guessed it, The History Channel, and another form of the same only more so, on Crime and Investigation; of which, I caught Final Report, on Columbine, or The Columbine Massacre, as they prefer to term it. It was interesting to hear there had been talk of whether the parents of the mass murderers could be held accountable. That surely they should (and by extension, would) have seen the danger signs. By this reasoning, this of course, makes them implicit in the killings; accomplices by proxy if you like. Guilty by direct association. They spawned the fiends. Kill the fuckers. Kill them all. Every last

one of them. In the name of the law. For what they did to our kids. An eye for an eye. Somebody should pay for this. Someone has to be held accountable. And of course if the blame could be laid 'fairly and squarely' on their shoulders, or at least enough to blur the issues, then it will of course, divert attention away from the most obvious question. Not just how could teenagers get their hands on such dangerous weapons, or did the school see any warning signs (and how might it notice the danger more quickly in the future), but who did they think they were they mad at, and why? Clearly it wasn’t their parents, as they lived to be around to be the potential scapegoats for it. They shoot the place up and gun down tens of students with a sawn-off shotgun and semi-automatic weapons, along with the odd teacher they come across. They even told one or two of them this is payback for people being mean to them, as they put it, the year before. They even asked some students of they believed in God, before shooting the ones who said they did. This is interesting as it demonstrates an even more hidden agenda, or certainly an unspoken, undisclosed and one that isn't discussed. And to cut to the chase, it reflects the war with God we all share on an unconscious level. As ACIM says, 'the world was made as an attack on God.' The world and the whole phenomenal universe was made so we can hide from a God we believe is out to destroy us for having separated from him. Info they probably wouldn't have been in the least inclined to listen to. What else is new?). They were a year in preparation for the massacre. I’d say whether they were paranoid or deluded or no, their grievance was with the school. Like all of us they were looking for someone to blame. In some circumstances, it’s simple enough to justify it. The day in, day out, petty humiliations, and perhaps more substantial ones, feeling they're accumulating beyond endurance. All a matter of how one chooses to interpret it, and clearly they went off at the deep end, but something sparked it off. Students they believed or perceived as having shown them consideration before, they let them live. To point any finger of culpability at any aspect of the running of the school is, apparently, almost unthinkable. It’s unspeakably bad enough already what’s happened to them. Let’s just blame the parents. God forbid it should be any aspect of 'the system,' and their, to quote Suicidal Tendencies, “institutional learning facilities.” The number one cause of death in the world is suicide. Thousands of kids every year die at their own hands due to being bullied, or feeling unheard, invisible, impossibly pressured. Inevitably, some are going to take a more assertive or proactive stance, one might say. And murder and suicide are only different sides of the same coin. And 'petty' harassment and bullying is murder all the same, as it stems form the same impulse, the same thought-system. The end result is and was still suicide. The ego gets everybody. Only it takes out substantially more in their case. A homicidal solution to a seemingly unforgivable indiscretion or wound to ones self-esteem, where even death seems a

small price to pay compared to the satisfaction of revenge, however illusory. That’s their final report.' And anyway, some of the information the FBI gained from the tapes the assassins themselves made, is still classified, so it can hardly be a definitive summing up. Their own justification is that it might spawn copycat killings. This seems to have happened anyway. I would hazard the guess they were quite specific on those tapes as to why they felt compelled to act in such a way; however unbalanced, deluded and unjustified in reality it was. They may have indicated it already in any case, when they were raging in the third person about protecting some kid from others. They could have as easily been talking of themselves and perhaps were. When I was at school there was no one I would have thought of as a sympathetic ear – at school or at home. If anything, the culture colluded in the perception it would be somehow unmanly or cowardly, and that one has to muddle through as best one can, as if all the lunacy and sneaky and overt aggression is the natural order of things, disguised as a rights of passage of sorts, when all it is, is an expression of projection and the belief in the pecking order. Might makes right. If the Columbine killers believed in the same, then it’s only a reflection of what they learned. It’s a circular situation. As I experienced it, too many teachers, in secondary school, were preposterously emotionally immature, intentionally offensive, aggressive and contemptuous. Whether through physical punishment and the pretext for it, sanctioned by the authorities of the time, or just taking matters into their own hands when it suited them, it was made clear enough that they believed violence and the threat of violence was the solution and the answer to whatever they felt warranted it and they would get away with. The idea that this aggression has for the most part magically vanished because corporal punishment is now illegal is ludicrous, naïve, and misleading. The establishment and its science would still have us believe Darwinian values rule. Give a disgruntled kid access to lethal weapons and he’ll take it to its 'natural' and illogical conclusion. It's 'survival of the fittest', after all. 'Didn't see this coming, did you guys?' We made this world ourselves. We won’t unmake it by refusing to look at ourselves while forever looking for others to blame. That’s why we put them there after all. I blame the parents myself. Just kidding. As Colin Wilson wrote, possibly in Mysteries, it's 'survival of the most intelligent.' But what if intelligence is confused with cleverness? Certainly cleverer and 'more intelligent' than the Golden Rule, as few people seem to follow it. So clearly they/we must believe we know better. Sneaky, covert, indirect, murderous aggression is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”. A lot of people believe this, though they'd never put it to themselves this way of course. (It's always been there. But it's increasing, or becoming more pronounced, joining forces. Denial is more prevalent as the aggression increases. It's a virtual epidemic. A narcissists world. The lines are becoming more cleverly demarcated by

the day, as the world polarizes/. You're either for them or against them, in their mind. Because if you don't think, look, and act like them you are against them. The left-brainers want to keep God out. They've never seen any need for him. There may come a day when they ask you if you believe in God, then the comparisons will be clearer. But fundamentalists of whatever persuasion always see their 'sins' in others). Authority figures, Daddy knows best. Go with the flow, the rest. Don't rock the boat. And the body is the seen as the locus of vulnerability, the focus of the insanity, through punishment and deprivation, whether being 'sent to Coventry'/enforced or manipulated isolation, sequestration, or assassination. And so it goes. Passive, 'civilised' aggression is a way of keeping the separation from God going, as well as each other. It's the belief in triumph through murder. Seeing others as 'monsters' and these events as an unforeseen 'mystery' is the way we choose not to see we all share the same thought-system of murder. And that we get there together or not at all. I woke up this afternoon, thinking about it again. It was this what were the danger signals BS again, preying on my mind. I know what it is, why it bothers me. It’s the sheer one-sidedness. Almost the wilful blindness that insists on looking every place but the right place. That intrinsic talent we all have for knowing instinctively how to not step out of line, to fit in, to blend seamlessly into the foreground, and toe the party line. Again, the most obvious question: Why did they want to kill anyone? There’s this automatic assumption of their own harmlessness and helpfulness. This is to be accepted as a given. The sole motivation for it laid squarely on the bad guys, the perpetrators. Under the circumstances, a difficult conclusion to question, and for that reason, also a conveniently simplistic one. But a question asked in such a way that dictates in advance what form of the answer should take is anything but an open question. Interestingly, I watched a bit of the same series, Final Report, on the two snipers that terrorized Washington D.C. in 2002, where the fundamental question asked was the one I’ve quoted above (I say a bit, because I was a bit short on sleep, afternoon notwithstanding, and let myself doze off while watching it. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out the technological intricacies of connecting the video-recorder yet). You’d think they’d compare notes between programmes. In this case, there was no problem in raising it, it seems, as clearly, the people they wanted to kill and did kill was Joe Public, your average and everyday citizen. There was no question or inflection of involvement in any sense of any authoritarian system that could have possibly brought the crisis however indirectly; or even directly. As there was no need to raise any such possibility, the most obvious question could be asked. And better still, as it turned out, it looks like it was a couple of black guys with a grudge against society and authority, one still in his teens. And to top it all, he seemed to believe society and the world was identical as portrayed in the movie, The Matrix. So they were wilful outsiders and mentally ill. Case closed. Would that it were that simple.

Sat 10 Nov. 07. Just as an added footnote, I believe The Matrix to be fundamentally accurate in its premises and as explored at length in Jake Horsley’s Matrix Warrior: Becoming the One. The big mistake is to get into the state of mind where you believe you have to attack illusions head on, which only makes them real, or as Wapnick once put it, witnessing to the reality of death. Prolifers murdering abortionists for example. 'Making the error real.'