----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 3:34 PM
Subject: Re: Version 2: Lynndie England to her Baby Son
> I also want to write from inside the Columbine kids, Eric Harris and Dylan
> Klebold. Recreate them. One mind or two or one? I was those kids when I
> was in Junior High School. I lacked only a companion in misery and access
> to weapons. I can't say I exactly went "right on!" when I heard what they
> did, but I could start to understand what might have pushed them to both
> vengeance and self-annihilation...the same impulse.
>
"Ken's Deviants" is a worthwhile idea. Remember that Browning's first (or
was it second) collection of dramatic monologues was called Madhouse Cells.
I tried to do something with Klebold and Harris several years ago, not
successfully. What strikes me about them and other teenage mass-murderers
is that they don't really focus their hatred on the jocks and cheerleaders
who tormented them. They often predictably adopt Nazi prejudices, and when
they start shooting they seem happy to shoot everybody. Of course there
would be no moral justification for selective murder, but it would be more
understandable. In some dark way, the indiscriminate killer is still trying
to evade his own pain. A generalized vengeance is easier, more grandiose,
more normatively adolescent, than a particularized one; a generalized hatred
replaces rather than admits vulnerability.
I think of Marx's statement that the criminal is a pillar of the system, not
a rebel. Without exchange-value he'd be nothing. In Al Capone's cell, two
crossed American flags filled one wall. Perhaps the same argument applies
to the criminal psychopath: he replicates individually and all at once what
the system does incrementally and collectively . All of a sudden there are
only two classes: the living (himself) and the dead.
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