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Essay on Classical Theory and the Columbine High School Massacre
No sooner had the gunfire begun around 11:30 a.m. on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, than accounts of it began to emerge, ranging from what happened to why it happened. Quickly, culturally saturated "narrative truth" merged with the "historical truth" (Spence) of the event and came to define it. It soon began to sound like similar other cultural stories in its cast and type of characters, sequence of events, story line, motivational inquiry (why the actors did what they did), the boundaries of the event (who was and was not on stage), and the like. The massacre quickly became woven into often-competing discourses, diagnoses, or interpretations which variously foregrounded "parental responsibility," "the power of the peer group," "bad genes," and "vulnerable temperament."
Certain cultural categories quickly emerged as part of a recognizable taxonomy: violence, schools, teens, gangs, adolescence, workplace, safety, control. The Columbine shooting became part of standardized ways of accounting for the way events "like this" happen. Psychohistorian David R. Beisel describes how his university classroom discussions on the day following the Columbine shootings "echoed discussions in the media" (Beisel, 1999). The unsaid and the culturally unsayable are the underside of the said and the sayable. It is almost as if the media provide the "secondary elaboration" rather than the "dream work" itself--yet claim to present the dream itself, and are believed. Beisel writes: The media not only provides information, but also performs a defensive function.
It is as if the media is an analysand, presenting all kinds of detailed data while hiding impulses, fantasies, and wishes through denials, rationalizations, displacements, projections, and the avoidance of facts (or topics) that might hint at the truth. (Beisel, 1999)Where, Beisel asks, were inquiries about the childhoods of Klebold and Harris, and comparisons with accounts of the early lives..............
