>But the anomie expressed in contemporary youth culture, and parroted by
>our two killers, is a long way from organised racism. The appeal of
>racist epithets in this context seems closer to their shock value than
>it does to an identification with a militarised society like Nazi
>Germany.
Jim, fuck your high falutin anomie, frankly.
Either Klebold or Harris stalked the halls of that high school taunting minorities who passed him by with the epithets N-word and Spic. That's shock value to you; it's real racist abuse to those who suffered it, no matter how anachronistic it may seem. His parents didn't stop him, the principal didn't stop him. I was called into the principal's office for wearing a budweiser cap that I found lying around and threatened with suspension for encouraging alcohol abuse. These kids wore swastikas and didn't face any discipline; their parents let them walk out the door attired like that. This Denver suburb sounds like a stinking racist cesspool. It allowed these kids to follow their sick twisted and racist logic to its horrifying end without any real challenge to the ideas they were openly and publically developing.
These rich, upper tracked kids were punks, convinced of their own genius and special standing in society (no doubt reinforced by the 5 BMW's Klebold's (?) parents owned); by the way, these kids did not simply represent iconoclastic narcissism or (as I would put it) misanthropic individualism but racist iconoclastic narcissism. Charles has only insisted on the qualifier, not any reduction to race. I think he's right. And the only thing that probably prevented their being beaten into a pulp by a few of those 30 or so spics and n-words is the clear sense of the latter that the administration or the police would throw behind the racist punks or discipline them 'equally' despite Klebold and Harris already having records.
Think of the dilemmas of the minority parents: send your kid to a well funded school in which there is some culture of scholastic achievement at the expense of exposure to so called shock value epithets.
Yours, Rakesh