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“He was their son—but they didn't know the kid who did this.”
I set for myself three inter-related tasks in this essay: (1) an understanding of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999; (2) an understanding of physical violence (with knives, guns, bombs) perpetrated by adolescents in America; and (3) an understanding of the psychodynamics of American culture, of which (1) and (2) are at once symptom and metaphor. I shall argue that the slaughter of youth by youth at that Colorado school is in part an extension of the rage against the imminent disposability felt by tens of millions of Americans in an increasingly corporate-dominated culture. In the process, I hope to illumine such behavioral science conundrums as understanding human aggression, understanding contemporary “violence in the workplace” (a widespread social problem and category; see Allcorn, Anger), and understanding the relationship among perpetrators, victims, and bystanders (Hilberg)—a relationship that constitutes a single overarching culture.
This paper will explore the very nature of psychodynamically informed cultural explanation for a catastrophe that has been exposed to universal gaze and interpretation by satellite-facilitated television. Specifically, how does one conceptually link large cultural processes (indeed, species-specific human biology) with local events? Specifically, how do social processes, structures, values, and change in the wider culture contribute to the triggering and later construction of such events as the Littleton, Colorado, high school massacre? Further, how do cultures explain “themselves” to “themselves”?
In summary, this study will attempt to bridge the exploration of a single catastrophic event with the larger epistemological issue of psychodynamically informed cultural explanation itself. Stated differently, it will ad