Sympathy for the Devil
February 13, 2000

     What he tried to tell her was that he wanted to memorize the face of evil, so that if he saw it on the street he would know to turn and run the other way.

     Everyone has guilty pleasures--usually the stuff that you love and would be embarrassed to tell others about. My CD collection has a few of those--Debbie Gibson's Greatest Hits, Cher's Half Breed, The Carpenters, and even a copy of Vanilla Ice's first tape that somebody gave me and I never threw out. Those are guilty pleasures, but not guilty enough for this.

     I'm talking about the really guilty pleasures here, like the guy who dresses up in women's clothing after everyone is gone and the town's pulse is low and drowsy. Staring at himself in the mirror and thinking he looks pretty, and terrfied that someone else will catch him and start thinking he's crazy. That's guilty. When you're locked in a windowless box on the moon and you're still worried about getting caught, you know the level I'm talking about.

     I always feel weird when I see my copy of The Turner Diaries. I bought it because I was curious about this "evil book" that probably contibuted to the Oklahoma City bombing in some way. I read it, cringed, and kept thinking "Someday, when I am dead, someone will find that book on my shelf and think 'Aha! He was a racist!'" Which is why I wrote "I'm not a racist" on the inside cover. After awhile, I thought that was stupid and taped one of my rainbow flag checks over it.

     I also have a copy of the computer game Postal, which has no redeeming social value. It's simply a game of mass murder, where your character walks out of his house and starts blowing people away. The injured crawl on the ground, leaving blood trails and gasping "I can't breathe!" until you silence them with an execution-style push of the button. It's taboo, it's tasteless, it's no doubt reprehensible, and I still play it.

     I mention these because I also have guilty pleasures on the internet. Every so often, I like to cruise through as many white surpremecist, neo-Nazi sites as I can find and see what they're saying. As a gay atheist, I wouldn't be welcome at the homes of any of these people, and yet I feel compelled to examine their beliefs and to try and understand the hatred that's on display for the entire world to see.

     My newest detour through the internet's underbelly took me to sites that seem even darker and more sinister--pages that hold up Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as heroes to be pitied, admired, and possibly emulated.

     I skipped class so I could watch the live coverage on CNN when the boys were shooting at everything in sight. I was absolutely riveted by this televised seige, where students with cellular phones could call from their hiding places in closets and barricaded classrooms to talk to reporters. The seed of fascination was planted, much like the week I spent during my 10th grade year plowing through Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, trying to understand what possessed seemingly bright and promising people and turned them into killers.

I doubt [their classmates] were ignorant to the fact that they were hurting the two boys...If they weren't willing to show compassion to those who were simply different and not hurting them at all, then why should Eric and Dylan be expected to show compassion to those who were hurting them...severely? -- Outcast Heroes

     High school is hell. You've heard it, thought it, and seen it in movies like Carrie, Heathers, and Jawbreaker. I suppose people who were popular look back at those times with fondness, but a lot of other people were considered losers and outcasts. I suppose I was one of them. I had my circle of friends and a good relationship with my family.

     BUT: I made a few dollars writing short stories for students. These stories were of the "Pick your least favorite student and the preferred means of death" variety. For two dollars, I'd write a three-page fantasy in which football players were stapled to wrestling mats, beaten, and anything else you could (or wanted me to) imagine. These stories were typed, unsigned, and only given to students who could be trusted to keep quiet about it. In today's zero tolerance climate, such stories would've kicked me out of school.

     BUT: The longest story of that type that I wrote was called "The Battle of Sherman High." I turned the tables in this one, having teachers as the gun-toting aggressors and my 11th grade chemistry class as the heroes who managed to get some weapons and save the day. Lighter in tone, there was still a body count at the end and a possibility of a sequel.

     I've always been a big believer in "writing it out of your system."

This page is great. As an member of the Doomer Geek mafia (goths,punks, and stoners) in my high school. I am one of the kids that hate the jocks and preppies. GOD! I hate them. They would throw soda at me, yelled fag at my face.. pushed me and the teachers wouldn't care about me. BUt now Eric and Dylan taught me to fight and stand up to them. but what i hate about eric and dylan is that they should kill preps and jocks not randomly shootings [Emphasis added]. After the shooting. The jocks and the preps left me alone. Thank to eric and dylan! Let the name of Eric and Dylan live on! -- OMega DooMer (Guestbook Entry)

     Most of the Harris-Klebold memorials I've found are created and maintained by teenagers. The tone of the pages tend to be apologetic, along the lines of "We certainly don't condone the violent acts they committed, but..." The authors regard the duo as misunderstood kids pushed out of the normal high school angst and into a killing frenzy by the popularity pressure cooker. Their crime was terrible, the authors point out, but it had the benefit of shining a light on the problem.

     The guestbooks signers are often not as apologetic. They don't leave e-mail addresses and have complete anonymity. It's there that you find the "Kill 'em ALLLLLL!" and "Finish the job! 4/20/00!" slogans. It would be comforting to think that these are kids pulling pranks, the modern equivalent of calling in a bomb threat to annoy more people than they scare.

     The grim aspect is seeing my own empathy responses at work. I can surf Nazi and white supremecist sites without feeling any pangs that somewhere, buried under the hate, is a grain of truth. I don't dislike black people or jews, nor do I believe that everyone should stay with their own tribe to make the world a better place, so there isn't much for the hatemongers to use.

     BUT: One of the earliest rumors to be discarded said that Harris and Klebold were gay. If they had been, I probably would fall into the same trap of "I think it was an extreme reaction and violence is not the answer, but I understand the pressure they were under." Privately, where nobody else can look, I might applaud their actions for sending a wake-up call to the world about the homophobia and cruelty of school children and the indifference of administrators.

     It's not a comforting thought to have.

FACT: Some People said they wore masks if so they could NOT tell who the killers and when Harris & Klebold were found they found no masks on them nor could they find them in the school

FACT:Recent studies are now shoting that it is possible that the boys did NOT commit suicide that they may have well have been victims of gunshots.

-- Columbine: Facts They DIDN'T Tell You.

     A few sites have fallen into the arena of holocaust denial, putting forth theories about what might have happened. One site had a fictional account of anti-gun activists conspiring to destroy the NRA by committing the massacre and framing the boys (to his credit, the webmaster doesn't give it any credibility). Another theory, probably using the guy on the grassy knoll, brings out the idea of a third gunman. Some people are not content to let the simplest answer be the correct one.

     Some of the appreciation sites--many of them taking part in an internet ribbon campaign to remember Klebold and Harris--have links to audio and video clips of the two boys. Of course, you can surf and find the cafeteria videos of the rampage. I'm sure those images destroy the conspiracy theories for most, unless you're a die-hard who also believes astronauts never walked on the moon and that the lunar landing was filmed on a sound stage.

No, I am not crazy. Crazy is just a word, to me it has no meaning. -- Eric Harris, from his AOL site.

     My friend Greg has an online journal called Ezekiel 25:17, where he likes to rant and scream. I usually laugh myself silly at the way he rages against the world. It's like watching Donald Duck have a nuclear meltdown. As far as I know, Greg has no inclinations toward mass murder, but I kept thinking of Greg when I read the contents of Eric Harris's AOL site. "The warning signs are there!" I can hear people crying. "Why wasn't something done?"

     I think most people who read the Harris rants probably knew him and didn't take him seriously. Am I saying that I'm going to start watching Greg to make sure he's not wearing a trenchcoat and walking into a McDonald's restaurant with a sawed-off shotgun? Of course I'm not.

     Maybe I can keep you up at night by sharing these side-by-side excerpts from the rants. One belongs to Eric Harris, and one belongs to Greg. Can you tell the difference?

A One of these days I'm going to smack that beedy little grin off of his bald fucking head. No I won't, he's not worth getting expelled for. But you know, if someone were to punch him really hard in the chest? With his heart problems I'm sure it would cause him to go into arrest, and the bruise could be blamed on the paremedics trying to resusitate him. But I would never do that, would I? Either way, if he has a heart attack no one's going to be able to prove it for sure now. Did I, would I, could I? No, probably not. Not that I couldn't, but I would only kill in self-defense or defense of another, for now...

B You know what I hate? People who think they can forcast the weather!!! Then they think that everyone else will think that they're cool just because you said that we were gonna have a 4 foot blizzard starting today! Like just the other day, this punk i know was saying .."Yeah tomorrow we are gonna get like, 2 feet of snow in just a few hours. They were saying its gonna be the biggest snow in ten years. Yeah, it'll be about -60 outside too." And that day we get an inch of snow and its 26 out. I feel like getting a baseball bat, breaking it over his head, and then STABBING him with the broken end!!!

     It could scare you, if you let it. You read the journals and think "Well, they're just letting off steam." One of them built bombs and blew away classmates, and the other is a big teddy bear.

     You have to avoid paranoia and look hard for the line between words and potential actions if you want to get through the day. I like to write horror stories in the splatterpunk vein of unflinching blood and gore, and yet I get sick and feel like throwing up when I see news photos taken of battlefields. I've killed enough people in my stories to fill up a church, but I'm still haunted by the images of a murder victim I saw floating in the river, head down, her hair waving like seaweed in the tide.

You are placed in a large, open arena to fight in. There are multiple stair cases and lots of ammo laying around. Plenty of health too. There are 4 other sections to this level to fight in, they are; A computer lab, a darkened and lightened tunnel with crevices to hide in (hint hint), and a cave-like room with a river 'o' sludge flowing through. And don't worry about getting cornered, there are plenty of places to run and hide if you are in trouble!

Additional Credits to : Well, the creators of Edmap, you rule, dudes. The creators of BSP and ADE2, you guys saved this WAD countless times from evil, bad-ass bugs! The creators of WINTEX, for letting me put in all those rockin' graphics. The Paintbrush creators to make them. Uuuuuuhh, My good friend Dylan Klebold for helping me play-test this WAD. And, of course, the creators of DOOM2!

-- Eric Harris, from the "Deathmatching in Bricks" README.TXT

     The gaming community drew heat because Harris and Klebold were big fans of Doom and Quake. The goal of the games are to get to the exit, flipping switches and opening doors as you go, and killing everything that moves. The games have been branded as "murder simulators," designed to desensitize players to the reality of killing. Reporters speculated endlessly that the boys may have been acting out their own mental video game as they fired, reloaded, fired again.

     One great thing about Doom and Quake is that it's pretty easy to design your own levels. There are CD-ROMs available that are chock-full of such player-made exercises. Search around long enough, and you can find the levels created by Eric Harris. I've downloaded every one I've found so far. I haven't played any of them, but I have them. It's a grisly conversation piece and an uneasy reminder, like having a war criminal's medal on your wall.

     Another conversation piece I've found is a copy of the autopsy report for Eric Harris. As I've mentioned before, most of the sympathy sites are created by teenagers with few design skills. They're content to link their pages directly to a series of image scans of the original report, with little intrest in typing it up. I'm a fast typist, so it only took twenty minutes to make my copy of the report.

     Part of having it is just a morbid fascination with the events, and another part of it is just being curious about how autopsy reports are formatted. I'm a writer, after all, and we sock that kind of information away for later use. The lawyer who argued that Hitman is a reprehensible book that shouldn't be covered by the First Amendment does not agree with the position that writers might want to use it for research and source material without using it to contact a murderer.

     Crazy people are crazy, and you really don't know what will set them off. It might be a barking dog, music from the church next door, Twinkies, or maybe a juicy brain trumor growing fat inside the skull like the one Charles Whitman suppoesdly had when he climbed the Texas tower and started firing. If I ever go insane and embark on a murderous rampage, I'm sure someone will point out that I was an atheist and that one of my favorite games was Postal.

AMMO, 200 rounds: $75
Semi-Automatic Rifle: $675
Ski-Mask: $10
Kenneth Cole Trench Coat: $400
Look on classmate's face just before you blow out his brains: Priceless -- Be Afraid

     Avoiding the paranoia is the hardest part. I surf the white supremicists and try not to take them seriously when they say there's going to be a race war and that you'd better be ready to take sides. I try not to think that the gun-toting weekend warriors calling themselves militias would like to overthrow the government when enough people are fed up. I try not to think about how many ticking time bombs there are in the classrooms across America because my sister is a teacher. You never want to think that it could happen here.

     It's something in the culture. Today's youth haven't known major war or depression. They haven't learned the same attitudes of discipline or self-sacrifice that earlier generations have had to embrace in order to survive. There are crimes that I do not commit because my sense of empathy is strong enough that I stick to the Golden Rule and treat others the way I would like to be treated.

     I don't think banning guns is the answer. Part of me would like to confiscate all the guns in the world and destroy them, because I worry that most people can't be trusted with them, but you can't behave that way. There are police officers in West Virginia who confiscate any gun they find during a search of a car, even if it's unloaded and locked up. It's highly illegal and unconstitutional for them to do that. The police argue that they're returning the guns after a background check, so where's the harm? Well, it's called illegal search and seizure.

     This also ties in with my feelings about the death penalty. I believe strongly in the death penalty, but I don't believe in the way it's administered in this country. Legal safeguards to protect the innocent are in place, but the incredibly long delays involved in the appeal process rob the lethal injection of their power to scare. If a state wants to deter crime with the death penalty, it shouldn't dick around and only execute a handful a year.

     I know that innocent people wind up on death row, which is why I would probably reserve the death penalty for the unrepentently sober "caught the fox in the chicken coop with blood and feathers on his muzzle" killers who are not going to be found innocent on any grounds. If you think "I might get caught and live on death row for several years while my lawyer works it out" or "I might get caught and be pushing up daisies by the time springtime rolls around," it might make a difference.

     I agreed with Singapore's government when they caned the kid with the spray can.

P.S. I guess Eric and Dylan had to shoot church-going girls in cold blood because those girls used to pick on them too, huh? According to you it was all about them being picked on and feeling bad about themselves... Quit making excuses for these fuckers. They weren't out just to kill the people who picked on them, they were just out to kill because their feelings were hurt. Eric: (sobbing) Dylan, my feelings are hurt... they picked on me again today.. Dylan: Yeah, they pick on me too Eric. Just today, a couple of the Christian girls made me feel bad by trying to save me from Hell. They don't really care about me... they just want to hurt my fragile feelings. I hate them, Eric. Eric: Me too Dylan. The big boys wouldn't let me up the stairs today. I had to walk around the building. Dylan: I can't take this anymore, Eric... My pussy hurts. Eric: Mine too, Dylan... let's get some guns and kill a bunch of people and then ourselves... then everyone will be sorry, huh? Dylan: Okay Eric, anything you say... By the way, after we kill everyone and then kill ourselves, do you wanna go bowling? Eric: Uhhh.. Sure Dylan, whatever. Survival of the fittest, huh? Grow up. -- Unsigned Guestbook Entry

     For every guestbook entry out there that says Klebold and Harris are a pair of misunderstood misfits, there's another that says the boys are vile beasts who are burning in hell right now. There is no end of surfers who leave messages questioning the motives of the webmasters in putting up such sites. "Keep it in perspective, you sick fucks," they remind them. "Don't waste your energy on those assholes."

     I don't know where the middle ground is located for those two groups or if there should even be middle ground. It's like putting a pro-lifer and a pro-choicer in a room together and seeing what they'll do. I'm the guy who hides on the other side of the one-way glass and watches.

     The consolation lesson is that for every person who goes out and wastes a bunch of people, there are hundreds of thousands of people who do not. Recently, the media has been hyping stories along the lines of "Is the NFL creating violent people?" because a few people got out of line. I argue that they should focus on all the well-adjusted people who play the sport.

From Mrs. Bernall's testament: "Cassie Bernall, a 17 year old highschool junior at Columbine Highschool in Littleton Colorado, was a typical teen having a typical day, when two rampaging classmates put a gun to her head and asked her if she beleived in God. She said yes."

Shortly afterwards, chunks of Cassie's blonde head were liberally distributed to all parts of the library. Within days, Christian teenagers all across America flocked together in hundreds of thousands to ask themselevs, "Would I have been brave enough to die for my faith?"

Well, here's a news flash for all you religious hopefuls: Cassie Bernall did not get shot in the head because she said Yes. She got shot in the head because that's where Dylan Klebold was pointing his gun... No matter what Cassie had said, she would still be dead. Even if Klebold had asked her what her favorite color was, it would have been her last words, and mother's book would be titled, "She Said Pink."

-- Meg's Aphelion

     I registered my disgust with the churches who staged their own mock Columbine massacres as part of their Halloween celebrations. The preachers love the Cassie Bernall story, because what could be scarier to them than an atheist with a gun? Some of the anti-Christian hate sites I've surfed to have little buttons at the bottom that say "Christian Holocaust Now!"

     The fascination I have for hate sites does not always make me comfortable. I worry sometimes that I'm being stupid for constantly going back to see who Fred Phelps is calling a godless sodomite this week or which Teletubbie has Jerry Falwell feeling pangs of concen. How many times can you stare into the face of the beast before you start do yourself harm?

     I never feel sympathetic toward the ignorant people who make these sites. But something in the story of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold disturbs me in a more fundamental way, because I can relate to them to a certain degree. I remember high school, and I have my own little psychotic gremlin that likes to cut loose on paper and create fictional carnage.

     The capacity to forgive them their trespasses is there, furtive and secret, deep inside.

     And I don't know if that capacity for forgiveness is a source of strength or a source of horror.

My Honor Student Killed Your Senior Class. -- Bumper Sticker