Columbine, Dave Cullen
While waiting for a library book to arrive, I picked Columbine as a quick book to work through. It has been on my radar for several years. After working through some of the early chapters, I found that I wasn’t loving the prose, so I tried to get through it pretty quickly so that I could at least get the factual content out of it.
This book functions well as a corrective to some of the erroneous information that has circulated since Columbine. Most notably, Harris and Klebold were not bullied, nor part of the Trench Coat Mafia; and the well-traveled story of Cassie Bernall’s martyrdom is false. Why these falsehoods have spread in the decades since Columbine is also a big part of the book (besides the mechanical description of the attack, which wasn’t particularly novel for me). The Jefferson County Sheriff seems to have been a real blowhard, and he appeared to be conducting media interviews off the top of his head, with scant preparation; that led to a lot of unfounded rumors becoming established in the press.
The evangelical community also really glommed onto the attack. Both evangelical leaders who used the attacks to target vulnerable students for conversion (this really bugged me) and the emotionally-wounded parents who coped with their children’s deaths by propagating stories of martyrdom or becoming stridently anti-abortion reacted to the mass murder in ways that I would consider to be wrong. The parents are somewhat more forgivable–I don’t know how I’d react to losing my kid in that way–but other people were clearly being hurt by their actions, and you can understand without condoning their actions. But the pastors were clearly predatory. The book’s afterword points out that levels of church attendance eventually fell back to their normal levels after Columbine, which makes me hope that at least not too many people dramatically changed their philosophy of living to incorporate the idea of “Satan living within their community.”
Columbine shows that people will approach any event, even mass murder, with an agenda. Media, cops, politicians, parents, priests: no one came at the murders as a tabula rasa. Their inherent motivations and prejudices inflected their actions, and those actions bounced off everyone within the event horizon of the event and caused even more chaos. We still feel that chaos today. And as new killers and communities are inspired by the Columbine shooters, their actions redound unto us still, and forever.
In the closing pages of Columbine, author Dave Cullen mentions that interviews with Harris’s and Klebold’s parents were sealed in the National Archive until 2027. I won’t be setting a timer or anything to see what what mentioned, and it seems likely that the parents weren’t entirely forthcoming (Wayne Harris especially). But we’ll see if there are any new insights in four years.
Libra, Dom DeLillo
I selected this as my next book because I’d been wanting to read one of the more modern celebrated authors. Maybe the movie adaptation of White Noise was lingering in my consciousness? What sealed the deal for me was an Amazon review stating that Libra was recommended by James Ellroy, who wrote the incredible American Tabloid which also deals with the JFK assassination.
American Tabloid stands as an obvious comparison point to Libra. I think I like Ellroy’s novel more, because of the insane plot and action. Plus the dialogue is a bit punchier. But DeLillo’s take reaches deeper places because of its focus on Lee Harvey Oswald. By sticking with one character for the most part and really exploring his idiosyncrasies, DeLillo is better able to lay bare the psychological aspects of being America’s most famous assassin.
Reading Libra, I found myself connecting to Lee, which is disconcerting because he is obviously such a heel. Lee lives in a series of fantasies, and he hurts himself and others by trying to enact those fantasies onto the real world. He fancies himself a Marxist and a spy, but blunders about in his attempts to defect to the Soviet Union and marks himself as someone who cannot be trusted by anyone. Lee clearly wants to be a great man of history, someone who is studied in classrooms and books (something he envisions for himself as he sits in a jail cell after shooting Kennedy). But his lack of character keeps him from making any progress–as the book posits, he isn’t even the one who finally assassinates JFK. Lee is a twisted version of the American aspirational loser archetype, the guy who always has another get-rich-quick scheme around the corner (for him it’s fame and importance that he’s most after), and fuck you if you think he doesn’t have what it takes.
I did very much like Libra because it demonstrates that the facts of the JFK assassination–facts which will likely never be known in their entirety–are less important than what we as a nation took away from the act. As DeLillo says, “There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.” The real truth of what happened on 11/22/63, or on any day, matters less than the deeper machinations which fueled it, those actions which we cannot describe with any real clarity but whose pulse we can feel under the skin of reality and which ultimately drive our understanding of our lives.
Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and some Devo albums
I spent a week trying to read this, and I’m putting it away now. I really wanted to like it, and parts of it were cool, but the place names in Mexico started running together, the anecdotes weren’t really grabbing me, and the ironic bits, while appreciated, didn’t really get my motor running, either. I’m gonna give this a try another day, maybe after a re-review of the Civil War.
Was recently listening to Devo’s Are We Not Men? and Freedom of Choice–now those are some invigorating works of art! I found myself humming “Girl U Want” and “It’s Not Right” as I washed dishes this week. And of course “Jocko Homo” is a masterwork. New wave music is so manic and angular and fun. God, I wish I could have been rocking around in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Dubliners, James Joyce
This is the first James Joyce I’ve read in full (I was assigned “Araby” in high school, or maybe it was earlier, and managed to skip the reading without any serious consequences). Joyce really likes to use subtext in these stories. There is a good deal of symbolism, and the stories are laden with references to Catholicism and Irish nationalism and literature that often flew way over my head.
The “point” of these stories is to portray slices of Dublin life for the reader. I felt that they accomplished this goal, yet I felt unmoved most of the time. Maybe it was trying to place myself in early-1900s Dublin, and failing to situate myself, that caused the lack of connection. I enjoyed what I was reading, but I felt that my connection was usually academic, rather than emotional.
The two stories I enjoyed the most, “A Little Cloud” and “A Painful Case,” did spur in me a heavier emotional reaction. “A Little Cloud” is about professional envy, dreams which were pursued with a lackluster spirit and thus doomed, and the realization that one is not where one intended oneself to be. “A Painful Case” is about self-imposed loneliness, the understanding of which settles upon a soul like a heavy fog. For whatever reason, I found these stories to be punchier than the rest, and it was much easier for me to empathize with the protagonists.
One other thing I liked about these stories is Joyce’s way with words. He really had an ear for an interesting turn-of-phrase, one which I wish had been more ever-present. I also connected with individual moments of flailing that Joyce depicts. There’s a guy who can hardly hear his companions speaking in a loud automobile, so he has to guess what they’re saying and formulate an appropriate response—I’ve done that a million times. I found myself caught reflecting by a particular line in the story “Grace”: “His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points…”
The Black Jacobins, CLR James
This was the first book I’ve read recently where I tried to save passages of interest. To be honest I find the idea of keeping a “commonplace book” pretty bothersome, but I do wonder if manually copying these passages into a hard copy wouldn’t help them to stick further.
In any case, I learned so much about the Haitian Revolution from this book. The Black Jacobins is supposed to be the main entry point for anyone wishing to learn about the slave regime in Haiti and how its inhabitants won their freedom. This conflict was incredibly complicated. In fact, I probably would have been better served by having read a book about the French Revolution before tackling this one, because a lot of what happened in the metropole influenced the course of events in Haiti, and not always in intuitive ways. And it wasn’t just the overseas influence that was hard to grasp. Beyond the enslaved blacks, who acted in ways that were largely understandable, the divisions between the mulattoes, free blacks, and whites (who were themselves divided into plantation owners, petit bourgeoisie, and tradesmen) were free-flowing, even within what I would have thought were clearly demarcated periods of conflict. There were a ton of backstabs, betrayals, shifts of allegiance, and counter-intuitive actions taken by all parties in the conflict.
I came into this book expecting a hagiography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and James does laud Toussaint for his vision of what Haiti could become. But Toussaint also made a ton of mistakes, especially in the latter half of the revolution. He was too much of an idealist in regard to France and how it might accept or integrate Haiti, which caused him too often to reward or grant mercy to his enemies and punish his erstwhile allies. (James: “His desire to avoid destruction was the very thing that caused it. It is the recurring error of moderates when face to face with a revolutionary struggle.”) James also considers him something of a ditherer. Nevertheless, his cause was righteous, and one wonders what might have happened if he had let the scales fall from his eyes regarding the true character of the French colonial regime.
James draws much attention to how white colonialists, from France to Spain and the United Kingdom, ravaged the enslaved people of San Domingo. The Black Jacobins is a story of rape, torture, and murder, with the ultimate goal being the degradation and unpersoning of every black person on the island. As James says at the end of The Black Jacobins speaking about the contemporary ravages of white governments, “Imperialism vaunts its exploitation of the wealth of Africa for the benefit of civilization. In reality, from the very nature of its system of production for profit it strangles the real wealth of the continent — the creative capacity of the African people.” (This reminded me of the Stephen Jay Gould quote about geniuses who live and die working in cotton fields and sweatshops. It’s the theft of this potential that may be most galling about our capitalist global order.)
The Black Jacobins is ultimately a sad tale, because Haiti was destroyed during and after the revolution, and has never really recovered. I can’t help but think this ravaging was another deliberate act by capitalist nations, one intended to show, essentially, that the house always wins. But the slaves who threw themselves at French artillery, Toussaint dying in a cold and lonely French prison cell, the mulattoes who finally saw the light and helped to expel the French for a final time, would probably have thought their rebellion worth it in the end–because what kind of life is the life of a slave? A slave sees every day their potential wasted for the use of others. It’s hard from my vantage point to really feel that experience subjectively, but intellectually and empathetically I can praise the struggle of the slaves to rise above their circumstances and lay waste to those who put them there.
P.S. Also, I did not realize how much of a racist Napoleon was. Really makes Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure hit different.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
I don’t know exactly how I feel about this book, except to say that it really shows the complexity of Malcolm X. He had a lot of valid, interesting points to share. Sometimes (like when he is being toured around Mecca by Saudi royalty) he seems a bit naive. At various times in his life, Malcolm did act in ways that were morally wrong… which he would be the first to admit. He also had some terrible opinions about topics both central to life (the place of women in the family and society) and far-flung (I cringed reading about the absurd pseudoscience put forth by Elijah Muhammad). But Malcolm was someone who was open to change, as co-author Alex Haley describes in the final chapters of the book, and it seems like he would have been open to revising his take on women.
I found it most interesting when Malcolm discusses (white) society’s reaction to his advocacy. Nowadays, whether on Twitter or in the wider world, it feels like the main way to dispense with an opposing argument is by ignoring it. This seems like a brazen thing to do, but it’s really not hard; just respond to a different question than the one that has been put forth. You see this most often with the cancel culture debate. A person says something offensive. Side A says, “The person in question said something offensive. There should be a sanction–or at least an understanding that what was said was racist/sexist/classist/transphobic.” A responsive way to answer that would be along the lines of, “Here are some reasons that particular person should not be sanctioned for that particular action.” But generally the responses are along the lines of:
- “It’s too easy to punish people for perceived offenses.”
- “You should not be forbidden from saying offensive things.”
- “By tarring this person with the brush of racism/sexism/etc, you are making other people want to be racist/sexist/etc.”
- Etc.
None of these responses actually deal with the core issue at hand–they pull back to a debate about the meta-issue. In lieu of defending the behavior (because it usually is not defensible), the original thesis is ignored.
Malcolm faced these kinds of responses all the time. Glib defenders of white supremacy would have nothing to say about the conditions of Black schools, the daily violence inherent in being a Black person living in the United States, but when Malcolm or other advocates for civil rights would point out injustice or its consequences, they would be attacked for having caused riots or domestic insurgency. The inequality which Black and other minority citizens face is not justifiable except by obviously racist thought, so the issue is moved to the side so that those who benefit can benefit from what they see as being on the rhetorical high ground.
Another point I liked: all white people, even if they are not racist or even anti-racist, benefit from racism. Even if racism’s benefits are declaimed, they are nonetheless garnered. White people can choose to be aware of that, or they can willfully ignore it and pretend that their successes are entirely self-made. Viewing oneself as a self-made success sometimes seems to me to be at the core of what is wrong with those of us in American society who seek to pull back the safety net and dismantle government–though the possibility that it’s all posturing in order to maintain their material advantages can’t be ignored.
Whatever one thinks of Malcolm’s politics, it cannot be denied that he is a legendary autodidact. To go from a ninth-grade education to debating–and defeating–the luminaries of the white establishment in defense of his right, and the right of all Black people, to be fully-realized American citizens and human beings, is inspiring. I really wonder what things look like in the alternate universe where he somehow goes to law school.