Kids Who Kill Kids
Sun Herald
Sunday May 31, 1998
Why are American kids turning feral in the school yard? Mark Steyn blames day care centres, Prozac and computer games
FOR the news shows, it gets a little easier each time. The "Slaughter In The Schoolyard" graphics are on standby; the Rolodex is bulging with telegenic anger-management experts.
It's just a question of finding this week's blood-spattered grove of academe and dispatching the Chief Massacre Correspondent to interview surviving students and bewildered relatives, all of whom tend to talk like the students, relatives and cops they saw on TV after the last massacre, and at least one of whom can be guaranteed to say "We thought it couldn't happen here".
It couldn't happen in Pearl, Mississippi, site of the US school year's inaugural shoot-out in October; nor could it happen in West Paducah, Kentucky; Fayetteville, Tennessee; Jonesboro, Arkansas; or Edinboro, Pennsylvania.
This time around it was Springfield, Oregon, a town whose most famous high school alumnus hitherto had been Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey has now been superseded by the equally alliterative Kip Kinkel. A week ago, Kip was expelled by the principal then allegedly went home, murdered his parents and returned to school the next day and opened fire in the cafeteria, killing two and injuring 22.
There's nothing like an American school massacre to make the rest of the world feel smug. What is it, scoff the British, with those crazy Yanks and their guns? What kind of lunatic teaches a boy how to shoot animals when he should be inside with his computer playing Amok! or Carnage!! like a normal kid?
When that first playground whacko of the Class of 98 allegedly decided to take out the high school in Pearl, an assistant principal retrieved his own gun from the car and "physically immobilised" the gunman (gunkid?) until the cops showed up. The boy had already allegedly shot two students.
Could another two, or four, or seven have been shot? Could the toll have made it into double figures and up to Dunblane's body count of 18? In Scotland, there was no assistant headmaster to save lives by shooting back.
Now, thanks to government restrictions on gun ownership, there never will be.
So forget about guns. Americans have done their sums: more guns equals less crime.
Vermont has more firearms per capita than any other State; it also has the second-lowest murder rate in the US. Besides, America has always had guns and hunting. Granted that we Massacre of the Month commentators like to fit the particular situation to our own pet peeve, it still seems perverse to fixate on the constants - the guns - rather than look at what's changed.
Take this kid Kinkel. When his taste for violent cartoons, the "music" of Marilyn Manson (who claims to be the Antichrist), throwing rocks at cars, torturing animals and making pipe bombs began to get out of hand, his parents took him to the doctor, who allegedly put him on Prozac.
Kip may have the makings of a defence here, or at least a lawsuit. Recently, a 10-year-old boy, arrested after an armed stand-off with police in which he used his three-year-old niece as a shield, entered the plea of "not guilty due to a Prozac-induced trance".
BETWEEN the millions of kids on Prozac and the millions on Rimlin for Attention Deficit Disorder, America's schools are becoming one huge experiment in mood suppression. But, for hassled parents and busy school administrators, "rewiring" is the easiest option.
With half the students, you don't want to be around when the medication wears off; with the other half, you don't want to be around when it kicks in. Since it's hard to tell which is which, you're best to steer clear entirely.
But the ever-swelling medicine cabinet is itself only a symptom - of how child-rearing is increasingly contracted out. All this year's "kids who kill kids" come from what the media, in their fuzzy shorthand, call "the heartland".
Springfield was routinely described on the news as a small town, even though it is technically a city and, in combination with its larger neighbour, forms what the US Government designates as the Eugene-Springfield Metropolitan Statistical Area, with a combined population of more than 300,000.
To those of us in municipalities a few hundred strong, Springfield seems rather large for a small town. I suppose what big-city reporters mean by the term is it's a nice place, with well-kept lawns and freshly painted fences: it's not the Bronx, or South-Central LA, or Chicago's Cabrini Green housing projects, or the nation's Third World capital, where the school system has collapsed and teachers feel they've come out ahead if they get through the day without being stabbed.
These boy killers are not the illegitimate children of crack addict mums and jailbird dads, sleeping in an alley and stealing to eat. So what bugs them so much they feel obliged to mow down their classmates? Maybe those nice towns have something to do with it. Most of them are suburbs or, in the preferred oxymoron of the day, "bedroom communities": Springfield people drive to work in Eugene.
Half a century ago, the suburbs were sold to Americans fleeing urban decline as the natural repository of family values: all the traditional virtues of civic life, without the contemporary problems of the inner city.
THEY'VE turned out the opposite. Today's bedroom communities have all the contemporary problems, without the traditional virtues.
It was the physical layout of post-war suburbia which pioneered the defining problems of the age: the long-distance commute; the drifting, rootless population (20 per cent of Americans move every year); feminism, which began in part as a rebellion against the stultifying isolation of suburbia; the working mum; the continuously flickering TV; the evening meal you pick up at the drive-through pizza-to-go joint; the no-fault divorce; and, above all, day care.
Fifty-one per cent of mothers work full-time; half of those would prefer not to. Mum's wishes notwithstanding, America's children spend their first, critical, years in what are little more than holding camps.
If this year's swollen phalanx of boy killers makes anything clear, it's that there are more and more parents who don't know their children.
Grown-ups shy away from confronting the evidence about what causes violence because they don't want to be judgmental about "non-traditional" household arrangements. But, seeing Thurston High's students talking about the murder of their classmates, glassy-eyed, in dull, unexpressive monotones, you couldn't help wondering if, to teenagers, the very idea of something causing violence isn't hopelessly quaint.
The so-called Information Age is actually an Entertainment Age in which violence is the most routine entertainment of all; on the accelerating descent into a "virtual childhood", violence requires nothing so humdrum as a cause - no motivation, no narrative drive, no character.
I'D far rather an adolescent boy was out in the woods learning how to hunt deer and bear and wild turkey. In 1936, a young chap could come inside and read in The Avenger : "He had lost his beloved wife and small daughter in the callous machinations of a criminal ring, which loss had impelled him to dedicate his life and his great fortune to the fighting of the underworld. The tragedy had turned his coal-black hair dead white. Also the nerve shock had paralysed his facial muscles in some curious way which made the dead flesh like wax; it could not move at the command of his nerves, but when his fingers moved it, it stayed in whatever place it was prodded. Thus he became a man of a thousand faces . . ."
Even in 1963, an adolescent could curl up with Amazing Fantasy Introducing Spider-Man: "`My fault - all my fault! If only I had stopped him when I could have! But I didn't - and now Uncle Ben is dead . . .' And a lean, silent figure slowly fades into the gathering darkness, aware at last that in this world, with great power there must also come . . . great responsibility!"
But the codes of honour, duty, redemption, vengeance and responsibility that drove the Avenger and Spider-Man are all gone. Reading dime novels and pulp magazines and super-hero comics were all, in their way, acts of imagination.
Mowing down stick figures, blips on a screen, requires no such emotional engagement: it's a pure sensory jolt, the thrill of action divorced from human motivation.
There are no causes of violence any more: you zap the aliens because that's the game; at Pearl High School, 16-year-old Luke T. Woodham allegedly "assassinated" a girl he had dated and another student because that was the game he and his pals planned that day.
Look at his accomplices at the Rankin County jail, or the two boys who allegedly shot up Jonesboro, or the students in Springfield - all with the same dead-eyed look of a blank computer screen. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an electronic whimper.
© 1998 Sun Herald