The War Comes Home Again

by Alexander Cockburn

In terms of hypocrisy, this is on a par with Clinton telling little kids in a school in Anacostia to conduct themselves in an upright moral fashion not long before he was unzipping his pants for Monica L. There'll be further vindictive assaults on the rights of young people, who as usual will incur collective guilt.

Meanwhile, the obvious lesson -- that war breeds violence -- is once again being carefully ignored. Watch the bombs fall, and watch the indices of social violence here in the United States, which had been falling, begin to rise again. As Malcolm X said when JFK was assassinated amid rising U.S. commitment to the war in Vietnam: "The chickens are coming home to roost."

By now, apologies for what happened at Columbine High are mandatory for Marilyn Manson, video-game manufacturers, Hollywood, publishers of "Mein Kampf," the Internet. The only people who apparently don't have to apologize are the U.S. military and their civilian overseers, who trained and paid the pilot dad of one of the teen killers; who sent F-16s over the funerals in Littleton; who are now pounding the Serbs each day and night; who mint the currency of violence.

In the aftermath of the Littleton shootings in Colorado, there's been collective determination among editorial writers to omit from possible motivating factors the U.S. bombing of Serbia. The typical editorial response has been "keep guns out of the hands of troubled youngsters." Of course, the institution most adept at putting guns into the hands of youngsters, many of them troubled, is the U.S. military, which insists on the right to accept teenagers at an age younger than most nations.

People bicker endlessly about the effect splatter movies have on people. I'm sure the Quayle candidacy will roll forward on this issue. Japanese films and TV offer blood-soaked stuff on a 'round-the-clock basis, but the level of social violence in Japanese society is exceptionally low, so it's hard to figure. But one thing is indisputable. Wars are always accompanied by a rise in criminal violence on the domestic front. This applies both to the victorious and defeated countries.

The Boston Globe's editorial writer avoided the usual call for accelerated gun control but emphasized the theme that "Adults should have noticed and intervened. ... Better to speak up and take the heat from a rebellious teenager or a defensive parent than to risk the eventual explosion of rage into bloodshed. This emotional war zone demands the attention of every community before there is gunfire."

How about the actual war zone? Bombing campaigns encourage the idea of invulnerability of the bombers and the illusion of omnipotence. Not so far from Columbine High School in Littleton is Fort Carson Army base, where they practice invading countries like Serbia. One of the families of the killers (two-parent, suburban) had a breadwinner retired from the military. This is Eric Harris' dad. His mother works at a gourmet food shop.

Dylan Klebold's father is a geophysicist, and his mother works with the disabled. Klebold Jr. drove a BMW. If the parents had been single mothers on welfare, or hippies, or in a small religious sect, we surely would have been inundated with preachments against single mothers, hippies and religious sects as trainers for mass murder. But there's been a certain embarrassment about the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who appear to have embodied the suburban American dream.

Commentators have fastened onto the fact that one of the two youths had a personal web site "espousing an addled philosophy of violence." Those were the words of The New York Times' editorial writer, either Howell Raines or one of his stable. Yes, the same editorial team that espoused an addled philosophy of violence a few days earlier, suggesting that NATO "intensify the bombing" of Serbia. Perhaps the reporter had it wrong and it wasn't a personal web site the kid had in his computer but nytimes.com.