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"America: Love it or leave it mother fuckers. All you racist (and if you think im [sic] a hypocrite, come here so I can kill you) mother fucking assholes in America who burn our flag and disgrace my land, GET OUT! And to you assholes in Iraq and Iran and all those other little piece of shit desert lands who hate us, shut up and die! We will kick your ass if you try and fuck with us, or at least I will!"
Eric Harris's web site (Wilkinson 53)
A reporter from a Detroit radio station called and wanted to know what I thought about the killings in Colorado. He seemed to have an agenda-as is often the case with journalists. Specifically, he wanted to know whether I thought Marilyn Manson was to blame for the massacre and that parents should police what their children listen to.
I thought this was a most peculiar question, since it was only a day or two after the killings and, to my knowledge, it had not been definitively established that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold even listened to or liked Marilyn Manson. As I write now in September 1999, I still don't think it has been established. Time says yes (Cloud 37); Rolling Stone says "[t]hey thought Marilyn Manson kind of sucked" (Wilkinson 54).
What seemed more obvious to me, as I talked to the reporter, was the significance of the date of the killings-April 20, which is Hitler's birthday and one day after the anniversaries of both Waco (1993) and Oklahoma City (1995). I talk to reporters fairly often, and I must say that I find no evidence in those quarters of the so-called "liberal media." The reporter in this particular case had picked up, somewhere, the conservative scapegoating of Marilyn Manson.
I did what I always do, which was to try to redirect and broaden the reporter's narrowly focused attention. Often, reporters don't want to hear a contrary view, even though they are trained to seek out "the other side." The blindness and deafness of the media in the Columbine case are especially pronounced and troubling. It seems that we have a new rite of spring in the form of rightwing violence every couple of...