Rad Stuff Worldwide
MISFITS
columbine re-examined
by Jessica DiMaio
Happy Columbine Day! April 20th was the year anniversary of the high school massacre that parents still have heir Ironically, I heard about the shootings when I went to my friend’s house to get ready for the Marilyn Manson concert. Dressed in black velvet and fishnet, her face painted bone-white with red eyeshadow and black lipstick, she told me about how two boys from Colorado came to school with guns and went on a shooting spree in the cafeteria and library, targeting jocks. They were part of a clique called the Trench Coat Mafia, and they wore black trench coats with anarchy symbols and listened to Marilyn Manson.
I rolled my black shadowed eyes. “Well, if they wear black and listen to Manson, what do you expect?” I deadpanned.
We made jokes about putting bombs in our purses, listing the people in our high school we would have shot if we had gone insane. We turned on the news and watched a corpse dressed in light blue jeans and a plaid shirt dangling from a broken window, then falling onto the SWAT team below, and we stopped joking.
Then I saw Clinton speaking about how this is our wake up call, and we’re seeing a pattern, and we’re going to keep seeing this until we do something about it. An uneasy feeling buzzed through the nerves of my body. Clinton wasn’t talking about the jocks who persecuted these kids, he was talking about me and my friends. The word “misfit” bounced about the lips of newscasters. Each one mentioned Marilyn Manson. I heard the word “goth.” And so it began…
The hype over Marilyn Manson is a pathetic attempt to explain these kids’ actions. If you’re a misfit kid who gets picked on every day, what else are you going to listen to? “I hate therefore I am, goddamn your righteous hand.” Marilyn Manson is being cited because he’s the most well known, but compared to other bands he’s a novelty act. Marilyn Manson is the exposed tip of a dark and disturbing iceberg. There are other bands out there who would be far more distressing to the masses if they were more public. I know this because they’re in my CD collection.
Although I dislike labels, most people would call me a goth. Some are disgusted by this and ask me how I can be drawn to such a depressing scene. But I like wearing flowy sleeves, petticoats, tall boots and other Victorian era clothing. I like that gothrockers envy my white skin instead of telling me to get a tan. I like listening to sweet, melodic, slightly demented music that blends growls with operatic warbles. I like dancing like a ballerina at clubs. I like pale boys who wear makeup.
So when I hear the Trench Coat Mafia referred to as the “goth crowd,” I have to shake my head. Even with the barest amount of information, I know this isn’t true. Goths don’t wear anarchy symbols-that’s a punk thing. You don’t find too many gothic Nazis either. I assume these kids probably listened to a lot of industrial music like Skinny Puppy and KMFDM, and maybe some punk bands like the Dead Kennedys. Although I love these types of music too, I’ve found that industrial fans and punks tend to take themselves a little too seriously because the music is very angry and political. Despite the gloom and doom stereotype, the goth scene is built heavily on fantasy, so goths are actually very creative and playful. A gothic Nazi is like a student council punk rocker . . . it just doesn’t happen.
Punk-goth-techno-industrial-ska-trance on and on and on. Notes from the underground. This music is dark and bitter and raw and angry and powerful and exquisitely beautiful. This is not the plug for rage. This is the outlet.
When I see the pictures of these kids who went crazy Heathers-style, I see the faces of the boys I knew in high school who had some serious demons. The small and skinny boys who didn’t play sports and were called “faggot” and got shoved into lockers and had their voices and movements mimicked. Imagine living through that every day because some football player knows he can get away with it. There were a couple of these boys who just might have snapped one day if they had gotten a gun in their hand. Remember the scene in the movie “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” when Dawn Weiner stands on stage and thanks the school for supporting her family while her little sister was kidnapped and the whole crowd starts shouting, “Weiner dog!” Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have cheered if Dawn had whipped out a gun and started taking them out. During the killing spree one of the boys pointed his gun in the face of the jock that tormented him the most-his nemesis-and he turned away with a laugh, saying, “I like you today.” He spared his life, knowing that the jock would always remember that. Imagine that feeling of power.
I’m not defending the Trench Coat Mafia. They fucked it up for us. Since the shootings, misfit kids have been made out to be monsters. Frat boys can go on a drunken orgy of rape and molestation at Woodstock ’99 and it doesn’t alter their lives a bit, but any kid who isn’t on a sports team is demonized. While channel-surfing one night I recently saw a Columbine-inspired special on goths under the cheerful title, Faces of Evil. I can’t imagine that other subcultures like punks and ravers are escaping this paranoia. These kids have always been thought of as “weird,” but now if you’re a girl with a shaved head or a boy wearing nailpolish, you get to be feared. That’s not a good thing. People don’t avoid what they fear, they do their best to stamp it out. One year ago there were articles that tried to be objective, tried to see things from the “monsters” point of view, but now no one even bothers to remember that these kids were ritually tormented by their God-fearing classmates on a daily basis. Some of the greatest and most creative minds throughout history didn’t fit in, but now a different way of looking at things is indicative of insanity. Go fill up a glass of water, kids, because here come the anti-depressants!
Why shouldn’t authority figures go after the outcasts instead of the jocks? It’s the popular kids who don’t ask questions. Join the army? Sure thing! Fight in a war? Sign me up. Work nine to five in a cubicle till retirement? Hey, gotta make money somehow. It’s the misfits who ask too many questions, who make churches and politicians uneasy. Now authorities have a concrete reason to squash these troublemakers early-because they’re crazy.
What can schools and parents do to make sure this doesn’t happen again? (Aside from noticing if your kid is building an arsenal of pipe bombs in the garage, that is.) The first thing is to put an end to some dangerous fallacies. There is a myth that is repeated by adults with bad memories to their children: These are the best years of your life. Some kids might be able to accept that, but others look up in horror and think, “You mean this is it?” It doesn’t help when teachers start droning on about “the real world.” A dismal picture is painted of going to college, getting a boring job, having maybe two weeks of vacation a year, watching lots of TV, then dying. Kids with mediocre grades are told that if they don’t start applying themselves, their lives are going to be screwed up before they’re even able to legally drink. “What do you want to do with your life? Decide now!”
Lies, all lies!
Here’s what schools can do; stop playing good kid/bad kid. Stop acting like a student who gets C’s has less to offer the world than one who knows how to pass a multiple choice quiz. Fire the boring teachers and hire some interesting ones. Ditch The Old Man and the Sea, and assign books like On the Road and Skinny Legs and All. Do away with SATs and other tests that measure intelligence by a ScanTron sheet. Teach kids that the fun is just beginning, that the world is wide and that we make it up as we go along. And don’t be afraid of black clothes, blue hair, obsessions with death or anarchy, because it’s not until after you examine the dark that you can know light.
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