There aren’t many today who know the names Cassie Bernall and Valeen Schnurr. They were both in the library of Columbine High on April 20, 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris came to school and murdered thirteen people. Valeen survived the massacre, and Cassie did not.
Word spread that Klebold put a gun to Cassie Bernall’s head and asked her whether she believed in God. The story went that Bernall said yes, upon whence she was killed. Books were published about this, and it quickly became a key chapter of the Columbine story. But it was actually Schnurr who was asked this question after being wounded by Harris in the library. After being winged by Harris’ shotgun, she exclaimed “Oh my God. Oh my God.” Harris asked her if she believed in God, and when she said yes, he asked her why. She replied “Because that’s how I was raised.” For reasons known only to him, Harris let her live. Cassie Bernall, meanwhile, prayed quietly underneath one of the tables, but not quietly enough so that Dylan Klebold didn’t hear her. He knelt under the table, said “Peekaboo,” and shot her in the head.
As frustrating as it can be to hear people say “It could have been worse” in response to tragedy, Columbine really could have been much worse. The massacre as it happened was an act of improvisation. Harris and Klebold had planted explosives in the school cafeteria prior to the attack, along with one across town that was supposed to distract law enforcement. Their plan was to detonate the cafeteria bombs during the most crowded lunch period, potentially killing hundreds, and then pick off those fleeing outside in a “mop up” action. When the cafeteria bombs failed to detonate, they went in with their small arms.
Harris and Klebold intended to slaughter their entire class that day, using explosives made from materials you could buy at Home Depot. Harris — the real mastermind of the attack with a passion for explosives — wanted to be a bomber, not a shooter. He settled for gunning his classmates down. Most of this took place in the school library, where ten of the thirteen victims were killed — where Cassie Bernall was executed while she prayed, and where both gunmen killed themselves as police closed in.
It’s hard to convey now what a shock Columbine was to the American soul in 1999. If the Manson Murders are said to be the end of the “free love” 1960s, so Columbine felt like a door being slammed shut on the materialist age of plenty that was the 1990s. The decade that began with the vanquishing of the Soviet Union and which proceeded into the techno-utopianism of the early internet had delivered a new prosperity to the United States, and yet as the decade went on the optimism began to wane. By 1999, the seeming unlimited promise of the internet had curdled into a ridiculous speculative bubble that resulted in the “Dot Com Crash.” The exciting Wild West of open chat rooms and free thinking blogs had been beset by scammers and computer viruses. The promise of Digital — that it would connect us all in an online Xandau that would smooth out differences and erase borders and perhaps achieve the egalitarian fantasy — was revealing itself as the most powerful tool for atomization the world had ever seen.
It’s morbidly poetic that the actions of Ted Kaczynsky — a domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber — in some ways marked the moment of separation from analog in the 1990s. A seminal techno-pessimist, Kaczynsky sent his bombs as parcels through traditional U.S. mail just as email was becoming an office mainstay. He saw his Luddite manifesto published in the traditional print pages of the Washington Post as blogging platforms proliferated - along with early digital networks of connected monsters trading child pornography and snuff videos. Many of Kaczynsky’s most fevered fears about the human soul becoming twisted and imprisoned by technology and its attendant demons would soon be made manifest in the digital age, but he belonged to a previous era, left to watch the emergence of the new one from a prison cell. Cassandra forced to watch her visions come to life from behind a wall of glass, the world deaf to her screams. Some say that had he begun his killing spree just a few years later he would have started a blog instead of bombing his way to a newspaper print of his manifesto, but I doubt it. He saw too far ahead for that, and he understood the power of the analog when it burst through the tech-addled haze, whether that analog were print paper or mail bombs. We were already getting a good look inside the machine as the new millennium approached, and it appeared that there really may be demons inside.
The Columbine Massacre felt jammed within that interstitial zone between eras - between analog and digital, but also between the television and the computer. Aesthetically, the mashup of cable news and surveillance footage belonged in the pre-digital 90s. The students streaming out of the school, the SWAT team huddled near windows. The spectacle looked like a slab of MTV News recorded to a shitty VHS tape. And yet both the actual planning of the attack and the speed at which it laced into the national bloodstream was a digital experience, chaotic and hyperreal. Harris learned to make bombs online, if not well enough to deploy them. Countless forums tried to figure out the shooters, understand them, condemn them — some mused about emulating them. All of these thoughts could now ping around millions of minds in seconds, beyond the corral of the television much less the print newspapers. The internet could create flames and fan them, but it couldn’t control them. People were already falling behind the pace of change in the 90s, and now there was a sense that a powerful horse had left the barn, and that we may never catch this one.
Columbine felt like a truly novel beast — the children had become destroyers, and the schoolyard a killing field — but the abyss in which dwells the mass slaughter of strangers had been widening for decades, expanding into places left weak or empty by an accelerating social deterioration. Even if “the medium is the message” as Marshall McLuhan said, the digital revolution was pouring gasoline on a fire that was already burning.
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