"good wombs have borne bad sons"

in the american grotesquerie, there's bundy & gacy & dahmer, loons of the highest order. the fbi pretends to write up "profiles" on these evil bastards in sad feeble attempts to understand what motivated them, while, in truth, they remain simply evil, true evil personified. that's the real terrifying fact of these crazies: there is no rhyme or reason for their depraved behavior. this is something that cannot be understood &, therefore, cannot be contained. when you see the picture of gacy dressed as a clown w/first lady rosalyn carter, it's mind boggling to try & reconcile that image w/the fact of the bodies underneath the house. they can't be reconciled.


10 years ago today, sometime after 11:15am, two young american school kids added to this list of crazies. as mindless as suicide bombers, as vapid as the teenagers they were, they simply shot whoever or whatever came into their paths w/o thought. after their bomb failed to explode(the bomb that would probably have killed upwards of 400 people), they randomly shot students & faculty until they finally shot themselves. how else could something so mindless have ended? the terror of their activity a re-run of the list above: there was no rhyme or reason for it.

there was much hand-wringing & various pronouncements & different assignations of blame. there were myths passed around as fact(the "trench-coat" mafia, "she said yes," they were after the jocks who'd abused them, etc)& facts dismissed as phony or impossible(that they acted alone, that there were no "targets" other than the school itself, that eric harris was the leader & that dylan klebold his bootlick, etc). the idea that a teenage kid could be a psychopath seemed impossible to absorb. the fact that the psychopath could manipulate someone weaker seemed impossible to swallow too.

but the sad fact is: that's what happened. these kids aren't symbols; they're not victims. they most definitely aren't heroes(their spawn, the crackpot in blacksburg at virginia tech, worshiped them). one was a lunatic; the other was a sociopath.

was harris' psychopathology genetic? could it have been detected earlier? were there external forces that exacerbated his psychopathology & what were they? was klebold's passivity a kind of "stockholm syndrome"? there may be some answers to these & other questions but, for the most part, i doubt it. what these kids did is as unexplainable as what bundy did.

in woody allen's shadows and fog someone is randomly killing members of a small community. as usual, allen uses this less than hilarious plot device to explore issues of life & death, community & individualism, science & nature. the scientist spends much of the film "explaining" why someone would do what the killer is doing. but in the end, as the killer has trapped him & he continues to insist that "i understand you...i understand why you're doing this...", the killer simply & inexorably strangles the scientist to death. "no, no you don't," are the killer's only words.