The Whispers and the Early Screams
I've just heard a pair of interviews on the Skepticality podcast that illustrate for me very clearly what might be happening here in the United States, something that seems to be all but absent elsewhere. We here in the States can't miss it without forgoing any and all media reporting. There's a frenzy of folks up in arms to resist the "socialization" of health care (like we did to fire and police protection generations ago) by (as they confusingly put it) a Nazi President, one who may or may not have been born in Kenya, one who many of those same protesters are sure is either an closet Muslim or (worse) an atheist. Just about all of the most vocal are convinced he is a racist.
I am convinced this is not happening in a vacuum. Phenomena this wide-spread never do. They are helped along by people who know what they are doing, who know exactly what buttons to push and how often. Don't be fooled: This is a power struggle backed by millions of dollars with many more billions of dollars at stake. On that most can agree.
What is less clear is how this is happening.
To illustrate what I feel is happening now, I'd like to mention a few facts about the Columbine High School incident ten years ago, facts I found startling and surprising. Did you know:
-- Bombs were supposed to be the main killing weapons, not guns.
-- Harris and Klebold were not members of the Trench Coat Mafia.
-- Harris and Klebold were not quiet "outcasts" picked on by "jocks."
-- The morning they and so many others died at their hands, the two did not go bowling.
Surprised at any of these revelations? I was. It's amazing to note what happened verses what everyone outside of Littleton thinks happened.
First, let's correct the record. The first items that should be addressed are the bombs and the bowling. As to the bowling, yes, the two killers were supposed to go bowling that morning. They didn't show up, something, in fact, that indicated they might be involved in later incidents. We in the general public, though, have perhaps permanently associated their early, carefree bowling morning with shock given the days events thanks to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, his multi-award winning documentary about guns and culture surrounding them here in America.
Moore makes several points in Bowling worth mentioning. Harris and Klebold, however, served as merely the most recent and famous examples in a documentary spanning our armed nation and it's history. And given its release in 2002, Moore might not have born the brunt of the blame for getting the bowling detail completely wrong. After all, that -- and the fact that the attack was planned not as a shooting spree but as a bombing with a shooting clean-up operation afterwards -- were taken as common knowledge, thanks to the flawed reporting on the attacks themselves.
One of the bombs Harris and Klebold planted.
Note the alarm clock timer to the left.
See and read more at David Cullen's Page.
The above bomb also takes a bit of Moore's wind out of his sails. Most of the deaths and injuries in Littleton were caused by firearms, yes, but that wasn't the plan. Columbine was intended to be a high school version of Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City terrorist attack. In the interview, Cullen quite specifically mentions that one of the teachers died of an untreated shrapnel wound.
Why wasn't that key detail -- that the attack was not solely an example of gun violence run amok in an armed country -- front and center in the reporting? I believe many, including Moore, chose to see what they saw. Guns are more of a controversy in the United States than bombs simply because more die from gun violence every year. Had Columbine happened in London during the IRA bombings of the 1980s, the movie released might have been very, very different, with a majority remembering the bombs and calling, for example, for limits on the sale of supplies that might be used in bomb making.
How about the so-called Trench Coat Mafia, a group to which the killers supposedly belonged? Cullen notes that the actual TCM weren't a gang of misfits simmering with rage and discontent, but were rather a clique of well-known students, so accepted in Columbine's social structure that their picture appeared in the yearbook. Black trench coats, however, are seen as threatening to many, especially when those coats pair with the word "Mafia." Therefore, what seemed to be an innocent quirk of Columbine society became overt, threatening behavior. Were that actually true, were the TCM a bunch of punks seething with murderous rage, would the yearbook group include them as a group as innocuous as the newspaper or marching band?
Unknown elsewhere, though, the TCM represented threat. Think of the goths in most high schools, the punks of an earlier era, kids with no desire to fit in with the general student population. Those who do not understand -- who wear "normal" clothes and cut their hair "normally" -- can see blue or fire engine red hair cut into a mohawk, can see the multiple piercings everywhere but the ear lobes, can see dark, brooding clothing as an understood indictment of "normal" society. Indeed, many affecting such styles use those excuses to describe their confrontational behaviors.
Therefore, two students who executed so horrific an act must have shown some outward signs long before the act itself . . . signs like "weird" clothing.
Other misfit stereotypes come easily to mind. An early Op-Ed piece by Dan Savage at The Stranger here in Seattle made the internet rounds very quickly after it was published, portraying Columbine as the Revenge of the Picked-On:
"The motivations of the two killers," People continued, "were hard to fathom." Actually, I had no problem fathoming Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's motives. While I didn't suffer the extreme abuse some of my friends did, I was fucked with enough to spend four years fantasizing about blowing up my high school and everyone in it. . . . Watching SWAT teams inch their way toward Columbine High, I wasn't shocked that something like this could happen in a high school. I was shocked that something like this hadn't happened at any of mine. . . .
The power cliques that rule American high schools are every bit as murderous as Harris and Klebold, only their damage is done in slow motion, over a period of many years, and fails to draw the attention of parents or teachers--let alone news anchors, SWAT teams, and presidents. How many kids ostracized, humiliated, and assaulted in American high schools, like the survivors of Columbine High, are left scarred for life?
While Savage has an excellent point, one that very probably does directly apply to many incidents of school violence, it later proves to be false conjecture. People magazine got it right.
Harris was not a picked-on outcast constantly facing the wrath of bullies. He was an outgoing, intelligent kid who, according to Cullen, could easily quote "King Lear, Macbeth, Thomas Hardy and Euripides." Yes, he and Klebold got into trouble; but from the sound of things their trouble was written off as the misdemeanor antics of two prankster youth that didn't warrant much attention. (Only one witness did sound an alarm about Harris' behavior, but she was apparently someone who complained about too much in general to be taken seriously by the police.)
No, says Cullen, Harris was an undiagnosed psychopath who actually had the same fantasy "about blowing up my high school and everyone in it," but was free enough of any moral compass to actually pull it off. Yes, he had an obsession with Hitler (something that concerned Klebold, who had Jewish origins), but not because of Hitler's racist philosophy. He likes Hitler simply because Hitler had killed so very many people, something Harris longed to do. Again, he wanted this not out of revenge for the abuse (as he states in his final letter), but simply because Harris wanted to kill a lot of people. He was, again according to Cullen, just like Othello's right-hand man and ultimate nemesis Iago, a man who manipulates and murders "for sport and profit."
Harris simply liked the idea.
(Something else should be mentioned. The idea "about blowing up my high school and everyone in it" shouldn't be treated like the symptom of a disease. Why? Most everyone of my close friends had the same fantasy. In fact, in 1999 my house mate, a man who had gone to a different high school altogether, first told me of the attack. His words that day were, "They did it right. They went for maximum body count."
(I myself spent countless hours staring at the transom windows at our junior high, realizing that a few well-lobbed grenades or smoke bombs through those open ports would force people into the narrow hall and its potential kill zone.
(I also spent hours bored in class thinking about books, and movies, and girls; but my small clique of close friends quickly realized that those were appropriate topics to mention to adults. The killing thing, er, wasn't. Mind you, I wasn't going to do anything. I just like to muse about it. I found it an escapist fantasy perfect for wiling away the time, as amusing as designing flying cars or playing guitar with my favorite band.
(Like, I can assure you, many other teenage boys. We as a society should recognize the profound difference between harmlessly fantasizing about mass murder and actively planning and preparing to execute the act. Until then, we will continue to falsely accuse boys who bring tiny plastic soldiers carrying tiny plastic rifles to school as terrorists and expel them.
(But I digress.)
So now that we know those false stories, how did they get planted in our brains? We humans have a tendency, something I think we do better than just about every other observed species: we tell stories. With these stories we convey information, some that could prove helpful to our future survival. What's more, we think in stories. We collect, organize and understand our world not by recalling collections of relevant facts, but by recalling stories formed by notions understood to be facts. Think, for example, of the mnemonic device, a pattern that helps one remember something without a familiar, memorable pattern. For me, a big one helping me to navigate using nautical charts was "True virgins are dull company, so add whiskey." (Trust me, it's very helpful.)
Harris and Klebold's actions so horrified the nation that many started to fit the killers' actions not to the facts of the case but to our preconceptions of how those facts should read. This was helped along, according to David Cullen, author of Columbine, by a police investigation that refused to release details as the investigation got them. In the absence of official information, the media, pressed to release something, started to resort to sloppy journalism, to infer facts as they probably might be.
These inferences were in turn read and seen by people who were later interviewed. Those interviews, tainted by inference and our very human tendency to place chaos in a context we can understand, created false memories and/or further unfounded inferences. On top of this, many who actually had accurate information -- those that suffered through the day -- became less and less willing to talk to the media they saw as infesting their neighborhood. The number of correcting accounts diminished. The media echo chamber took many familiar elements and misplaced them (the bowling, the guns, the TCM), and created other elements seemingly out of whole cloth (the misfit theory).
Worse, these deviations from the facts of the case were exacerbated by two phenomena psychologists call Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect. In an interview with Ray Hyman (Episode #108), Prof. Hyman elaborates:
. . . (T)here is something what's called in psychology "source amnesia." So when people standing in the supermarket line, for example, . . . on the stands right near the checkout . . . the National Inquirer and . . . other rags, with headlines on it that Elizabeth Taylor had sex with a gorilla, or something like that. They say "That's silly." They know.
However . . . this stuff floats around in your mind; but the source, where it came from, is not there anymore. As a result, this (gorilla sex idea) becomes much more plausible. The next time you hear something like that it becomes much more plausible, more believable. And we know this. This is called the Repetition Effect. There have been lots of experiments. It's a very powerful effect.
The way they used to do the original experiments, they give people a lot of statements, and ask them to rate these statements on how plausible they are. . . . (M)ost of these statements are rated very low in plausibility. Next week or the week after they give them another bunch of statements and have them rate them. The next week, another batch. Well . . . each time they were doing this, they repeat some of (the statements), and some of them were not repeated. . . . People don't consciously remember that they saw these before. The more (the statement) was repeated, the more it becomes believable. (Emphasis mine.)
So at Columbine, these reporters are interviewing people who might or might not -- who probably did not -- remember the sources they are quoting. They most often do not remember that the source was not "something that happened," but "something they heard or read." In the media. It becomes an feedback loop that emphasizes any familiar, oft-repeated story-like elements . . . but eventually undermines any factuality.
Back to David Cullen (from Skepticality Episode #109), the source for most of the Columbine material in this post. Mr. Cullen was living in Denver at the time Columbine hit the news, and reported from Day One for Salon Magazine and others. Later, researching the book that lead to the interview, he went back and finally got official investigators to speak with him. He learned first hand how powerful Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect really were. From about 30 minutes into the interview:
That summer I was digging around, putting this investigation together, trying to figure out everything that had happened and understand what had happened there. I was able to talk to several senior investigators . . . . At that time the cops had known for quite a long time that the media accounts that they had been reading were completely wrong, and they felt they were investigating a completely different case than the one they were reading about and hearing about on TV every night. They were getting more and more frustrated . . . about the situation. That's when I learned, four months out (from the attack), just how wrong we had gotten the story.
There were some really shocking things that had happened to me. For instance, when they would talk to me about the big bombs the killers had planted and that it was mainly planned as a bombing, I was shocked. "What, this was a bombing?" And then I went back to my early stories and I had written about the fact that it was a bombing. So I saw how it had worked in my own mind, that I had "forgotten" this major detail, that it had been a bombing, because that didn't fit into the narrative that we (the media) have.
. . . . (T)he way memory works is you hear so much over and over repeated about "Here's the central narrative about how Columbine happened." . . . (It was a) big revenge idea by the Trench Coat Mafia against the Jocks. And you buy into that and you let go of the pieces that you learned along the way that were contradictory to that. So I even fell into that trap myself. That was really big wake-up call to me, that just a handful of months after . . . we had gotten it wrong.
So here we have a reporter -- who had reported the initial facts of the story correctly -- forgetting those facts after just a few months of frenzied echo chamber reportage. Worse, Cullen and others wrote articles to correct the record. These included one Cullen himself did for Salon Magazine in 1999. Other pieces were printed in the Rocky Mountain News and Time Magazine. The higher profile publications, however, while they did correct the record, did not admit that they themselves had initially gotten the story so wrong, and thereby failed to alert the public to the misinformation at all. Without the "Oops, we screwed up" being said first and foremost, Cullen notes, the corrections were themselves largely forgotten.
Even if these publications had admitted error, though, Cullen doesn't see that as efficacious in and of itself. The echo chamber effect is simply too powerful. Furthermore, when the false data fits our own preconceptions it is almost impossible to overcome. Just under 50 minutes into the interview, he says:
It's very hard to correct stories once they're wrong, especially major stories burned into our psyches. When for months you hear about (any oft-repeated story), and there's different things going on and it's just accepted fact, one or two days of the news cycle of reporting "Oh, that thing never happened" doesn't undo all that. . . . (I)f you don't happen to be watching the Today Show or ABC Nightly News, or you don't read the New York Times that day, you don't happen to see that story corrected yet, then . . . you never get the information.
Or (if you do get the information) you think, "Really? That never happened?" And then a month later, you don't necessarily remember. All this isn't that important to the average person. . . . You revert to the version that you heard fifty times, instead of the correction that you heard one time. . . . so even though that story came out, the correction is like a whisper compared to the early scream. The initial stories stick with us, so we have to get them right the first time. (Emphasis mine)
Just for somewhat sobering laughs, I'd like you, Dear Reader, to re-read the last sentence in Mr. Cullen's quote. Mr. Cullen seems to have forgotten the lesson he himself learned after he got the story right the first time. Remember? He reported on the bombs he later forgot. Listen to the interview and you will learn that he also forgot that the pair had not been members of the TCM, even though he himself had reported that fact two days after the attack.
When the facts do not fit the narrative people choose for themselves, they will probably not be remembered accurately, if at all. If enough people choose a similar narrative, the social pressures all of us exert/feel will quash most alternative narratives, even when those alternatives fit the facts more accurately. I've noted this last phenomenon before. It's called The Overton Window, named for Joe Overton, a public policy wonk. From the wiki entry, the Overton Window Theory ". . . describes a 'window' in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue." Overton orders public reactions thusly, from the least acceptable to the most:
The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:
* Unthinkable
* Radical
* Acceptable
* Sensible
* Popular
* Policy
In his interview, Cullen noted at length that people have a real problem understanding true, clinically-defined psychopaths. Amoral killers like Ted Bundy and fictional counterparts like Shakespeare's Iago from Othello simply don't fit into anyone's morality-based universe. After all, they lack a traditional sense of morality, much like some have no sense of smell or the ability to see and recognize faces.
This lack of morality challenges and defies morality. This puts Harris' psychopathy outside the realm of normal understanding into the realm of the "Unthinkable." In the media echo chamber, the few facts available warped from "Unthinkable" -- those that fit no accepted narrative -- to "Acceptable" to "Popular" through Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect. The story became one of picked-on outcasts, marked like all outcasts by their non-standard dress of trench coats, who lashed out at their jock tormentors and teacher enablers with the American weapon of choice, the gun.
The accepted narrative trumps the facts even to this day.
By now, Dear Reader, you have probably forgotten that I introduced this entry with mention not of Columbine but of more recent events in the news. The Health Care Reform debate. President Obama's citizenship and (by extension) ability to lead as Commander in Chief. President Obama's religious affiliations, if any. His racial views. What have these to do with Columbine?
Everything.
To explain, let's go back to Mr. Overton and his Window. I mentioned briefly that he was a public policy wonk. He is, in fact, a wonk who has used the phenomenon bearing his name to affect elections. Returning to the wiki entry, we read:
Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable. The idea is that priming the public with fringe ideas intended to be and remain unacceptable, will make the real target ideas seem more acceptable by comparison. . . . The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it, and adding new ideas that can push the old ideas towards acceptance merely by making the limits more extreme. (Emphasis, yet again, mine.)
This Daily Kos article outlines the strategy Overton observed (and employed to influence at least one election). What Overton and those employing his strategy do is to identify the topics under public consideration by pinning them in his descending acceptance order. Let's take Health Care. Moving from the most conservative to the most liberal, let's consider how a liberal voter/policy person might see the current Window. Remember, it runs from Unacceptable to Policy:
* No government involvement in health care allowed at all.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
Now let's reverse the window and envision it from the point of view of conservatives:
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* No government involvement in health care allowed at all.
Ah, but let's remember that a Window has a base and a top. Only the views in the middle, in the Widow itself, can be applied. Let's combine the two windows to show what I mean:
* Unthinkable
* Radical
* Acceptable
* Sensible
* Popular
* Policy
* Popular
* Sensible
* Acceptable
* Radical
* Unthinkable
By adding some content let's see how that applies to the health care debate, using the bold to indicate the present state of affairs. This list outlines how health care is seen by liberals in this country, with the upper points reflecting the current state of unacceptable affairs:
* Doctors allowed to charge whatever they want, even deny treatment for want of payment.
* Health insurers entitled to unlimited profits.
* Drug manufacturers entitled to charge onerous prices for needed medication.
* No government intervention in health care allowed at all.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
Now let's do this again, but add some of the "noise" introduced by more extreme and vocal citizens placed prominently on the news.
* Government involvement will raise the cost of health insurance, leading to national bankruptcy.
* Patients cannot choose their doctors in the Single Payer System.
* Health care is to be rationed, leading to health difficulties from untreated conditions.
* Rationing becomes so severe that "death panels" decide the fate of the elderly.
If we add those vocal (but completely false) scenarios to the Window, it now reads by conservatives as a plan cooked up by liberals and thought of by these liberals thusly:
* Doctors allowed to charge whatever they want, even deny treatment for want of payment.
* Health insurers entitled to unlimited profits.
* Drug manufacturers entitled to charge onerous prices for needed medication.
* No government intervention in health care allowed at all.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* Government involvement will raise the cost of health insurance, leading to national bankruptcy.
* Patients cannot choose their doctors in the Single Payer System.
* Health care is to be rationed, leading to health difficulties from untreated conditions.
* Rationing becomes so severe that "death panels" decide the fate of the elderly.
You see what is happening? By emphasizing extreme elements not even being proposed by Congress, the conservative Noise Machine has scared people enough to mobilize them. They turn out in droves protesting elements again not found in any proposed legislation. This drives the Policy Goal of Single Payer into the realm of Unacceptable, and even pushes the modest Public Option into the Radical realm.
Of course, I've not here considered the liberal Overton Window. Michael Moore's Sicko does that very, very well. But look at how quickly Moore's facts were smeared in an ad hominem attack on Moore's person. Almost none of the points Sicko raised were discussed at the time the movie was released, at least not by the main-stream commercial news outlets . . . outlets, let's remember, largely funded by advertisers pushing health care products.
The liberal points are simply not being heard.
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cPRwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show
Full EpisodesPolitical HumorHealthcare Protests
This Daily Show piece (along with several others) outlines what is happening very nicely. The Overton Window is shifting, is being shifted, and few -- thanks to Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect -- can correct the misconceptions.
So, what to do? First, let's not blame "ignorant" Americans for the reactionary path this country is taking. Yes, the most vocal right-wingers are ignorant. Yes, a few of them don't know how to spell. But the visceral reactions you see them exhibiting come from real fear of unreal threats, threats emphasized beyond all rationality by vested interests who just so happen to control our news media (or have the personal home numbers for those that do).
The protestors are ignorant in that they are uninformed; but in this media environment I fail to see how they could effectively inform themselves. The Noise Machine is simply too damned loud . . . and too damned well organized.
We've seen this before, just after Columbine. Swoopy concludes her interview with this:
There were more than a few petty hate crimes following April 20th aimed at my friends, myself, and just anyone who was different -- openly gay, atheist, or simply dressed in black. This occurred despite the fact that any of these things had anything to do with what happened at Columbine; but the media had told everyone that it did. There was not only a zero-tolerance in schools for kids with black coats or blue hair, but a general zero-tolerance in America at that time that took a long while to abate. In some instances, it never has.
Yes, that emphasis was once again mine.
I am convinced this is not happening in a vacuum. Phenomena this wide-spread never do. They are helped along by people who know what they are doing, who know exactly what buttons to push and how often. Don't be fooled: This is a power struggle backed by millions of dollars with many more billions of dollars at stake. On that most can agree.
What is less clear is how this is happening.
To illustrate what I feel is happening now, I'd like to mention a few facts about the Columbine High School incident ten years ago, facts I found startling and surprising. Did you know:
-- Bombs were supposed to be the main killing weapons, not guns.
-- Harris and Klebold were not members of the Trench Coat Mafia.
-- Harris and Klebold were not quiet "outcasts" picked on by "jocks."
-- The morning they and so many others died at their hands, the two did not go bowling.
Surprised at any of these revelations? I was. It's amazing to note what happened verses what everyone outside of Littleton thinks happened.
First, let's correct the record. The first items that should be addressed are the bombs and the bowling. As to the bowling, yes, the two killers were supposed to go bowling that morning. They didn't show up, something, in fact, that indicated they might be involved in later incidents. We in the general public, though, have perhaps permanently associated their early, carefree bowling morning with shock given the days events thanks to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, his multi-award winning documentary about guns and culture surrounding them here in America.
Moore makes several points in Bowling worth mentioning. Harris and Klebold, however, served as merely the most recent and famous examples in a documentary spanning our armed nation and it's history. And given its release in 2002, Moore might not have born the brunt of the blame for getting the bowling detail completely wrong. After all, that -- and the fact that the attack was planned not as a shooting spree but as a bombing with a shooting clean-up operation afterwards -- were taken as common knowledge, thanks to the flawed reporting on the attacks themselves.
One of the bombs Harris and Klebold planted.
Note the alarm clock timer to the left.
See and read more at David Cullen's Page.
The above bomb also takes a bit of Moore's wind out of his sails. Most of the deaths and injuries in Littleton were caused by firearms, yes, but that wasn't the plan. Columbine was intended to be a high school version of Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City terrorist attack. In the interview, Cullen quite specifically mentions that one of the teachers died of an untreated shrapnel wound.
Why wasn't that key detail -- that the attack was not solely an example of gun violence run amok in an armed country -- front and center in the reporting? I believe many, including Moore, chose to see what they saw. Guns are more of a controversy in the United States than bombs simply because more die from gun violence every year. Had Columbine happened in London during the IRA bombings of the 1980s, the movie released might have been very, very different, with a majority remembering the bombs and calling, for example, for limits on the sale of supplies that might be used in bomb making.
How about the so-called Trench Coat Mafia, a group to which the killers supposedly belonged? Cullen notes that the actual TCM weren't a gang of misfits simmering with rage and discontent, but were rather a clique of well-known students, so accepted in Columbine's social structure that their picture appeared in the yearbook. Black trench coats, however, are seen as threatening to many, especially when those coats pair with the word "Mafia." Therefore, what seemed to be an innocent quirk of Columbine society became overt, threatening behavior. Were that actually true, were the TCM a bunch of punks seething with murderous rage, would the yearbook group include them as a group as innocuous as the newspaper or marching band?
Unknown elsewhere, though, the TCM represented threat. Think of the goths in most high schools, the punks of an earlier era, kids with no desire to fit in with the general student population. Those who do not understand -- who wear "normal" clothes and cut their hair "normally" -- can see blue or fire engine red hair cut into a mohawk, can see the multiple piercings everywhere but the ear lobes, can see dark, brooding clothing as an understood indictment of "normal" society. Indeed, many affecting such styles use those excuses to describe their confrontational behaviors.
Therefore, two students who executed so horrific an act must have shown some outward signs long before the act itself . . . signs like "weird" clothing.
Other misfit stereotypes come easily to mind. An early Op-Ed piece by Dan Savage at The Stranger here in Seattle made the internet rounds very quickly after it was published, portraying Columbine as the Revenge of the Picked-On:
"The motivations of the two killers," People continued, "were hard to fathom." Actually, I had no problem fathoming Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's motives. While I didn't suffer the extreme abuse some of my friends did, I was fucked with enough to spend four years fantasizing about blowing up my high school and everyone in it. . . . Watching SWAT teams inch their way toward Columbine High, I wasn't shocked that something like this could happen in a high school. I was shocked that something like this hadn't happened at any of mine. . . .
The power cliques that rule American high schools are every bit as murderous as Harris and Klebold, only their damage is done in slow motion, over a period of many years, and fails to draw the attention of parents or teachers--let alone news anchors, SWAT teams, and presidents. How many kids ostracized, humiliated, and assaulted in American high schools, like the survivors of Columbine High, are left scarred for life?
While Savage has an excellent point, one that very probably does directly apply to many incidents of school violence, it later proves to be false conjecture. People magazine got it right.
Harris was not a picked-on outcast constantly facing the wrath of bullies. He was an outgoing, intelligent kid who, according to Cullen, could easily quote "King Lear, Macbeth, Thomas Hardy and Euripides." Yes, he and Klebold got into trouble; but from the sound of things their trouble was written off as the misdemeanor antics of two prankster youth that didn't warrant much attention. (Only one witness did sound an alarm about Harris' behavior, but she was apparently someone who complained about too much in general to be taken seriously by the police.)
No, says Cullen, Harris was an undiagnosed psychopath who actually had the same fantasy "about blowing up my high school and everyone in it," but was free enough of any moral compass to actually pull it off. Yes, he had an obsession with Hitler (something that concerned Klebold, who had Jewish origins), but not because of Hitler's racist philosophy. He likes Hitler simply because Hitler had killed so very many people, something Harris longed to do. Again, he wanted this not out of revenge for the abuse (as he states in his final letter), but simply because Harris wanted to kill a lot of people. He was, again according to Cullen, just like Othello's right-hand man and ultimate nemesis Iago, a man who manipulates and murders "for sport and profit."
Harris simply liked the idea.
(Something else should be mentioned. The idea "about blowing up my high school and everyone in it" shouldn't be treated like the symptom of a disease. Why? Most everyone of my close friends had the same fantasy. In fact, in 1999 my house mate, a man who had gone to a different high school altogether, first told me of the attack. His words that day were, "They did it right. They went for maximum body count."
(I myself spent countless hours staring at the transom windows at our junior high, realizing that a few well-lobbed grenades or smoke bombs through those open ports would force people into the narrow hall and its potential kill zone.
(I also spent hours bored in class thinking about books, and movies, and girls; but my small clique of close friends quickly realized that those were appropriate topics to mention to adults. The killing thing, er, wasn't. Mind you, I wasn't going to do anything. I just like to muse about it. I found it an escapist fantasy perfect for wiling away the time, as amusing as designing flying cars or playing guitar with my favorite band.
(Like, I can assure you, many other teenage boys. We as a society should recognize the profound difference between harmlessly fantasizing about mass murder and actively planning and preparing to execute the act. Until then, we will continue to falsely accuse boys who bring tiny plastic soldiers carrying tiny plastic rifles to school as terrorists and expel them.
(But I digress.)
So now that we know those false stories, how did they get planted in our brains? We humans have a tendency, something I think we do better than just about every other observed species: we tell stories. With these stories we convey information, some that could prove helpful to our future survival. What's more, we think in stories. We collect, organize and understand our world not by recalling collections of relevant facts, but by recalling stories formed by notions understood to be facts. Think, for example, of the mnemonic device, a pattern that helps one remember something without a familiar, memorable pattern. For me, a big one helping me to navigate using nautical charts was "True virgins are dull company, so add whiskey." (Trust me, it's very helpful.)
Harris and Klebold's actions so horrified the nation that many started to fit the killers' actions not to the facts of the case but to our preconceptions of how those facts should read. This was helped along, according to David Cullen, author of Columbine, by a police investigation that refused to release details as the investigation got them. In the absence of official information, the media, pressed to release something, started to resort to sloppy journalism, to infer facts as they probably might be.
These inferences were in turn read and seen by people who were later interviewed. Those interviews, tainted by inference and our very human tendency to place chaos in a context we can understand, created false memories and/or further unfounded inferences. On top of this, many who actually had accurate information -- those that suffered through the day -- became less and less willing to talk to the media they saw as infesting their neighborhood. The number of correcting accounts diminished. The media echo chamber took many familiar elements and misplaced them (the bowling, the guns, the TCM), and created other elements seemingly out of whole cloth (the misfit theory).
Worse, these deviations from the facts of the case were exacerbated by two phenomena psychologists call Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect. In an interview with Ray Hyman (Episode #108), Prof. Hyman elaborates:
. . . (T)here is something what's called in psychology "source amnesia." So when people standing in the supermarket line, for example, . . . on the stands right near the checkout . . . the National Inquirer and . . . other rags, with headlines on it that Elizabeth Taylor had sex with a gorilla, or something like that. They say "That's silly." They know.
However . . . this stuff floats around in your mind; but the source, where it came from, is not there anymore. As a result, this (gorilla sex idea) becomes much more plausible. The next time you hear something like that it becomes much more plausible, more believable. And we know this. This is called the Repetition Effect. There have been lots of experiments. It's a very powerful effect.
The way they used to do the original experiments, they give people a lot of statements, and ask them to rate these statements on how plausible they are. . . . (M)ost of these statements are rated very low in plausibility. Next week or the week after they give them another bunch of statements and have them rate them. The next week, another batch. Well . . . each time they were doing this, they repeat some of (the statements), and some of them were not repeated. . . . People don't consciously remember that they saw these before. The more (the statement) was repeated, the more it becomes believable. (Emphasis mine.)
So at Columbine, these reporters are interviewing people who might or might not -- who probably did not -- remember the sources they are quoting. They most often do not remember that the source was not "something that happened," but "something they heard or read." In the media. It becomes an feedback loop that emphasizes any familiar, oft-repeated story-like elements . . . but eventually undermines any factuality.
Back to David Cullen (from Skepticality Episode #109), the source for most of the Columbine material in this post. Mr. Cullen was living in Denver at the time Columbine hit the news, and reported from Day One for Salon Magazine and others. Later, researching the book that lead to the interview, he went back and finally got official investigators to speak with him. He learned first hand how powerful Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect really were. From about 30 minutes into the interview:
That summer I was digging around, putting this investigation together, trying to figure out everything that had happened and understand what had happened there. I was able to talk to several senior investigators . . . . At that time the cops had known for quite a long time that the media accounts that they had been reading were completely wrong, and they felt they were investigating a completely different case than the one they were reading about and hearing about on TV every night. They were getting more and more frustrated . . . about the situation. That's when I learned, four months out (from the attack), just how wrong we had gotten the story.
There were some really shocking things that had happened to me. For instance, when they would talk to me about the big bombs the killers had planted and that it was mainly planned as a bombing, I was shocked. "What, this was a bombing?" And then I went back to my early stories and I had written about the fact that it was a bombing. So I saw how it had worked in my own mind, that I had "forgotten" this major detail, that it had been a bombing, because that didn't fit into the narrative that we (the media) have.
. . . . (T)he way memory works is you hear so much over and over repeated about "Here's the central narrative about how Columbine happened." . . . (It was a) big revenge idea by the Trench Coat Mafia against the Jocks. And you buy into that and you let go of the pieces that you learned along the way that were contradictory to that. So I even fell into that trap myself. That was really big wake-up call to me, that just a handful of months after . . . we had gotten it wrong.
So here we have a reporter -- who had reported the initial facts of the story correctly -- forgetting those facts after just a few months of frenzied echo chamber reportage. Worse, Cullen and others wrote articles to correct the record. These included one Cullen himself did for Salon Magazine in 1999. Other pieces were printed in the Rocky Mountain News and Time Magazine. The higher profile publications, however, while they did correct the record, did not admit that they themselves had initially gotten the story so wrong, and thereby failed to alert the public to the misinformation at all. Without the "Oops, we screwed up" being said first and foremost, Cullen notes, the corrections were themselves largely forgotten.
Even if these publications had admitted error, though, Cullen doesn't see that as efficacious in and of itself. The echo chamber effect is simply too powerful. Furthermore, when the false data fits our own preconceptions it is almost impossible to overcome. Just under 50 minutes into the interview, he says:
It's very hard to correct stories once they're wrong, especially major stories burned into our psyches. When for months you hear about (any oft-repeated story), and there's different things going on and it's just accepted fact, one or two days of the news cycle of reporting "Oh, that thing never happened" doesn't undo all that. . . . (I)f you don't happen to be watching the Today Show or ABC Nightly News, or you don't read the New York Times that day, you don't happen to see that story corrected yet, then . . . you never get the information.
Or (if you do get the information) you think, "Really? That never happened?" And then a month later, you don't necessarily remember. All this isn't that important to the average person. . . . You revert to the version that you heard fifty times, instead of the correction that you heard one time. . . . so even though that story came out, the correction is like a whisper compared to the early scream. The initial stories stick with us, so we have to get them right the first time. (Emphasis mine)
Just for somewhat sobering laughs, I'd like you, Dear Reader, to re-read the last sentence in Mr. Cullen's quote. Mr. Cullen seems to have forgotten the lesson he himself learned after he got the story right the first time. Remember? He reported on the bombs he later forgot. Listen to the interview and you will learn that he also forgot that the pair had not been members of the TCM, even though he himself had reported that fact two days after the attack.
When the facts do not fit the narrative people choose for themselves, they will probably not be remembered accurately, if at all. If enough people choose a similar narrative, the social pressures all of us exert/feel will quash most alternative narratives, even when those alternatives fit the facts more accurately. I've noted this last phenomenon before. It's called The Overton Window, named for Joe Overton, a public policy wonk. From the wiki entry, the Overton Window Theory ". . . describes a 'window' in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue." Overton orders public reactions thusly, from the least acceptable to the most:
The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:
* Unthinkable
* Radical
* Acceptable
* Sensible
* Popular
* Policy
In his interview, Cullen noted at length that people have a real problem understanding true, clinically-defined psychopaths. Amoral killers like Ted Bundy and fictional counterparts like Shakespeare's Iago from Othello simply don't fit into anyone's morality-based universe. After all, they lack a traditional sense of morality, much like some have no sense of smell or the ability to see and recognize faces.
This lack of morality challenges and defies morality. This puts Harris' psychopathy outside the realm of normal understanding into the realm of the "Unthinkable." In the media echo chamber, the few facts available warped from "Unthinkable" -- those that fit no accepted narrative -- to "Acceptable" to "Popular" through Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect. The story became one of picked-on outcasts, marked like all outcasts by their non-standard dress of trench coats, who lashed out at their jock tormentors and teacher enablers with the American weapon of choice, the gun.
The accepted narrative trumps the facts even to this day.
By now, Dear Reader, you have probably forgotten that I introduced this entry with mention not of Columbine but of more recent events in the news. The Health Care Reform debate. President Obama's citizenship and (by extension) ability to lead as Commander in Chief. President Obama's religious affiliations, if any. His racial views. What have these to do with Columbine?
Everything.
To explain, let's go back to Mr. Overton and his Window. I mentioned briefly that he was a public policy wonk. He is, in fact, a wonk who has used the phenomenon bearing his name to affect elections. Returning to the wiki entry, we read:
Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable. The idea is that priming the public with fringe ideas intended to be and remain unacceptable, will make the real target ideas seem more acceptable by comparison. . . . The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it, and adding new ideas that can push the old ideas towards acceptance merely by making the limits more extreme. (Emphasis, yet again, mine.)
This Daily Kos article outlines the strategy Overton observed (and employed to influence at least one election). What Overton and those employing his strategy do is to identify the topics under public consideration by pinning them in his descending acceptance order. Let's take Health Care. Moving from the most conservative to the most liberal, let's consider how a liberal voter/policy person might see the current Window. Remember, it runs from Unacceptable to Policy:
* No government involvement in health care allowed at all.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
Now let's reverse the window and envision it from the point of view of conservatives:
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* No government involvement in health care allowed at all.
Ah, but let's remember that a Window has a base and a top. Only the views in the middle, in the Widow itself, can be applied. Let's combine the two windows to show what I mean:
* Unthinkable
* Radical
* Acceptable
* Sensible
* Popular
* Policy
* Popular
* Sensible
* Acceptable
* Radical
* Unthinkable
By adding some content let's see how that applies to the health care debate, using the bold to indicate the present state of affairs. This list outlines how health care is seen by liberals in this country, with the upper points reflecting the current state of unacceptable affairs:
* Doctors allowed to charge whatever they want, even deny treatment for want of payment.
* Health insurers entitled to unlimited profits.
* Drug manufacturers entitled to charge onerous prices for needed medication.
* No government intervention in health care allowed at all.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
Now let's do this again, but add some of the "noise" introduced by more extreme and vocal citizens placed prominently on the news.
* Government involvement will raise the cost of health insurance, leading to national bankruptcy.
* Patients cannot choose their doctors in the Single Payer System.
* Health care is to be rationed, leading to health difficulties from untreated conditions.
* Rationing becomes so severe that "death panels" decide the fate of the elderly.
If we add those vocal (but completely false) scenarios to the Window, it now reads by conservatives as a plan cooked up by liberals and thought of by these liberals thusly:
* Doctors allowed to charge whatever they want, even deny treatment for want of payment.
* Health insurers entitled to unlimited profits.
* Drug manufacturers entitled to charge onerous prices for needed medication.
* No government intervention in health care allowed at all.
* Government involvement limited to retirees.
* Government involvement limited to retirees and the financially strapped.
* Private coverage is regulated to prevent rescission, pre-existing condition denial and premium hikes.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* All coverage is controlled by the government through a Single Payer System.
* Along with regulation, a Public Option be made available to compete with private insurance.
* Government involvement will raise the cost of health insurance, leading to national bankruptcy.
* Patients cannot choose their doctors in the Single Payer System.
* Health care is to be rationed, leading to health difficulties from untreated conditions.
* Rationing becomes so severe that "death panels" decide the fate of the elderly.
You see what is happening? By emphasizing extreme elements not even being proposed by Congress, the conservative Noise Machine has scared people enough to mobilize them. They turn out in droves protesting elements again not found in any proposed legislation. This drives the Policy Goal of Single Payer into the realm of Unacceptable, and even pushes the modest Public Option into the Radical realm.
Of course, I've not here considered the liberal Overton Window. Michael Moore's Sicko does that very, very well. But look at how quickly Moore's facts were smeared in an ad hominem attack on Moore's person. Almost none of the points Sicko raised were discussed at the time the movie was released, at least not by the main-stream commercial news outlets . . . outlets, let's remember, largely funded by advertisers pushing health care products.
The liberal points are simply not being heard.
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cPRwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show
Full EpisodesPolitical HumorHealthcare Protests
This Daily Show piece (along with several others) outlines what is happening very nicely. The Overton Window is shifting, is being shifted, and few -- thanks to Source Amnesia and the Repetition Effect -- can correct the misconceptions.
So, what to do? First, let's not blame "ignorant" Americans for the reactionary path this country is taking. Yes, the most vocal right-wingers are ignorant. Yes, a few of them don't know how to spell. But the visceral reactions you see them exhibiting come from real fear of unreal threats, threats emphasized beyond all rationality by vested interests who just so happen to control our news media (or have the personal home numbers for those that do).
The protestors are ignorant in that they are uninformed; but in this media environment I fail to see how they could effectively inform themselves. The Noise Machine is simply too damned loud . . . and too damned well organized.
We've seen this before, just after Columbine. Swoopy concludes her interview with this:
There were more than a few petty hate crimes following April 20th aimed at my friends, myself, and just anyone who was different -- openly gay, atheist, or simply dressed in black. This occurred despite the fact that any of these things had anything to do with what happened at Columbine; but the media had told everyone that it did. There was not only a zero-tolerance in schools for kids with black coats or blue hair, but a general zero-tolerance in America at that time that took a long while to abate. In some instances, it never has.
Yes, that emphasis was once again mine.