Columbine

Columbine
© 2009 Dave Cullen
417 pages

Columbine. I remember it, of course.  I was in eighth grade when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold turned their high school into a bloody spectacle. That day on April 20th, 1999, is always referred to as a school shooting, but that label misses the point. Harris and Klebold weren't shooters, they were failed bombers.  They didn't turn the cafeteria and library red with blood because they had a score to settle with the jocks, they wanted to depart a world of inferiors in a blaze of glory.  Dave Cullen's Columbine is a disturbing history of the April attack, one which draws extensively from the corpus of material the two deliberately left behind.  Cullen's history has a target, though, as he aims to rebuke not only the media for creating and perpetuating various myths about the horror, but the sheriff's department for negligence and deception.   Most importantly, Cullen maintains that Harris and Klebold were not abused loners who 'snapped', but psychologically disturbed individuals who planned the attack for more than a year.

Columbine is a receptively easy read. Cullen is a journalist, and knows how to grease the runners to captivate readers with a story. The problem is the grisly subject -- or subjects. The graphic nature of the shootings isn't dwelt on overmuch, but through Cullen's research considerable time is spent in the head of Harris and Klebold. This is, to say the least, a toxic atmosphere. Cullen's thesis is that Harris was a clinical psychopath, one who could lead a double life. In society, he could be productive and charming, convincing adults into purchasing guns on his behalf, and even dating a twenty-something despite being a kid working at a pizza parlor.   By himself -- in his journals, with people he regarded as confederates -- Eric was full of contempt for society, for virtually everyone.  He acted out his contempt in 'missions' of petty vandalism and theft,  and when confronted by authority figures, could always manipulate them into believing he was repentant.  Eric was joined in these missions by Dylan Klebold, a depressive misfit who nontheless managed to snag a prom date; both boys had active social lives.

There is no doubt that the April attack was a methodically planned horror instead of a loner's 'snap'.  Not only did the boys ramble and rave in their bloodlust for months prior, but the equipment took time to purchase and put together --  for their bombs were homemade concoctions, based on plans from the internet.  The April 20th attack itself was a multi-stage drama of the horrific: first, a diversionary bomb in the outskirts of the city to draw police away, then several massive explosions would rock the school cafeteria at peak traffic time.  Hundreds would be killed by the inferno, and as students streamed out of the exits, Eric and Dylan would be waiting for them with intent of sweeping up survivors with gunfire  before their inevitable demise at the hands of the police. Still worse, their cars, parked in areas where emergency services would establish a perimeter, were rigged to blow after their deaths, adding still more chaos and death.  This is no impulsive revenge quest, but a premeditated campaign of war against the humanity they loathed. Fortunately for the students of Columbine,  all of the bombs failed to explode. and the murderous pair soon lost interested in shooting people after the first dozen, resigning themselves to self-slaughter.

Their campaign of death should not have been an ambush. Cullen notes that Eric's sociopathy, his contempt for the world, often displayed itself in the arrogant way he and Dylan both leaked information.  Harris' toxic website often broadcast his hatred for the world,  and numerous people were aware that they had guns and were experimenting with pipe bombs. The police, having previously arrested the pair for breaking into a van and stealing equipment from it, even had a warrant for a search of Eric's house -- one which was never executed.  Although Cullen labors to dispatch many minor myths associated with the Columbine attack -- the pair's association with a 'trench coat Mafia', the sole targeting of 'jocks', etc --   he rebukes local authorities far more seriously for their negligence in following up on Harris, and for attempting to conceal how high he had already registered as a potential threat from the public.

Cullen's case is simple: Eric Harris was a psychopath who essentially co-opted the suicidal tendencies of his manic-depressive buddy into an attempt  to depart a world they loathed in a manner that demonstrated their superiority over the zombies.  Some parts of his argument are stronger than others: for instance, the numerous heavyweight bombs, which would have killed hundreds indiscriminately, indicate that the two weren't just after jocks. (The intense planning obviously belies any impulsive snap, of course.)    The case for Eric's sociopathy strikes me as solid as well. Less convincing is the utter denial that Harris and Klebold were bullied, as Cullen points to their circles of friends and the fact that Harris was a bully as well.  A bully can be bullied; the two categories are not exclusive, and Klebold strikes me as an easily-bullied sort of personality. While Harris' journals are nothing but wrath and rage, Klebold is more relatable, alternating between wrath and idolization of a girl.  Numerous students have also testified in interviews that the two were subjects of abuse -- but who in a modern high school is not?  

It is never easy to dwell on this kind of rage, and strong stomachs are definitely required to endure constant exposure to Harris' utter lack of humanity.  Cullen's interesting approach -- alternating build-up and aftermath chapters -- kept me glued to the pages, and I'm grateful for a history that indicates how Columbine attempted to climb back to its feet after the attack, to reclaim the school and honor those who perished.  Columbine's story after the fact is also difficult, though, riven with lawsuits and slow-to-heal psychological wounds. But the school survives still, and these days much has changed: police have different active-shooter protocols now (immediate engagement, no more waiting for SWAT)  threats of violence are often met with zero-tolerance policies, and it is doubtful in the post 9/11 world that teenagers could get away with leaving mysterious dufflebags in the school cafeteria, ticking away.  Although a cry for stricter gun laws follows every shooting in the United States -- understandably -- Columbine also points to the limits of those laws, as the culprits' most potentially dangerous weapons, the bombs, were fashioned from ordinary consumer goods. Thank heavens Harris had to put them together at the last minute for want of safe storage space, otherwise his serial bombing might  have succeeded.   Those with intent to harm will find a way to try it; good security policies are needed to counter these threats. At Columbine, I couldn't help but notice that the sole guard was off at lunch during the attack. One guard for 2000 students?!  My high school had two deputy sheriffs, and we couldn't have boasted a thousand students on a good day.  (Of course, we were post-Columbine.)

Columbine is haunting, effective reading.

Related:

• The Ashes of Waco, Dick Reavis. The boys' April 20th assault was allegedly timed to 'honor' Timothy McVeigh, whose own bombing was allegedly revenge for the Waco massacre. 

Dreamland

Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51
© 1998 Phil Patton
336 pages

"What would happen if the U.S. government opened its doors to us and let us see all that was going on? Depending on what is there, we'd either be vindicated or disappointed, but we would also rapidly lose interest. What would we focus our attentions on? Where would we go next?....the greatest thing about Area 51 is its mystery, otherwise nobody would care."

Dear readers, I have a confession. In middle school, I was way into alien conspiracy theories, specifically the Roswell Incident. I didn't believe anything had happened, but it was fun to pretend that it did. My bedroom walls were littered with three things: tiger photographs, glow-in-the-dark star stickers, and posters of green bobble-head aliens, sometimes dressed as hippies offering peace signs.   So, when I ran into Dreamland while looking for a similarly titled book on rural drug epidemics (Dreamland: the True Tale  of America's Opiate Epidemic), I had to try it out. Right?

It took me a few check-outs to actually read the book, because it's an odd kind of investigatory tourism that begins with the paranormal, shifts to completely sober and extensive discussion of military test aviation, and then swings back to more severe paranormal material towards the end. The author plays the part of reporter-tourist searching for the truth, presenting himself as neither credulous nor particularly skeptical. Like Herodotus, he simply reports what he is told, though there's an obvious personal interests in what 'Area 51' truly is.

Dreamland is not solely about 'the' Area 51, the conspiracy codename for Groom Lake, Nevada, where experimental jets are/were tested. 'Dreamland' as a place covers much of the southwest; it is not merely 'The Ranch' of Nevada, guarded by private paramilitary 'camo dudes', but the headspace world in which the subjects of this book live -- and while some of them believe devoutly in alien visitation and even in-progress takeover, others believe the alien talk is mere coverup for more ominous projects. One interviewee opined that the alien hype is being created by the military which will use a faux-alien invasion to effect a coup. The last quarter of the book is a bizarre mix of conspiracy theories, Christian and Islamic prophecies merging with alien obsession and political intrigue:  fear of a 'New World Order', so intense in Endtimes believers of the 1990s, is very strong here. My personal favorite, in part because it's the sort of thing I would do if I were in charge of a secret government project, is that Area 51 is cover, used to distract the public; the real base  is in Tonopah. (Of course, if I were in charge of the secret government project, I would put it underground and then stick a shopping complex on top of it.)

 Although the first and final fifths of Dreamland are very odd reading, fraught with true-believer syndrome ("Yes, the flying saucer we saw was a B2. But they're just  letting us see it so we won't freak out about the real flying saucers!"),  there's actually an enormous amount of information on military test aviation throughout the late 20th century, including on projects that were scrapped but which are now declassified.  Many of the aircraft mentioned bear little resemblance to conventional aircraft, at least to a public expecting to see something that looks like a commercial transport or fighters. The proposed A-12 Avenger is downright alien.   Dreamland features a chapter on the development of unmanned spy vehicles from spy planes like the U2, and speculates that soon these UAVs may be armed. (He was right: three years later after publication, a Predator drone blew up the outside  of a Taliban building, wrecking cars and sending the actual target running away instead of crossing the Styx.)

If you're interested in experimental aviation, this actually has a few chapters of interest. The actual subject of the book may distract from the fascinating bits inside, though, and considering the context of the source I'm not sure how seriously I'd take the information on CIA spy planes and the like.

The Grid

The Grid
© 1995 Phillip Kerr
447 pages

Some modern architecture might make you want to kill yourself. Other modern architecture might try to kill you directly. The Yu Corporation's newest project in Los Angeles, derisively called "The Gridiron" by everyone except for its starchitect, is an example of the latter. The Grid is the pinnacle of not only the kind of architectural brilliance it takes to make viewers wish fervently for a good disaster to remove the eyesore, but of integrated computer technology. It is the world's first wholly "smart" building, in which every supporting system of the building -- even the physical structure of the building itself -- is controlled by a computer. It is a technocrat's greatest hope: people can't even use the elevators or enter doors without being authorized by the computer as having legitimate business within the building. And if they try to attend to their own 'personal' business -- using the restroom, for instance -- their leavings are automatically scrutinized, subjected to not only a drug test but health screenings. A system this complex is bound to go wrong, and it does: with less than a week to go before the grand opening, people start dying. At first it seems like a rash of bad accidents, but then the characters realize the building itself is trying to kill them -- but why? Did a deranged ex-employee sabotage its programming, or has it developed intelligence and decided to remove its internal carbon-unit infestation?

For someone accustomed to Kerr's historical mysteries set in Germany, this is startling different work. In terms of literary craftsmanship, Kerr has grown by leaps and bounds since penning this. Much of the dialogue is forced, like canned lines from a television show. The increasing tension itself carries the novel forward, as the true source behind the mysterious deaths is revealed. Of interest to modern readers is the technology, which -- astonishingly -- within our grasp if not already achieved today. No one can read this today without thinking of the rising "internet of things", although we have more to fear from outside sources hijacking those devices and using them against us than we have of our house trying to kill us. Readers from the 1990s may remember the Sandra Bullock movie, The Net: at times, the book has that feel, of the building being an entity that can do anything -- even interfacing with a police department's internal network and suspending two officers to keep them trapped in the building -- and the futurism has the occasional short-sighted pockmark, like the fact that people use film cameras despite living in a world of holograms. The increasingly frequent trips inside the 'building's brain grew tedious because of their weirdness, but on the whole I enjoyed this. It's not stellar, but still topical. Too bad Kerr has never tried to revisit techno-thrillers -- I'd like to see what a more experienced hand produces.

Related:
The Fear Index, Robert Harris

The Ashes of Waco

The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation
© 1995 Dick Reavis
320 pages

What happened at Waco?  Dick Reavis had an itch to find out, and since no one else at his alternative newspaper was curious, he volunteered as man on the ground to investigate. Getting close wasn’t easy: during the fifty-one day siege, the ATF and FBI kept journalists at a distance, and their scissor job with the phone lines restricted communication in and out of the surrounded center.  Inside the center were nearly a hundred members of the Branch Davidians, a splinter sect of the Seventh-Day Adventists, expecting the apocalypse and living in the belief that their leader David Koresh was chosen as the next messiah, meant to  reveal God’s word to the world.   What Reavis found was a gung-ho mob of bureaucrats and gunmen, constantly getting in one another’s way and approaching a situation that demanded delicacy with all the tact of a bull in a china shop.

The Ashes of Waco is a more comprehensive text on the Waco disaster, which started off with the deaths of ten people – six civilians, four agents --  and ended in an inferno that killed eighty more, including children. Reavis covers the sect's religious background in a series of introductory chapters, covering their revolution from an Adventist group to one increasingly dominated by Koresh's interpretative of the Book of Revelation, then moves on to the ATF investigation and the bloodshed that followed.  If Reavis seems at all partial in his sharp criticism of the government which follows, this owes more to their half-cocked Rambo tactics than overt  sympathy for the Davidians.  He doesn't dwell on the child marriages, but at the time of writing Koresh was still being lynched by the media as a deranged pedophile with a private arsenal.  Reavis doesn't shy away from their kookiness, covering aspects that Tabor missed altogether, like a belief in biblical UFOs that transported people from Earth into Heaven.  In Reavis' eyes, however, a government which uses extreme force recklessly is far more dangerous than a religious group that had lived peaceably in Texas for decades.  From moment one, Waco was a catastrophe for civil, competent law enforcement. From the raid's opening, with a helicopter strafing the building, to its closing fifty-one days later with tanks used to batter down walls and shoot in tear gas grenades banned from war and known to be incendiary in enclosed situations, the operative word was Fiasco.

The Ashes of Waco is well-done, drawing on extensive interviews with Federal agents,  Waco residents (the centers' neighbors), and Davidian survivors. Reavis conveys a good sense of what life was like inside the community, including maps of the connected buildings. He also looks beyond the front lines to consider how neighbors reacted to the showdown, including one radio host who -- after realizing the center's residents were listening to his show -- had them move a dish mounted on their roof in response to questions, a la Christopher Pike in "The Menagerie", in Star Trek.   Although obviously appalled by the actions of the ATF and FBI, they are not villainized, All told, this is as even-handed and thorough an account one could hope for, written so soon after the debacle.

                                                               

Harvest of Rage

Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning
© 1997 Joel Dyer
307 pages

In the spring of 1996, the peace of Oklahoma City was shattered when a truck bomb ignited outside a federal office.  Nearly two hundred people were killed, and nigh a thousand injured, in one man's act of rage against the government.  But in Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer writes that McVeigh was far from alone: he was part of a movement of thousands, spread across the country but concentrated in its withering agricultural heartland.  The farm crisis -- the growing poverty and destruction of rural life in the wake of globalization -- has created legion of homegrown terrorists, whose despair has been crafted into insurrection against the government. Dyer spent seven years interviewing and visiting anti-government types attempting to get to the bottom of rural militancy, and offers sections on the movement's ideological bases as well as his economic argument.  Although portions of this are badly dated, especially given that Dyer sees Endtimes-paranoia about the coming of the Millennium as a factor,  the central issues are alive and well twenty years later.

Dyer is not sympathetic to most of the ideas that he encounters during his seven-year investigation (he refers to the free enterprise system as one "in which the government does nothing to help people"), but he does empathize with the plight of his subjects, sharing some of their concerns if not their response. The central issue, as Dyer sees it, is economic:  as globalization allows for American firms to  manufacture goods and purchase food more cheaply overseas,  America's own primary industries are being gutted. Family farms are being eaten alive by monstrously large international entities like Cargill, and as they fail they take with them rural towns. Further , Dyer writes, a farm is different from  other small businesses; a farmer is more likely to have inherited the estate from his father, who inherited from his own. The farm is home,  and can contain within it an family's entire history. To be responsible for losing that heritage can be emotionally crippling: little wonder when this ruin looms,  some farmers clutch at whatever desperate straws they can find.

Having established the nature of the farm crisis as one not causing a shortage of food, but one obliterating the livelihoods of families and local economies of families throughout the west, Dyer then argues that their legitimate grievances are being twisted into sometimes violent conspiracy theories.   Farmers are not simply competing with multinationals;  in fact, they depend on them for storage, equipment, and some supplies.  Some chicken farmers are functional sharecroppers, doomed to contracts with  giants like Tyson which constantly demand equipment upgrades that keep them in debt.  The law is no recourse; not only are the oversight agencies tasked with keeping monopolies in check staffed by former members of the very companies they are policing, but the government bears responsibility in promoting “get big or get out” policies. Many of the families interviewed within were crippled by the farm policies of the 1970s and the monkeying-around with of interest rates.    On realizing how many of their woes came from monopolies, and their sinister connection with the government which was supposed to be fair referee,  the door was pried open for conspiracy.  Government policy was not simply inappropriate, or corrupt: it became viewed as evil. Here was a plot to destroy individual freeholders and replace them by massive conglomerates controlled by a few,  in one measure strengthening the cabal and undermining economic resistance. It was a sign of the times, the advent of a New World Order.   The architect of this scheme was not a pocket-lining bureaucrat, but Satan himself.  Obviously,  it was the duty of every true Christian to resist – little wonder the government was so interested in  taking the weapons of  Americans! From there follows militia movements, composed of individuals willing to shoulder arms in defense of their rights – against the tyranny of the state, if need be.

 All of this is tremendously interesting, although the central argument tends to wander away from its roots. Dyer’s goal is to link the farm crisis with rising antigovernment rhetoric and violence, but after some sections on farmers attempting to defraud lenders through legalese, he examines various parts of the antigovernment as a whole, not all of them with any rural dependence.   Religious obsession with the rise of the New World Order and doomsday, for instance, was common in the sect of Christianity I was raised in, but we haven’t been farmers for three generations.  The same is true of the book’s sections on strict Constitutionalism and monetary policy: one need not be a distressed farmer to hold the government in contempt for granting itself war powers in peacetime, or for entrusting the nation’s financial security to an entity that has control over the money supply, but no accountability whatsoever.   Dyer has a tendency to make sweeping statements – at one time, he urges the reader to go into any small rural town and take note of the abundance of people with Constitutions in their front pockets.  99.9999% of the time, he says, these people are involved to some degree in the antigovernment movement. Well, who isn’t involved in antigovernment activity to some degree?   He also assumes that all of the pipe bombs discovered in the United States in a given year were deployed by agents of the vast rural agenda.  Dyer is genuine, though, both in his concern about how the heartland is being devestation, and in his fear of what is to come.  No war of disaffected farmers ever broke out, however, despite the coming of  the Millennium, and I for one think Dyer’s extensive time embedded in some fairly radical groups gave him his own acute sense of  paranoia.   

Harvest’s argument is stretched too thin sometimes to be credible, but the facts and stories Dyer turns up are worth the read alone.  The issues at hand are still relevant: many of the grievances aired here drive the contemporary Tea Party movement, for instance.  Even with its tares, Harvest of Rage is a commendable look inside  American populism and how it can turn tragically violent.

Sky Walking

Sky Walking: An Astronaut's Memoir
© 2007 Tom Jones
384 pages

Although the exploration of space has a scientific edge, the first astronauts were not scientists: they were military pilots. Thomas Jones is no exception, establishing the foundation for his career in NASA as an Air Force pilot, but his aspirations for space were definitely those of a man of science, not those of a hot-dogging jockey out to set records and prove his manliness. A member of the astronaut class of 1990,  Jones took part in no less than four Space Shuttle missions,  advancing science as a mission specialist. Jones' Sky Walking is one of two shuttle-era astronaut memoirs, the other being Mike Mullane's Riding Rickets; and of the two, Jones is easily superior. This detailed memoir, grounded not just in memory but in Jones' mission logs and letters home,  offers a look at NASA in transition as the age of the space race gave way to one of geopolitical cooperation in the building of the International Space Station -- a project Jones had a hand in. While a shuttle memoir doesn't ripple with explosive excitement like that of an Apollo astronaut's,  Jones is a sturdy guide to NASA of the 1990s -- a thorough and professional author whose attitude combines Right Stuff-era dutifulness with a scientist's excitement at what new knowledge science missions in space might produce.

Although his career spanned over a decade, Jones never sold that idea to his wife. When he applied to be an astronaut, it was over assurances to her that in the unlikely event that they accepted him, he'd be in the program for four years at most -- a year of training, followed by a couple of flights 'up'.   Jones brought something to the program that NASA administrators liked, however:  he was chosen for his first mission before more senior astronauts who'd waited for years for their first flight into the black, and remained a popular choice for a series of missions thereafter, totaling four. Jones' first two missions were expressly scientific, as he helped deliver and begin operating a new form of orbital radar operated from the shuttle that  allowed data receivers on the ground to see far more deeply into the Earth's crust than ever before. Jones' latter missions were tied to the International Space Station: after his crew proved the feasibility of orbital construction procedures, he delivered and established the Destiny laboratory module, the core of the International Space Station. Although each of these missions were successes, the memoir is not without its disappointments: on his third mission, Jones and his companions were frustrated to find that they'd endured months of  rigorous mission-specific training and faced the prospect of rocket-fueled death to get into space, only to arrive in orbit and find their door wouldn't open to let them do their extravehicular work -- or spacewalk.  The birth of the ISS program was not a storied triumph, either:   although Jones chiefly chronicles his own missions, NASA's general history of the time is provided as context.  NASA in the 1990s was an agency struggling to find a purpose for itself. The moon was forgotten in the history books and the shuttle program firmly operational.  With Mars out of the question and the government not particularly supportive of any big projects, NASA was left with half-considered plans for a space station called "Freedom". Bumbling bureaucracy and chronic budget overruns sapped virtually everyone's enthusiasm for it: even Jones and the other astronauts, for whom the station would be a guarantor of work,  regarded it with skepticism. The International Space Station wasn't planned as such; it emerged as a product of compromise.

Those interested in the shuttle program will find Jones' memoir of interest, as he's generous with  details. His missions have far more appeal than those of fellow shuttle memoir-writer Mike Mullane's, whose shuttle  trips were classified runs for the Department of Defense.(Without being able to say much about his missions, Mullane used much of his ink to complain about NASA politics and tell bawdy stories.)  Although Jones' story easily  holds interest, it doesn't exactly command it:  Jones isn't an aggressive author who screams "LOOK AT ME!"  He writes not just as an astronaut, but as a science educator, and so the work requires some focus on the part of the reader. As much as I appreciated Jones' professional style, the occasional glimpses of his personality, like his account of being mesmerized by the slow-turning globe under his feet, kept the work from being reading too much like a debriefing.  The resonance these lapses in the military staccato added would have helped the memoir connect even more easily with general readers, though the odd few dry moments scarcely detract from Sky Walking's appeal. Jones' memoirs offer readers an education into the intensive, prolonged training that astronauts endure, a story of NASA scientists at their finest, and a look into the birth of the International Space Station, inspiring despite its difficult birth. With the shuttle program behind us, and the next crew vehicle Orion not yet operational,  it also provides a look back to the days when American astronauts flew high on ships of their own.

Related:

• Riding Rockets, Mike Mullane. 
• Space Station: Base Camps to the Stars, Roger Launius. I read this a few years back, but it may have predated the blog..
• Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System;  NASA for Dummies, Tom Jones
• Forever Young: A Life of Adventure in Air and Space, John Young