His schoolmates baited him for his race, his shyness, his nerdy interests, his awful, tenebrous poetry, and more or less everything that made him different from themselves. The opposing line of thinking is a po-faced caricature of The Onion’s caricature: It runs that Cho was himself the original victim, the inevitable product of his cruel environment. Easy access to semiautomatic weapons enabled him to manifest his psychopathology on a disturbingly large scale, but he was a homicidal maniac to begin with. The first is that Seung-Hui Cho was clinically insane and as such could have been preemptively 'profiled.' Nothing conditioned him into slaughtering 32 people with premeditation but his own diseased mind. (John Hughes's contribution to the genre was to argue that money is also a factor, especially in economically mixed school districts.)īut now that a psychotic South Korean undergraduate has outdone Klebold and Harris for intramural violence, and even bucked the pattern of school slayings by perpetrating his on the campus of a college rather than a high school, we've been presented with two explanations of what went wrong.

Y ou can choose your pop culture referent here, from Rebel Without a Cause to The Wonder Years to Freaks and Geeks. Let us at once agree that many teenagers are mercilessly tormented in high school, which is essentially an adolescent caste system where good looks, athleticism, and sociability determine one's status. The dubious subtext of this parody? The cool kids had it coming.

'We're bouncing back, more committed than ever to ostracizing those who are different.' 16 returned to the school for the first time since the shooting. 'We have begun the long road to healing,' said varsity-football starting halfback Jason LeClaire, 18, a popular senior who on Aug. Thanks to stern new security measures, a militarized school environment and a massive public-relations effort designed to obscure all memory of the murderous event, members of Columbine's popular crowd are once again safe to reassert their social dominance and resume their proud, longstanding tradition of excluding those who do not fit in.

But if The Onion ever stumbled in its coverage of disaster, it was in ' Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying,' published four months after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris machine-gunned their classmates and teachers:

The satiric weekly's coverage of 9/11 was shrewd and hilarious, yet also oddly tasteful-a near-miraculous editorial feat in the somber weeks of late September, 2001. The Onion has a way with rubbing up against uncomfortable truths at the least comfortable moments.

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