Have you read Cullen’s epilogue in the 2016 edition of Columbine? In there, he claims that he interviewed with bullies and states that the Columbine perpetrators were not frequent targets of the things he noted as the bullies’ persistent behaviors. I would like to know your opinion on this.

I do not have the 2016 edition, as far as I know, and I have yet to read the last few chapters of his book as we speak. As I refuse to give this man any money for his toxic take on the case, I am going to respond to what you’re saying here alone..

He claims he’s done interviews with bullies, but somehow never reached out to Anne Marie Hochhalter and her family while writing his book even though her story features in it in such a way that makes you think he spoke with them directly. I’m therefore taking Dave with several grains of salt here, although it’s true that he did write up some things about bullying and Columbine back in the day for the opinion site Salon. He could very well have done interviews with bullies.

Howevuh. We have factual evidence and witness accounts stating that Eric and Dylan were both subject to bullying. Dylan himself claimed that Eric “had it worse”, according to Sue Klebold, and Brooks Brown confirms that in his book as well. Scroll down in this file and you’ll get to see examples aplenty for both boys.

Secondly, Regina Huerter (Director of Juvenile Diversion for the Denver District Attorney’s Office) conducted her own investigation into bullying at Columbine. Her nine-page findings were based on interviews she’d held with twenty-eight adults and fifteen current or past students, and she had this to say about it:

“All students with whom I spoke, independent of their status at school, acknowledged there was bullying,” Huerter wrote. “One identified the unwritten rules of survival in the school as: Don’t screw with anyone who can beat you up, don ’t look at jocks in the eye, bump them, or hit on their girlfriend, and don’t walk in the wrong area …’”

At the same time, Huerter noted “a strong perception from nearly everyone I spoke with that there was ‘no reason to say anything about the bullying — no one was going to do anything. ‘Some students were just ‘untouchable. ”’

Huerter described an “overwhelming” sense that teachers responded only to bullying they had personally witnessed — and that when “certain parties” were involved, even these incidents were overlooked.

As for students like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Huerter wrote that
everyone she interviewed described the pair as “loners” and “often the brunt of
ridicule and bullying. Although no one had specifics about when and the degree of
bullying they received, most often it was about shoving, pushing and name-calling.”

Even those who associated with Eric and Dylan were punished. A female
student told Huerter that she was talking to Dylan Klebold in the school hallway
during her freshman year. “After their conversation was over, one of the notorious
bullies slammed her against the lockers and called her a ‘fag lover,’” Huerter
wrote. “Many students were in the area, but no adults. She did not report this to the
administration. When I asked her why, she said that everyone told her ‘it wouldn’t
do any good because they wouldn’t do anything about it.”

In other words, sounds to me like Dave chooses to believe the words of a bunch of bullies because it fits his narrative better than the notion that there was extensive bullying going on at Columbine and the boys were influenced by this in terms of their motivation for the massacre and Eric in particular wasn’t the suave psychopath Dave claims he was. As with everything else, Dave is fucking wrong. Again.

coldestbitchonthisplanet:

According to Dave Cullen’s Facebook, he is currently on his way to Denver to be a part of a Columbine documentary by Showtime.

Showtime making a documentary actually sounds like it might be pretty good. I personally prefer HBO’s, but anything done by someone other than basic cable should be fairly high end.

Can someone please stop this man before we wind up with another inaccurate doc about Columbine? Is it too late to contact Showtime and let them know that Cullen’s work ain’t that grand? Or should we just wait until it airs and then laugh about it for hours?

So many questions..

Are Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’s parents to blame for the Columbine shooting?

everlasting-contrast:

perfectlydangerousarbiter:

via The Colorado Independent

UGH.  Cullen has sprayed his turf on Sue’s book release. Any ol’ opportunity for him to re-seed his black and white propaganda about the boys.  He’s never even met Sue and says as much. How does this twerp manage to land interviews in connection with Sue’s big moment when he is just regurgitating the same, old prefabricated constructs he came up with since his book of fictional lies.  There is nothing new or factually informative to be had – just his usual interview tripe with that worn-out public agenda to reinforce his status quo disinformation. Grrr.

Feel free to have at the comments section at the bottom of the article.. 😉 

Here is what I had at the comments section of that awful article.. If my comment makes it through moderation, this is what you will find:

I am very pleased that Mrs Klebold is stepping forward and sharing her family’s story (and most importantly her son’s story) with the world. It can do a great deal of good. Her eloquence and honesty in previous writing endeavours (for O Magazine and through Andrew Solomon, respectively) have drawn my respect and my trust that she will carry this book forward with love and strength.

However, I am sorely disappointed to see the inclusion of Mr Cullen within this article. Mr Cullen has written a book about Columbine, yes he has. But what is often neglected is the fact that various “facts” in his book are not the truth. Various events he cites did not come to pass exactly as described and some were even discredited as false within the available evidence on the case. Mr Cullen also has developed the unfortunate habit of glossing over Dylan Klebold’s shortcomings and more vindictive murderous acts. Furthermore, survivors of Columbine and families of victims (as well as the community within Littleton) have spoken out against Mr Cullen’s work in the past as being dishonest and not at all in line with what really happened.

Mr Cullen has furthermore chosen to rely on a post-mortem diagnosis for Eric Harris as the gospel truth, even though Robert Hare (founder of the ‘psychopath checklist’, referred to in Mr Cullen’s own book) also stated that the test leading to that diagnosis “should be considered valid ONLY IF administered by a suitably qualified and experienced clinician under scientifically controlled and licensed, standardised conditions”. None of those conditions were met when so-called professionals set out to diagnose a deceased 18-year-old and set him up to be the mastermind of a terrible massacre. Eric set out to convince the world that he was evil, only leaving breadcrumb trails in his journal that pointed at his own insecurities and lack of self-esteem. A part of him would certainly feel vindicated at having pulled the wool over the eyes of Mr Cullen and his cohorts so completely that they could not even see Eric for who he really was!

The general public needs to understand one thing: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were equals to one another. One was not pulled in by the other. One was not convinced to kill by the other. These boys both needed help. They both exhibited warning signs long before the massacre. Eric reached out for help; Dylan did not. Dylan wanted to die but also kill, expressing a longing for this dualism long before Eric ever said two words about it (that we know of). To presume otherwise would be to do their respective stories a grave disservice. It is time to put Mr Cullen’s shoddy research to rest once and for all.

Let Mrs Klebold and the actual story do the talking.

Are Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’s parents to blame for the Columbine shooting?

vodkatomyreb:

dr-pepper-n-reds:

davecullen:

Dirty mirror. The shower tent at Guantanamo Bay.

(A bit out of shape then.🙈 All #gitmo and #westpoint pix taken on my iPhone. More coming.)

#guantanamo #soldiers #gaysoldiers #cadet #torture #writing #writer #writersofinstagram #write #books #gay #iraq #afghanistan #dadt #gaymen #gayman #instagay #soldier #columbine #marines #newyork #NYC #gaynyc #journalism #scruff #waterboarding @harperbooks @harpercollinsus #military #usarmy @harperbooks @harpercollinsus

Yikes

I just barfed in my mouth @thedragonrampant

Can someone please inform Dave that some things should stay between himself and that poor tent (did anybody decontaminate that yet?), as we unfortunately cannot unsee the damage that’s done by his continued presence on the internet? Horrifying. Just look at those tags. YES DAVE IT’S #TORTURE YOU GOT THAT RIGHT

lauramackayeotd:

daffodylan-klebold:

nbkgodlike:

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS CRAP

THIS IS WRONG

I’ve never seen such utter fucking bullshit in all my life.

That last bit of this made me laugh so much that I actually illustrated it really badly once. It was also the starting point of my fountain of hate for Dave. (I still think Dave secretly really likes Eric – look at this fawning description! – but is so scared to admit this that he prefers to refer to Eric as evil instead.)

vodkittie:

I just can’t believe Dave Cullen actually sat down and wrote these things about the boys only to nod like ‘yes. this is completely factual. not inaccurate or made up at all’

Reading Cullen’s Columbine: Chapters 41-45

After the fiasco of the psychopath-chapter, I really have no more hope left for this book. I didn’t come all this way just to throw in the towel now, though, and so I will soldier on until chapter 53 and then call it a blissful finish. If you want to know what you missed on the previous installments of Dave Cullen’s complete idiocy, you can find the previous chapter links on this page.

My experiences with this next batch can be summed up thusly:

Happy reading?

Chapter 41

• Oh lord Dave and Fuselier just keep on goin’ with the psychopathy. This is gonna suck beyond all the sucking.

• Fuselier was sure Eric was a psychopath, huh. I’m still waiting on the explanation as to how he reached this completely off-base conclusion on Eric’s character. Let’s not forget he spent only 12 weeks on the formation of this theory and assigned it to Eric post-mortem based off the same evidence (plus the enigmatic basement tapes) that you and I and everyone else can see too. I see huge issues arising when it comes to exclusively utilising evidence for this theory that was gathered on Eric after he became a mass-murdering fuckhead, but maybe that’s just me..

• You’d hope that somebody somewhere was gonna go “what the fuck are you doing calling Eric Harris a psychopath?” in much the same way that I have practically screamed at Fuselier and Dave et al last chapter, but apparently that’s not meant to be. They had this huge summit on school shooters going on three months after Columbine, where Fuselier presented his view on Eric and called him “a budding young psychopath”. Guess what? Those golden nuggets of psychology not only agreed with him, but made it worse: Eric was apparently “a textbook example of a fullblown psychopath”.

• You can’t make this shit up, guys, I swear. I am just flailing wildly about it all at this point. Can we make tiny gold stickers for Fuselier and his summit people that say “you tried but you suck”? Can we can we can we? Please..

• Well, I’m glad that Dr Ochberg (psychiatrist for Michigan State University) at least interviewed people close to Eric and Dylan and studied the writings of the boys.. That’s the line I’d have expected from Fuselier, too, but I don’t think he did much in the way of interviewing. Correct me if I’m wrong, though, but I don’t believe the Klebolds or the Harrises (especially not the Harrises!) spoke with him or anybody else much in the aftermath. But, hey, if the Harrises did speak with Fuselier and all those other little shits claiming their son was a fullblown raging psychopath and had them present that theory to them with all the sensitivity range of a big-ass rock.. I can’t really blame them for not going public after that.

• Thank the fucking gods that Fuselier wasn’t allowed to talk to the public because he was from the FBI and the FBI had decided to not overshadow JeffCo in order to respect their decision that the motives of Eric and Dylan should not be discussed. I don’t get why Dave thinks that’s a problem, because as far as I’m concerned somebody should give Fuselier a permanent gag order after the stupidity I’ve seen from him in this book.

• There was a credibility problem for JeffCo, though, which isn’t so surprising given their conduct pre-massacre and on the day itself. I mean, I think we’ve all read and seen certain things from JeffCo that made us go “the fuck” – dragging dead bodies around the premises and fucking up the crime scene on 4/20 is probably the least of the issues with them. JeffCo officials believed they were innocent of any wrongdoing – it’s not my job to decide if they were or weren’t, but the fact remains that JeffCo tried to cover its ass post-massacre rather than remain open about their own possible contribution to the way the events played out.

• JeffCo officials really did their best to discredit Brooks and his parents after the massacre. So much so that they were willing to destroy the paper trail of their past warnings on Eric. Mike Guerra’s file on Eric went missing, then reappeared, then was purged from the computer records, and then finally went missing permanently. It has never been physically recovered. (JEFFCO WHERE IS THAT FILE GIMME)

• You know what’s weird? I started this chapter believing we’d march ahead with psychopathy and JeffCo’s fuck-ups. I love to talk about the latter, as you all know, and could talk about it all fucking day if you let me. But then, ladies and gentlemen, I am rudely shaken from my JeffCo ramblings by the fact that Dave decides to jump ship and go back to the stories of survivors. I’m not sure who edited this book and believed it to be a good idea for him to jump back and forth like this, but I’m having none of it right now. It’s very confusing for a reader to focus in on one thing in the first bunch of paragraphs and then have to focus on a thing that’s absolutely unrelated to all of the above after a brief paragraph break. It’d be better served – stylistically speaking – as separate chapters. There’s no reason why that psychopath shit couldn’t have gone into the previous chapter I’m still ragefesting about, ya know?

• But we’re back with Patrick Ireland and I’m perfectly cool with that because it means I no longer feel the need to make strangling gestures at my laptop screen. I’m so glad to read of his recovery process, you guys. It was such hard work for him – such slow going, regaining control over his limbs. In the first week of May, he was able to lift the thigh of his previously useless leg. He could feel change every day that followed. They had him back on his feet a few weeks after that. Fingers and toes were the hardest parts: it would take him months to be able to hold a pen without shaking. And that’s the other part I think that some of us forget, talking about Eric and Dylan and the case the way we do.. the lasting damage they did to a whole lot of people only truly becomes clear in paragraphs like this one.

• Anne Marie Hochhalter didn’t have Patrick’s level of progression. She’d barely made it through: her spinal cord was ruptured, causing nerve pain that was unbearable. Weeks on morphine. Weeks with a ventilator and a feeding tube keeping her alive. She grew more lucid. Asked nurses if she would walk again. The answer? No. Six weeks afterward, she met Patrick and Sean Graves and Lance Kirklin. All had their own injuries to deal with. Sean Graves was left with a partial paralysis. Lance Kirklin made light of his facial reconstruction with “it’s cool to be five percent metal”.

• Nearly all the families of the library victims walked the crime scene with investigators. I commend their strength – I cannot imagine how difficult and harrowing that experience must have been for them to be in the location where their children died in fear and pain. (I cannot help but wonder.. was the same courtesy extended to those other two families? We know that the survivors and the victims’s families walked the scene, now. But what of Eric’s family? What of Dylan’s? Were they made the same offer by investigators? I could imagine that this would help them with their own grieving process, too..)

• They fucking had tourists arriving in fucking tour buses snapping pictures of the school and students, huh. That would be enough to make anyone furious – how in the hell did anyone allow these tour operators to capitalise on this tragedy so quickly? I believe it to be different now, years afterward, but I can imagine that seeing people treat this as another landmark so quickly after the fact would be upsetting to the max.

• Oh Fuselier’s son agrees with me on that part, that’s cool. (I still don’t know why Fuselier was left on the case when his own son went to Columbine and he was arguably too close to the case for comfort, but ugh..) And, hey, Fuselier’s son expresses that he just wanted to walk up and punch a couple of those tourists in the nose. Understandable sentiment, right? Fuselier, honey, remember your own son’s expression of anger and then compare it with Eric’s just-as-juvenile expressions of anger. There’s literally no difference.

• Going back inside that school en-masse in early June must’ve been every bit the cathartic experience Dave describes here. That’s a very useful thing to do in light of tragedy.

• Fall enrollment for the school actually went up instead of down. Almost nobody transferred out. Students weren’t going to give up their school to one day of tragedy. That’s community spirit right there: commendable.

• Gutting the library and rebuilding it was the initial plan they came up with. Essentially redesigning the room but keeping it in place. Everything inside of it would change, but.. all the changes were cosmetic. It’d still be the place people had suffered and died in.

The students and the families of the victims were at odds here – the families had opted for complete removal of the library. The families of the victims wanted to band together to get this done, but before they could a notorious lawyer teamed up with the Shoels family and proposed the fucking unthinkable: a wrongful death suit against the Klebolds and the Harrises for a quarter of a billion dollars. (I’m fucking screaming over here at the indignance of that: did nobody remember these families lost all they had, too?) There was a huge explosion about money going into funds and money going to the families of survivors and victims and I’m not even sure if Dave explains it all correctly.. I’m not really following all of what he describes here and some things are foreign to me, such as not being insured for medical costs and the like and medical costs being this exorbitantly high, but I’m willing to leave this for what it is and take it at face value.

• The Klebolds are mentioned after this. Tom was dealing with a lot of anger concerning Dylan’s acquisition of weapons and the school culture’s picking on kids outside the mainstream. Tom essentially shut himself off from the world and worked from home, but Sue didn’t have that same luxury.

• Kathy Harris didn’t only write condolence letters to the thirteen families, but also wrote letters to the families of the injured. She mailed all of them to the school district’s clearinghouse for correspondence to victims. The clearinghouse turned the letters over to the sheriff’s department as potential evidence. Officials decided not to read or deliver them. Eventually, they were returned to Kathy. I can’t imagine how she must’ve felt.. wanting to reach out, but being stopped from doing so partially due to JeffCo’s own ongoing frustrations about the Harrises not being willing to speak with them without immunity. I can honestly imagine why we haven’t heard anything from Eric’s family, guys..

• Sue was smarter about it and addressed her cards directly to the thirteen families. Leads me to wonder why Sue had the addresses and Kathy didn’t, and why Kathy and Sue didn’t ever reach out to each other in a way that could’ve helped them both..

Chapter 42

• We’re apparently with Diversion, you guys, and I’m still not happy about Dave going back and forth like this. Tell it chronologically next time, okay?

• I don’t believe that April 1999 was already set as definitive a year prior. I remember that Eric loosely referred to “a year from now” in April 1998, but he could’ve easily meant March as well. I don’t think they picked the definite date or month that early on.

• I love how Dave just continues on with the fuckery and absolves Dylan of everything while throwing Eric under the bus. Apparently setting the date for the massacre a year away gave Eric time to plan, build his arsenal, and convince Dylan of it. I’m pretty sure that if Dylan had a grave he’d be rolling around in it non-stop because Dave is relentless in taking away Dylan’s agency/responsibility when it comes to the massacre.

• Eric could never have been a serial killer with his admission that he hates white vans. (I have this very weird and probably very inaccurate idea of all serial killers owning a white van and lemme tell you it makes life quite difficult because the postal service over here works with white vans..)

• Was the arrest really the singlemost important event in Eric’s life that ‘progressed him to murder’? It’s weird to me how Dave accurately names Eric as an “injustice collector” (ain’t nobody gonna argue with that, did you see the kid’s rants?) in the following paragraph, but then has Fuselier be so sure that it was pretty much the arrest that led to murder. I would say that there were numerous things that led to murder and the arrest was one of the bigger contributors but not the biggest catalyst.

• “A comically comprehensive enemies list”.. I’m glad Dave agrees with me that it’s almost hilarious how all-inclusive Eric’s ragefest list was. He was also completely and totally right about Tiger Woods, y’all.

• Oh what the fuck DAVE please for the love of god I BEG YOU right now (I am sitting on my couch and I am not gonna get on my knees for any of it but pretend that I’m grovelling at your feet right now okay if that stops you from crying about my forcefulness with this): REWRITE THIS BOOK. STRIP IT OF ALL MENTIONS OF PSYCHOPATHY AND NEVER MENTION THE NAME BRENDA PARKER IN ALL SERIOUSNESS AGAIN. Eric was NOT dating a twenty-three-year-old, nor was he getting ditched by her because he was “grounded all the time”. Eric never fucking knew the woman!

• Um how do we know that Eric defaced almost every single one of the 2000 photos in his yearbook with his juvenile angry bullshit writing? *scratches head* Did I miss the full yearbook somewhere? Is Dave concluding weird shit here again?

• Eric did love control, yes. Dave, take note: you coulda totally used this for a theory that does not include psychopathy.

• I don’t think he enjoyed every full minute of that library kill though. He read to some of the witnesses in there as a little disoriented and out of it. He was far quieter than Dylan. I don’t know where Dave is pulling this from but I have the impression it all comes outta his ass because it’s stinking up a storm.

• Of course Eric was willing to entrust Dylan with power, too. That doesn’t contradict his love of control, as Dave writes here, but instead demonstrates the reciprocity and trust they had built up between the two of them at the time. They were brothers, not strangers.

• Um Dave congratulations on your successful German translation but I don’t think KMFDM would agree that “kein mitleid” (or “no mercy”) is shorthand for their bandname. KMFDM loosely translates as “no pity for the majority” (Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid") and is therefore vastly different from “no mercy”.

• How the fuck did “particularly Dylan” take a gamble in noting the murderplans in the yearbooks? I mean, Eric took the same fucking gamble there. They were in it together. DAVE CAN YOU STOP ABSOLVING DYLAN THAT’D BE GREAT THANKS

• I’m just on the verge of closing my eyes and wishing for the second coming of Jesus or something just as destructive as the apocalypse because I cannot deal with these Eric versus Dylan comparisons today. I think that Dylan focused in on the single attack because that was the plan they’d both committed to: it was something he could work with and plan for. He understood and supported Eric’s far broader “kill mankind”, but even Eric knew better than to plan for that other than a few daydreams here and there. I’m not sure why Dave and Fuselier name their individual lines of focus as discrepancies between the two. I’m not even sure I’m willing to find out anymore.

• Dave writes “neither one complained about bullies picking on them” and I’m just having insta-flashbacks to Eric’s “I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things” and “everyone is always making fun of me because of how I look, how fucking weak I am and shit” as well as to Dylan’s less direct “nobody accepting me even though I want to be accepted” and “I have always been hated by everyone and everything”. Keep dreaming, Dave. Reality is a bitch.

• I love how Dave just makes Eric’s dad and his diversion officer the two most important people in his life without any real basis for it other than the fact that he needed to keep both happy after his untimely arrest. (Hey, Dave, if we broadened that list to include non-humans, would you agree with me that Sparky would hold number one position in importance?) I also love that Dave admits that Eric worked his ass off to excel and keep his life together, as it’s one of Eric’s strongest character traits that I personally admire because I’m more along the lines of Dylan’s “everything is falling apart and I wanna curl up and go away right now”.

• Speaking of that latter bit, Dylan sure as heck didn’t try to impress the diversion folks any. Dave says that NBK was nothing but a diversion for Dylan and was nothing more than a fantasy that he didn’t believe or plan to go through with. I’m just very puzzled at this. I think Dylan knew it to be reality and planned to stick with it unless something muuuuuch better came along, which never really happened so it’s beside the point.

• Dave, did you forget the part where Dylan was arguably clinically depressed (two can play at setting post-mortem diagnoses, lol) and likely didn’t have enough energy to work the amount of hours that Eric did and put in the other work that mattered? He didn’t contribute much financially to the attack, true, and I would even go as far as to say that without Eric’s diligent follow-through in terms of hard work and finances we wouldn’t even know their names. Eric got shit done for both of them. Dylan.. not so much. I’m pretty sure that it kinda chafed on Eric a bit that he was doing all the damn work for it, too, though it did suit his controlfreak levels to be the one in charge of the get-shit-done department.

• “Eric knew exactly what empathy looked like.” That is because he was fully capable of feeling it, Dave. Sure, he was playing at it in the letter he wrote the van owner. Am I a psychopath for admitting that I totally would’ve done the same thing (fake remorse to someone’s face and talk shit about it when they can’t hear me) back at Eric’s age? Every teenager tells lies, especially if they get people like parents and teachers off their backs about something. The fact that Eric succeeded with that is something I fully give the kid bragging rights over.

• Oh now procrastination is a common affliction among psychopaths too. *looks at self* I’m beginning to feel quite uncomfortable here, you guys.. I’m a procrastinator pur sang, always have been.. (Doesn’t this just illustrate how far gone Dave’s rationale is?)

• “And why wouldn’t Andrea Sanchez like Eric more? Everyone did. He was funny and clever, and that smile, man–he knew just when to flash it, too; just how long to hang back, tease you with it, make you work for it, and then lay it on.” DAVE YOU’RE NOT WRITING TWILIGHT OR A ROMANCE NOVEL HERE. Also, everyone liked Eric more? Hahahaha, no, other way around. People liked Dylan more and got along with Dylan better than they ever got along with Eric. There are numerous accounts in the evidence concerning Eric’s toxicity. I genuinely love Eric’s smile but I hate Dave’s description of it so much that I want to set fire to this book. (I would actually do that if I had a physical copy.)

• Dave calls Dylan “a gloom factory”. How, um, nice? (Guys I think we made a mistake I think Dave is secretly in love with Eric instead of Dylan..)  Dave does accurately describe that Dylan may have been afraid to let his real emotions and thoughts come out for other people to see. It is my impression that Dylan “boiled over” when he was alone and felt safe. I don’t think, the way Dave says, that anger boiled over sometimes with Dylan.. There are too few accounts in the evidence of that and the strongest clue we have to him boiling over with anger lies in his childhood. I wouldn’t even consider the massacre a boilover in terms of anger, not for either of them..

• Eric did complain about his medication in the diversion papers and transitioned to another type, which is something I personally dissected entirely during the time I wrote Building ‘Reb’. It’s through this that I know that Dave is kinda muddling things in this particular paragraph. He’s describing the essence of it reasonably correctly, but I disagree that Eric was telling his diversion officer one thing and telling his journal another. Eric is being honest in both ways here.  His concern over changing medications isn’t fake, but his rant about being put on them isn’t either.

The diversion papers clearly state that Eric was experiencing massive problems with his medication to the point where he would no longer be taking it and that he would cycle off it entirely before being put on a new medication.  He expressed a little bit of concern about how he would feel during the transition between one and the other. The transition period between those two medications marks the journal entry in which Eric first mentions NBK by name. It’s also in this same entry that he rallies against the medication his doctor wants to put him on. Eric is pretty much freaking the fuck out over what the new medication is going to do to him after having had one negative experience (extreme restlessness and inability to concentrate). Dave writes that Eric may have complained about the first medication because it was too effective and I have never heard bigger bullshit in my life because the diversion documents and the journal both prove otherwise.

• Dave writes that Eric’s dad was the hardest person for him to fool and I’m pretty sure I disagree because I have the impression that Wayne Harris wanted to believe the best of his son and wanted to do damage control more than anything else. And because he wanted to do these things, he cracked down on Eric hard but also let things slide the minute Eric showed a semblance of control over what should be controlled.

• Hahahaha Dave practically admitted right here that nobody really spoke with the Harrises in-depth post-massacre, thus confirming that Fuselier and the others did not speak with them before forming the psychopath theory on their son. You’d almost applaud the Harrises for steering clear of this total fucking bullshit.

• Dylan wrote about multiple girls in the space of his journal instead of just one.. Dave consistently calls her Harriet, though, which gives off the impression that Dylan pined after one girl all the time.

• Lord almighty Eric’s so see-through with threatening Brooks, it’s amazing.

• Eric went cold on so many people that it’s hard to see what would even lead to him doing another freeze-out on Zach. I don’t believe the two were ever outright on the outs, though..

• “That same old little criminal, Eric Harris”. DAVE YOU’RE GIVING ME LIFE WITH YOUR DESCRIPTION

• I don’t see the philosophical divergence between Dylan and Eric as an outright divergence the way Dave does. I would sooner argue that Dylan represented the spiritual and metaphysical side of it, while Eric represented the human and earthly side. Both were needed to make the combination.

• I’m pleased to see that Dave doesn’t gloss over the strong possibility that Dylan wanted to kill himself in August ’98 and perhaps made an attempt at that. What confuses is that the next paragraphs don’t mention anything about it again and just go “back to normal”..

• I absolutely have such distaste for Dave using literally every opportunity to say that Eric was manipulating and conning Dylan into going NBK. Pisses me the fuck off on Dylan’s behalf because he’s relegated to being the dumbass follower while he was so much more than that.

• Fuselier is even using Eric’s essays for school as hallmarks on List Of Reasons Why Eric Harris Is A Psychopath. I’m exhausted.

• The Nazi-essay in particular gets dissected because of its violent imagery, which is completely and utterly laughable to me because there’s only one way to tell that part of human history and Eric knew exactly how to get that point across. He did what anyone who’s truly interested in history would’ve done: tell it like it is without sugarcoating any damn thing. Of course he then flirted with the Nazi ideology out in the open and there’s really no way to approve of that, though it must be noted that it’s a great thing for shock value.. I don’t think it was the Nazi-thing in particular that painted Eric into a corner there. I think he was just getting very caught up in how he passionately felt about this world and humanity and that a part of that was ‘bleeding out’ into the everyday life..

• Mr Tonelli, who taught government class, felt so much guilt that he actually sought Fuselier out and asked him what he’d missed in Eric that he could’ve helped him with. Fuselier believes it was nothing because Eric was a psychopath and beyond saving, but I don’t know.. having a teacher like Tonelli at his back would’ve given Eric a sounding board for some of his wilder ideas.

• “Civilians always believe a good psychopath.” And professionals see psychopaths where there are none, so neener neener booga booga.

• Eric’s mention that he would’ve made a damn good Marine coupled with “and I would never drink and drive, either” isn’t that surprising when you actually connect the dots on that and realise that it stems from the argument that he had about the flask of alcohol found in his possession. The fact that the mention is cited as unusual for Eric just goes to show that you need more than twelve weeks (and ten years, in Dave’s case) to be able to make sense of Eric. As I wrote in Building ‘Reb’: A moment of speculation on my end is that Eric was told, in the heat of the argument, something along the lines of that he would “never make a good Marine” if he continued to behave this irresponsibly and that perhaps even a comment like “next thing you know, you’ll be busted for a DUI and then you can forget all about making the cut for the Marine Corps!” was thrown in there for good measure. Eric seems to be addressing someone specific as he writes that he would’ve made a great Marine, so why not have this argument be the reason why he said it in the first place?

Chapter 43

• Ahhh gosh, Dave Sanders had just qualified for his teacher’s pension after working at Columbine for 25 years and was looking forward to retirement. Two or three years later, and Mr Sanders would’ve moved to Laramie (Wyoming) and become a coach for university there. I can’t help but think that a lot of lives were saved at Columbine because he was there to guide his students, but it’s so sad that he and his wife would never get to enjoy that new space described here.

• Patrick Ireland asked his mother to forgive Eric and Dylan. “It didn’t matter, he said. They were confused. Just forgive them. Please forgive them.” That’s a strength of character unlike any other: to make the conscious decision to not focus on anger, to let go of what cannot be changed, to forgive even in the most dire circumstances.. Beautiful.

• There was such a need to know everything inside of Patrick – I suppose that’s something that happens when you’re subjected to tragedy, that sometimes the only way to move through it is to question what happened and what made it happen. To ask why it happened. And, of course, there’s anger – even if you don’t focus on it, it’s still there. Patrick describes it as being more for what was taken from him rather than for the act itself. The massacre changed him, changed his life.. It’s so big, you’re left wondering how the hell someone comes back from that.

• The only thing I will commend Dave Cullen on (yes people you’ve read it correctly) is that he describes the process of healing and the aftermath of Columbine quite well. He describes it in a way that can make you empathise with everyone and everything trying to recover from the chaos that Eric and Dylan wrought.

• Lord y’all have gotta read this, I’m so amused right now. Columbine’s reopening was set for August and they created this project called Take Back The School for it. It’s a ritualistic kind of thing that is recommended by professionals in order to deal with tragedy and reclaim your own agency and power inside of that process of grief and recovery. This particular ritual needed an adversary of sorts. And they didn’t choose Eric and Dylan – thank fuck they didn’t – but they chose the media. A ceremonial reclaiming by students of the school from the pushy, omnipresent media. I couldn’t have thought of a better idea myself. The media didn’t like this at all, though! I’m repulsed by the reaction they had to their own exclusion. Dave writes this with an undertone, too – he’s part of the media, after all, and lord almighty I wish somebody had issued him a permanent gag order right then and there. I’m fucking repulsed by this TV-executive’s statement and I’m gonna include this in its entirety so you can be repulsed with me, too: “As long as parents understand that by saying no to everything, again it’s going to be a situation where we’re coming out of rocks and stuff in order to get sound and pictures. And I wonder if the parents really understand, if they think they control us by just saying no, they’re really not; they’re forcing us to go in other directions.”

• Hey, how cool, I wonder if Columbine still has those ceramic tiles plastered above the lockers that they already started with pre-massacre and continued as a sort of grief therapy thing afterward? That’d be really sweet to see.

• Way to go, Fuselier, you don’t even listen to your own kid when he tells you to not join the human chain that would shield students from the media.

• I love how the American flags that had been at half-mast since 4/20 were raised from that for the first time on the school’s reopening. That’s a great symbolic thing.

Chapter 44

• I’m kinda giggling to myself over the chapter title “bombs are hard” because I’m a juvenile little shit that way, lol.

• Dylan and Eric both talked about coming back as ghosts and creating a lasting tragedy including flashbacks for people. They had a conversation about it in the basement tapes, Dave, and note how your precious Dylan is the one remarking about victim tally more than Eric in that instance.. Could you please cease making Eric shoulder all of it?

• Who needs the basement tapes when Dave has just told me how to create crickets and pipebombs? I could build a batch of the former based off that description, anyway..

• Seriously Dave what the hell you actually mentioned the quote from Eric where he goes “I gotta turn off my feelings and must not be sidetracked by empathy and blahblahblah” (paraphrasing heavily, haha) and THEN you call that a mark of Eric’s ruthlessness? What. The. Fuck. If he comprehended the pain to this degree, Dave, as you literally describe here.. HE HAD THE CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY.  Psychopathy argument = gone. Congratulations, you just undermined your own book in the space of a single paragraph.

• I actually am okay with Dave’s mention of Eric’s essay on Medea. Eric only used a small quote from the play (it’s a lovely play to do, by the way) but the full one is something I feel encapsulates Eric’s vibe perfectly: “I shall not die, perhaps, as a pigeon dies nor like an innocent lamb that feels a hand on his head and looks up from the knife at a man’s face, and dies. No! Like some yellow-eyed beast! That’ll kill it’s hunters, let me lie down on the hound’s bodies and the broken spears.”

Following this, there are lines from Medea that strike me as Dylan’s instead – he wrote of choices, of the imminence of death. “Then, how to strike them… what means to use? There are so many doors through which painful death may glide in and catch. Which one? Which one? Which one?”

• I’m laughing so hard because Dave just called Fuselier’s full access to the journal an advantage. How is that an advantage? Fuselier had it for years before we had it and he still fucked up on Eric big time, lol. If that idiot can’t even comprehend that Eric’s superiority complex was a coping mechanism for his inferiority complex and that his inclinations for violence were born out of the violence he inflicted upon himself.. I mean.. he’s meant to be the professional here. Why do I have to keep correcting his shit? (Oh yeah, because loads of people actually believe it.. *eyerolls*)

• Dave just called the massacre “homicidal art”. I’m just going to leave this here and cry about it.

• I think that Eric’s concern that we may be too stupid to see his point/reasoning behind the massacre is fully justified in the case of Dave and his ilk..

• Very good that it’s mentioned that Columbine saw the utilisation of terrorist tactics and that the chosen target was a symbol of the system abhorred by the perpetrators of the attack – looks like Dave’s been doing the same reading I have, y’all. (There are numerous reports out on Columbine and a fair few of them detail this stuff, so don’t hesitate to ask me for sources if you can’t locate them.)

• The “hell of a fight” that Dave discusses here that happened in the Harris household after it was made clear Eric was in possession of a flask containing alcohol isn’t something that Eric glossed over in his journal. I also want to express concern over Dave mentioning this again after he’d also mentioned it in chapter 42 already – it’s so fucking disjointed. Also, it wasn’t a friend who ratted Eric out to his parents (as Dave mentions here). Eric had confided in his boss, Bob Kirgis, about the flask and it was Bob who told Eric’s parents/dad about it. Dave writes the whole argument as though Eric was perfectly confident pulling his ass out of the water and lying to his dad about everything. I don’t think this was the case: Eric was stung by his dad’s remarks and all over the place emotionally as a result. The casual comments he flings out in the confines of the same journal entry speak of a deeper hurt rather than of someone who actually managed to deceive and save face.

• Bless his heart, Fuselier tries so hard to make the psychopath argument stick. It’s exhausting to keep having to read this same thing over and over.

• I actually think that the diversion officer was right on the money calling Dylan out on his waffling concerning his grades and behaviour in class. The minimisation and belief that he was ‘the victim’ is something that other authors (I’m thinking Krabbé in particular) have noted about Dylan in this instance as well. Dylan didn’t have his shit together half as well as Eric did, nor was he too bothered about not having it together. It’s a huge red flag that I believe they should’ve picked up on.

• The chapter ends with more blabla on the Brady Bill and Eric’s writing on that, which isn’t really remarkable in general.

Chapter 45

• I’ll never get used to the formatting of this book.

• The surveillance tape footage was leaked to CBS around the time of the six-month anniversary, according to Dave, which is.. bad timing. Extremely bad. Fishy kind of bad.

• Eric Veik was the friend Dave refers to when he mentions that, around this time, one associate of Eric/Dylan was arrested for threatening to “finish the job”. And it really goes to show that they affected people on all sides here – Eric Veik was put on suicide watch and lamented his failure when it came to helping Eric/Dylan.

• Of course the six-month anniversary saw school attendance at a low: nobody wanted to risk anything.

• The Friday after the anniversary saw the suicide of Anne Marie Hochhalter’s mother. Her daughter was still struggling with her own injuries and survival at the time, but Carla Hochhalter had struggled with mental illness for years prior to the shooting. What happened to her daughter ‘destroyed her’, as Richard Castaldo’s mother put it. The fallout from the suicide within the community was noticeable: the mental health hotline was flooded with calls straight after.

• The Klebolds also sued a government agency for negligence. The reason? JeffCo should’ve warned them about their earlier investigation into Eric’s threatening behaviour, which could’ve led to the Klebolds demanding that Dylan sever all contact with Eric. The Sheriff felt the suit was outrageous, but even Brian Rohrbough felt that it was a reasonable move for the Klebolds to make.

• Fucking hell why wasn’t the brief meeting the Harrises had with investigators documented? WHY WASN’T IT HUH I WANT THIS IN MY EVIDENCE PILE RIGHT NOW YOU INCOMPETENT LITTLE SHITS AT JEFFCO COME ON AND GIVE US A BREAK

• I agree with Mark Manes’s lawyer in that Manes was used as a scapegoat because people had virtually nobody else to blame. Should he have known better in selling the TEC? Sure, he should’ve. But the trial was pretty ugly, you guys, and I have a lot of annoyance inside of me at Robyn Anderson escaping this same thing with nothing more than a slap on the wrist while she provided Eric/Dylan with more firepower than Manes did.

• Emily Wyant allowed her name to be used for the article refuting Cassie’s martyrdom. The publisher of Cassie’s book actually lashed out at her – how depraved do you have to be to lash out at a young girl for telling the truth? Seriously. Ughhh.

• Wonderful that the church is going to stick to the martyr story but it’s not the fucking truth. You’d think the truth would be more important than a bunch of lies.

• I love how JeffCo even gets thrown under the bus by Dave, who’s usually a lot more lenient with them than I have ever been. You can’t make this level of incompetence up, you guys. They kept delaying their final report (which, by the way, is the absolute highlight of epic 90s design) and kept expressing shock over the leaks and mistakes they made. I have no idea how anyone comes away from this taking JeffCo seriously, to be honest with you. They’re a joke.

• There’s this paragraph in this chapter that describes the tragedies that continued to hit the community and the harrowing PTSD that plagued the aftermath – it’s good stuff for a change. Go read it. (I love how I keep rallying against Dave 99% of the time and then tell you all to go read a certain paragraph anyway, lol. Sorry about that!)

• Very nice touch about the football team’s season dedication to Matt Kechter and the victory game for the state championship.

• I feel really sad for Patrick that he couldn’t fulfill his dream of becoming an architect due to the injuries he sustained during the massacre. He became a managing director and seems to be doing well for himself, but it’s painful to read how he couldn’t realise something he had been working toward already. Dude did graduate magna cum laude from Colorado State – he was determined to succeed in life.

• DAVE YOU WITLESS FUCK. “The shotgun blasts had robbed him of some of his best assets, but he was a star.” How dare you write those words. Go wash your mouth with acid.

Less than 10 chapters of this monstrosity left to go. I kinda feel like the wind has been knocked out of Dave’s sails after that tumultuous chapter 40, because most of the chapters look to be blissfully shorter again. Keep your fingers crossed for my survival, please!

Dave Cullen logic

the-whatever-generation:

“the media is making mass murders celebrities stop naming them!1!1!1”
*proceeds to write and entire book about columbine while whoring himself to the media as if the event had anything to do with him or he knew anything of the actual shooters personalities

imaginetruecrime:

Imagine punching Dave Cullen in the face.

Alternatively, imagine Eric and Dylan taking turns punching Dave Cullen in the face.

I actually figuratively punch Dave Cullen in the face on a semi-regular basis, or at least envision it while writing chapter-by-chapter reviews like this one of that shithouse he calls a book. This man must never be forgiven for his despicable contributions to the discussion on Columbine.

Reading Cullen’s Columbine: Special Edition Chapter 40

We are on chapter 40 of the chapter-by-chapter reviews by yours truly of Dave Cullen’s Columbine. SPECIAL EDITION CHAPTER 40, YOU GUYS. (In honour of how wrong Dave is when he’s really, really, really wrong.) After the shenanigans from chapters 1 to 39, found here, we arrive at chapter 40, lovingly entitled “Psychopath”.

DAVE, WE NEED TO HAVE A TALK ABOUT HOW YOU CANNOT NAME CHAPTER TITLES AFTER SOMETHING THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COLUMBINE

WE ALSO NEED TO TALK ABOUT HOW THIS ONE CHAPTER TITLE HAS BECOME THE FLIPPANT DISMISSAL OF ERIC HARRIS AS YOUR RUN-OF-THE-MILL COOKIE CUTTER EVIL BASTARD FROM THE NINTH PIT OF HELL OKAY

I’m so not okay with this entire fucking chapter, you guys. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened this one thing up only to go “fuck nope not having it today or any other day really”. The chapter title stares me in the face and it’s like my entire brain short-circuits for a second before I come to realise that:

a) someone legitimately wrote this as something that cannot possibly be construed as a joke (and if it is a joke, it’s the one where the punchline is very late in arriving..)
b) someone actually took the whole thing seriously enough to publish it
c) this chapter is the birthplace of actual evil (sorry, Dave, I know you were banking on that being Wichita)
d) people are actually using this chapter as a defining point for Eric Harris

My experience with this chapter can’t even be summed up in a
funny gif anymore. I have never been more distraught over this sorry
excuse for a book, nor have I ever been so very mama dragon over Eric as
I get in this review. Dave Cullen fucked up. He fucked up real good. Allow me to tell you how.

• “His explanations (for choosing to kill) didn’t add up”.. Dave, honey, between you and me, let me fill you in on a little Eric-secret: he waffles. The kid loves to go back and forth between one opinion and the other. He’s testing the waters throughout his writing, dabbling in whatever sounds most offensive, and he’s visibly hypocritical about a lot of things. He tries to explain why he’s going NBK. Sometimes, he edges close to confessing why: he’s disappointed in the world, he doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere, he feels uprooted and confused, he doesn’t really know what to do with everything he’s feeling and experiencing, he’s got these intrusive thoughts like whoah, and he’s very angry as a result of how his inner world interacts and chaves against the outer world.

• Of course his explanations for going NBK don’t add up. They made sense to him at the time, given his fragile state of mind, but they don’t make sense when you view them objectively. Eric didn’t have objectivity. He was living something that was painful to him: you can’t be objective when you’re suffering.

• “To most readers, Eric’s rants just sounded nuts”.. and, honestly, they also sounded hilarious. You can’t deny the guy had a sense of humour that edged its way out into his writing. Eric has a very distinctive “voice” in the things he writes a lot of the time. He pours his entire feeling and energy onto those pages and he doesn’t really edit anything once it’s out there. Does he get over the top? That’s our dude for you right there – of course he does. Does he get kinda wacky? Yes, sometimes. Does he sound like he could explode any damn second like a beautiful little supernova of doom? Absolutely. But, hey, that’s a part of Eric that distinguishes his voice spectacularly from Dylan’s. It’s good stuff. Not really worth the “nuts”-blanket.

• Fuselier is here again and I’m 10 seconds away from crying and cringing because Dave just wrote “insanity was marked by mental confusion” and I’m left seriously debating with myself on whether this book is offensive to people who struggle with mental illness because I can see a whole world o’ trouble in that statement alone..

• “Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation”. Cold. Rational. The fuck, you guys? Lest we forget, Eric responded to his gun acquisition like this: “we……. have…. GUNS! we fucking got em you sons of bitches! HA! HAHAHA! neener! Booga Booga”. He also talked himself into that whole coldness: “I have a goal to destroy as much as possible so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that, so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom like FH or FS or demons, so It’s either me or them. I have to turn off my feelings”

Does that first part sound remotely like rational calculation? Does that second part sound cold to you? I don’t know ‘bout you, but to me it kinda sounds like a little kid getting giddy over guns and realising he’s still kinda fucked in the feelings-department because he actually fears getting sidetracked by them.. and that’s just two examples from a long line of writing. Yes, I’m still keeping Eric’s journal propped open on the sidelines of this thing right here so I can do an immediate word-for-word rebuttal. The life of a Columbine researcher has never been this interesting.

• You guys do realise that the whole Psychopathy Checklist that Fuselier compared Eric with is actually problematic as fuck in this particular context, right? Dave mentions Robert Hare in this chapter, who’s the founder of the checklist and did some pretty decent research into psychopathy. I actually like the work that Hare did and the research he committed to, as it was also built upon and expanded upon by other professionals who know their shit. What Dave neglects to mention in this chapter is that Robert Hare also argued “that the test should be considered valid ONLY IF administered by a suitably qualified and experienced clinician under scientifically controlled and licensed, standardised conditions”. READ THAT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN, DAVE CULLEN AND MR FUSELIER AND ALL THE SO-CALLED EXPERTS CLAIMING PSYCHOPATHY AS THE DEFAULT DIAGNOSIS FOR ERIC HARRIS. READ AND WEEP AT YOUR “PROFESSIONAL” LABEL BEING BLOWN OUTTA THE DAMN WATER IN ONLY ONE SENTENCE.

• Thing is, I’m not even outright contesting the psychopath label in and of itself here. Those of you who know my writings and know how I get about the kid will
  know that I have a vastly different view of Eric that doesn’t include psychopathy whatsoever. I have never once spoken out in favour of psychopathy when it comes to him, nor will I ever come to the point where I will personally see it as a legitimate option after all the research I’ve put into understanding Eric away from any kind of label. But I’ve never met Eric in his lifetime and I have no way of testing him myself or reading his therapist’s findings. (The latter were never released to the public, so it’s guesswork as to what’s inside of those.) Contesting the label on Eric’s behalf is something I love to do, but I’m not quite stupid enough to outright deny it as a tiny (very tiny like flea-level kinda tiny) possibility.

What I AM contesting here, and what I hope that anyone will contest alongside me, is the habit of setting a post-mortem diagnosis in a situation as precarious as a massacre. I would never dare set a diagnosis of any kind without talking with a person and examining them at length. The fact that Eric is portrayed as a psychopath by people who only knew him because of what he did.. biased much? Judgmental much? Kneejerk much? Unprofessional as hell much? MYTH-TAKEN MUCH?

• Fusilier spent 12 weeks contesting that theory. Three months of this fuckery and dude decides he knows Eric Harris. I’ve gone into this case for three years and the fucker still gets the jump on me, I dunno how Fuselier was able to cap it off so neatly but lord was he wrong..

• He tested the hypothesis to see if psychopathy held up – tested it how? Tested it against what? Used which evidence to refute it? Which alternate explanations were used as a counterweight argument? (Did you use mine, Fuselier? I have a really solid one that holds a lot of weight and actually doesn’t demonise Eric in the process.)

Dave never actually explains how Fuselier tested the hypothesis. This is sloppy writing at its best: drop the bombshell of the diagnosis into the chapter and then never show the step-by-step of how that conclusion was acquired. And, ya know, this might actually lead me to suggest that whatever testing they did on it would not hold up under close scrutiny. Whatever testing was done on that flimsy hypothesis might not be good enough to withstand criticism.

Because, let’s face it: what evidence did Fuselier have that we don’t? (Yes, okay, the basement tapes.. upon which Dylan is said to be the more ‘monstrous’ of the two, if we are to believe the people who’ve seen them.) He saw the same Eric we all have, though, right? He worked his diagnosis off the angry juvenile rants of a teenager and of people’s recollections of him after said teenager had committed the unspeakable and almost-bombed a school and killed/injured a great many people before taking his own life. Not the finest “evidence” in the book when you want (and need!!) to remain as objective as possible. Of course the psychopathy argument is going to sound sensical in parts when that’s the main stuff you’re working off of.

Did nobody ever take the time to teach these people critical thought? Why the fuck isn’t Dave explaining how Fuselier did his research? Why, for that matter, isn’t Dave explaining how he personally arrived at the conclusions that he consistently showcases throughout his book and throughout this chapter in particular? Could it be so that there is no logical basis and no critical-minded objective construct in place for this theory? Could it be that Dave is just parrotting the status quo, while the status quo itself was reached through shoddy research and half-assed facts?

Can someone please explain to me why this book was published and put in the non-fiction section when it completely flaunts any and all things that would lead to it being a factual, accurate, and historical account of events? *puts head in hands*

• I will insist on assessing Eric’s motives through a “normal” lens because Eric himself is no longer here in any capacity that can show me that I should use a non-normal one. The way I have always approached Eric is called “benefit of the doubt” coupled with “I have a genius deduction of his character that is not a diagnosis by a long shot” and I recommend you all inhale a daily dose of it as well. Dave seems to think that you should use a non-normal lens because of this magical unicorn diagnosis they’ve set for the kid.

• Psychopathy (si-COP-uh-thee)

DAVE YOU DIDN’T JUST TELL ME HOW TO PRONOUNCE THE WORD PSYCHOPATHY I SWEAR TO ALL THE GODS YOU ARE THE MOST OBNOXIOUS OFFENSIVE CONDESCENDING LITTLE SHIT I HAVE EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE OF SEEING ON MY SCREEN

HOW THE FUCK DID THAT PRONOUNCIATION KEY EVEN MAKE IT IN HERE THIS IS NOT A GODDAMN DICTIONARY AND I AM SO FUCKING OFFENDED AS A READER THAT AN AUTHOR ASSUMES THAT I DON’T KNOW HOW TO PRONOUNCE SOMETHING HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS

This is even worse than the time I tried to read Fifty Shades of Suck. (Don’t judge, I worked in a bookstore at the time of hype height for that one and lemme tell you you haven’t lived until you’ve been recommended Fifty Shades as mandatory reading by an 80-year-old and an 18-year-old in the same day. Anyone who’s attempted that monstrosity: did you find yourself wishing you had bleach and a shotgun by the end of it, too?)

• Oh, so they give Eric two reasons as to why he did what he did: he wanted to demonstrate his superiority and he actually just really enjoyed killing. The first is something I can agree on (god complexes are very common in people with extremely low self-esteem – how’s that for actual psychology?) but the latter.. eh.. I think the fun was sucked right out of it when the bombs didn’t blow and dude hurt his nose like a trigger-happy fool. I would actually add “to make a statement you can’t ignore” to the list, but not out of superiority ground but more out of a “look what you did to me”-sense of the term. I’m sure that any additional explanations of it on my end will go right over Dave’s head, though, because apparently he needs a daily reminder on how to pronounce “si-COP-uh-thee”..

• “Eric saw humans as chemical compounds with an inflated sense of their own worth.”

To quote the lovely, lovely scene from True Detective (my most favourite show ever and I watch a lot of shows, people) in which Rust Cohle lays down the law: “The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it?

[Rust looks up to the heavens in mockery]

COHLE: Surely this is all for me?! Me. Me me me, I, I’m so fucking important! I’m so fucking important, right?! Fuck you.”

Eric isn’t wrong. We are chemical compounds at the end of the day. We have an inflated sense of our own worth – how else do you think we fucked this planet up as spectacularly as we did? It does boil down to nature and chemistry when we die. The spiritual side to that doesn’t always factor in. It factors in for me, of course, as I profoundly feel that nature itself is a sacred thing that should be revered and respected – but it doesn’t necessarily factor in for Eric.

The fact that this one thing that’s really a question of existentialism suddenly makes it in as a supporting argument for the psychopathy claim is highly problematic. The way in which we view humanity is something that originates from more than just our own tiny psyches. It’s something that’s debated by physicists and religious folk alike: where did we come from, where are we going, what defines us, what sets us apart from other living things, is there purpose to us, who or what created us? The origin myth of us as human beings is so much more complicated than a few loose words from Eric, from a brilliant TV show, or from myself. It’s a question of existence and how someone deals with that existence. It’s not really a question of whether someone’s a psychopath.

• Dave actually goes quite in-depth on the origins of the terminology and ideas behind the “psychopathy”-umbrella. And I do wonder, you know, if “ruthless disregard for others” and the gift of disguising that under a mask of “normalcy” are strong enough to be used as the solitary defining points for what makes someone a psychopath. Egocentrism, failure of empathy, mimicking what people want to see, fabricating his entire personality, duping delight.. they’re all things you could ascribe to Eric in varying degrees if you tried. They’re also things that you could ascribe to any teenager on this planet. These are common developmental stages for a teenager that only become problematic when someone hasn’t grown out of all of these by the time their brain and body settle down into maturity. Eric wasn’t yet at the stage where his brain and body had settled into something definite: his writing alone betrays the search for identity that every teenager goes through. He was barely eighteen at the time he committed the massacre. He was a child, Dave. He was a lonely, angry, wanna-be-part-of-things child. He acted on those emotions and thoughts in a way that few children do, but that fact does not make him a psychopath.

• Dave also mentions the confusion between psychopath and sociopath and states that the latter is more in use among sociologists. This is interesting in light of what Columbine is: Columbine is something that defines and redefines our society through its existence and its impact. Should we adjust our language away from law enforcement’s “psychopathy” and speak of “sociopathy” instead? Food for thought right there. Other research does differentiate strongly between psychopathy and sociopathy, though, which is something that Dave neglects to mention here altogether. The term psychopathy is used in that research to illustrate that the main cause of the antisocial personality disorder is heriditary. Sociopathy describes the behaviours that are results of a brain injury or abuse/neglect. It’s the nature versus nurture argument encapsulated in these two descriptions: not really something that I believe Dave explains very well at all in this chapter, though he sure as heck tries.

• Dave mentions that Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is the closest thing the DSM-IV (currently DSM-V) manual has to psychopathy and that the use of this term is widely disputed. I would like to add that the ICD-10 has a similar diagnosis in use that is comparable enough to be included in Dave’s dismissal of it as relevant: Dissocial Personality Disorder. I would also like to add that the diagnosis, which is still debated and refined every day as we speak, isn’t so disputed as to render it wholly irrelevant to the story the way Dave says it is: psychopathy actually falls perfectly in-line with the subtypes ascribed to this diagnosis. ASPD with psychopathic features is a thing. So is ASPD with malevolent and reputation-defending tendencies. I’ve worked with a kid who showed preliminary signs of ASPD and, let me tell you, Eric is a completely different cupcake of trouble compared with that.

• A correlation exists between psychopaths, unstable homes, and violent upbringings. (If you follow the sociopathy line, you’re probably gonna balk at that sweeping statement.) While I’ve argued before that Eric definitely suffered from uprootment due to the many moves he went through as a young child, that is not quite a strong enough contender in the term “unstable home” to qualify as an upset in this category. There was very little in Eric’s direct environment that qualifies as something that could have exacerbated a pre-existing condition of psychopathy. Excluding the proven toxic environment at Columbine, there’s not really much of anything at all.

• You know what’s kinda funny? Dave makes a concerted effort in writing that psychopathy can be deduced from childhood behaviour and that symptoms can appear early regardless of family circumstances and the way kids are raised. And that’s true in general because it’s a disorder that is wired quite differently in the brain, but then.. well.. I’m reminded of the fact that Fuselier probably did not make a concerted effort to speak with Wayne, Kathy, and Kevin. Speaking with Eric’s family about how he was as a kid and how he grew up would be vital to learning more about him as a person. It would give you something to go on that doesn’t quite scream “psychopath checklist of doom and horror”. They could’ve shared which behaviours were ‘normal’ for Eric and which were not, as well as how his behaviour changed in the years leading up to the massacre. This rampant diagnosis setting that this entire chapter is devoted to didn’t really take the opinion of the people who arguably knew Eric very well into account.

• I’m so glad it is actually mentioned that Eric doesn’t tick the box of “animal cruelty”, because I think he’d actually attempt to come back from the dead and murder Dave if that had made it into the book.

• BUT THEN THERE IS THIS FUCKERY IN ALMOST THE SAME SENTENCE AND NOT EVERYTHING IS FORGIVEN EVER: early experimentation with sex, and vandalism and setting fires. Eric bragged about nine of the ten hallmarks in his journal and on his Web site–for most of them, relentlessly. Only animal cruelty is missing.

WHEN IN THE WORLD DID ERIC HARRIS HAVE SEX. DID I MISS THE MEMO? WAS THERE A MEMO? I WOULD THINK I’D NEED A MEMO ON THAT ONE BECAUSE I COULD SWEAR I SAW HIM.. OH.. HOLD ON..

LAST EVER ENTRY OF HIS JOURNAL THAT YOU PROFESS TO HAVE READ, DAVE:

“Right now I’m trying to get fucked and trying to finish off these time bombs. NBK came quick. why the fuck cant I get any? I mean, I’m nice and considerate and all that shit, but nooooo”.

*coughs* Yeah this kid totally got laid. Totally. In his dreams.

• May the gods bless Kate Battan, as it is stated here that she “would describe him as a teenager trying to act like an adult”. Finally, someone with a shred of common sense! (I actually do come away from most of this research liking Battan, as she talks good sense a lot of the time and tried to do her job the best way she could. I’m quite certain some other officers like the SWAT guys were also decent – I recently read a statement in the evidence essentially saying that Columbine was the worst thing someone had ever experienced while serving in the line of duty and that they were very disappointed in their superiors for handling it so inexpertly.)

• I’m just very, very sad over the way that Dave has chosen to write this chapter. It was a bad call all around, certainly, and it leans heavily on the FBI’s opinion instead of on Dave’s own. (He practically repeats everyone else’s words verbatim and seems to propagandate this willingly as his own opinion – it’s regurgitation central.) But it’s also.. damaging. Damaging in a way I don’t even quite know how to explain. It’s a chapter that speaks of opinions as though they are facts. It’s a chapter that explains the whole notion of psychopathy (and does it quite well), but doesn’t speak about it with any kind of sensitivity.

“Eric Harris baffled the public because we could not conceive of a human with his motives. [..] His brain was never scanned, but it probably would have shown activity unrecognizable as human to most neurologists.”
Unrecognisable as human. What a shitty thing to say. What an absolutely maddening, painful, hurtful statement to make about someone’s child. About someone’s brother. About someone’s family member. About someone’s friend. It’s essentially the same as saying “Eric was beyond help” and adding the kick of the year “and he wasn’t fully human anyway so neener booga booga” to that as an addendum.

A few paragraphs after this, it’s written that a psychopath is most comparable to a robot. Incapable of feeling. Producing a failure to comprehend the basic survival instinct of fear and displaying the lack of ability to empathise with suffering. And Dave does write that the metaphor lacks nuance – why use it, then, if it lacks something this entire chapter needs more than anything else in this universe?

This whole thing.. some of Dave’s comments.. it reads as offensive to me on a level that’s very hard to put into words. I’m trying my best to convey to all of you what reading this chapter means to me and how damaging it comes across. I’m in that zone of empathising with Eric’s family and with all other families who’ve witnessed the mental illness of a loved one firsthand, as well as with the individuals themselves who are entirely aware that their mental and emotional responses to this world are considered “abnormal”. It pains me to see how Dave will just state “unrecognisable as human” in print as though he’s not talking about someone who was loved and cherished and wanted so very much by the people who held him dear and carried him throughout his years.

I’m almost crying over the callousness of it all, you guys. None of this sits well with me and it’s a hurtful experience to go through this chapter. I’m furious as much as I am distraught. I’m having a tough time with these paragraphs in particular for reasons I can’t fully comprehend. Maybe it’s the years spent with Eric’s journal, the time devoted to crafting working theories about who he was as a person that stray far away from any kind of diagnosis.. maybe it’s the sense of identification I have with the god complex, the misanthrophic speech, the exact same sense of humour.. but I’m struggling intensely with the fact that Dave does not show Eric or his family a lick of sensitivity in the way he describes everything in this chapter. It’s fucking hurtful and I hate every second of this. I hope this review spares some of you the indignance and the pain of sitting through this shit excuse for a book that’s said to have cost ten years of research. (To which I will say nothing but HAH!)

• Psychopaths like Eric are, apparently, on the level of an earthworm or squirrel. They don’t achieve golden retriever status. I could quote you the entire paragraph but I’m still throwing my shoes against the wall over the fact that this is used to describe Eric with in all seriousness. You can’t make this shit up, you guys. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m so furious that I have lost my words for it. 

• I gotta correct this one over here:

Dave writes that Eric should’ve been a 4.0 student, but collected A’s and B’s and C’s. DAVE HE SERIOUSLY HAD ONE C AND THE REST WAS A AND B CENTRAL. (Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but he was perceived as a participatory student who really enjoyed learning – gradepoint average means less than class participation to good teachers.)

Eric didn’t have job prospects beyond Blackjack. True, sure, but keep in mind we’re talking about a young adult here who used Blackjack as a job alongside school. He was promoted not long before the massacre, which would never have happened if he wasn’t a good, hardworking and reliable employee. Those qualities would’ve assured him of a great future in whatever job he would have chosen to do, because Eric never did anything half-assed. He stuck with Blackjack for almost two years, too, which discredits Dave’s earlier statement that psychopaths rarely stick with a career and get bored. Joke’s on you, Dave.

Eric made NO attempt to enlist in the Marines? Hahaha. HAHAHA. *laughs into infinity* Let me quote you something directly here, Dave: “Harris contacted Marine Corps recruiters and inquired about joining but was disqualified because of the Luvox prescription and the fact that he was under the care of a doctor at the time”. Do you wanna try and rewrite history on my watch again, you complete and utter incompetent waste of space?

• DYLAN GETS MENTIONED YAY FOR DYLAN WHOOHOO. It’s not good, though. Let me quote you Dave’s thing.

“An angry, erratic depressive and a sadistic psychopath make a combustible pair. The psychopath is in control, of course, but the hotheaded sidekick can sustain his excitement leading up to the big kill. "It takes heat and cold to make a tornado,” Dr. Fuselier is fond of saying. Eric craved heat, but he couldn’t sustain it. Dylan was a volcano. You could never tell when he might erupt. Day after day, for more than a year, Dylan juiced Eric with erratic jolts of excitement. They played the killing out again and again: the cries, the screams, the smell of burning flesh… Eric savored the anticipation.“

*raises eyebrow* Dylan is the hotheaded sidekick? Angry, erratic depressive? This doesn’t fall in line with Dave’s poetic waxing about the dude for a change, wow. But I don’t know, this entire quote makes Dylan subservient to Eric in a sense. It puts Dylan in a position where he’s serving Eric the excitement Eric is said to crave – the anticipatory kill, in a sense. We know they both fantasised about it, so what makes Dylan the one "juicing Eric” (the fuck kinda turn of phrase is that, Dave, I have a feeling I’m reading gay fanfic) and what gives Eric the control and agency over Dylan? Dave doesn’t explain the dynamic in their friendship with examples of any kind – maybe because, well, there are none?

I need to add that Eric’s energy has always felt very volcano-ish to me, where it all just bubbled under the surface and spilled out in random bursts of whitehot rage. You could play the lava game (you know, the one where the floor is lava and you gotta jump on tables and chairs and shit to make it from one end to another?) just by knowing Eric.. (How cool is that omg!)

Dylan, to me, feels more like an undertow. A strong current in water that lies far below the surface but grabs you by the ankles and pulls you the fuck under when it sees fit to do so. That’s Dylan’s vibe to me. If Dave can’t even get this right, there’s really no hope.

Also, Dave’s writing turns sloppy once more as he says that Eric savored the anticipation. YOU HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING STOP FILLING IN THE BLANKS WITHOUT ADDING A DISCLAIMER YOU COMPLETELY POOR EXCUSE FOR AN AUTHOR

• They’re talking about treatments for psychopaths and come to the whopping conclusion that there are none and that individual therapy like Eric had makes it worse. Diversion and Eric’s therapy would’ve provided him “with one-on-one training, to perfect the performance”. I’m just.. baffled? Eric’s steady progress in Diversion shows someone who knew how to cater to adults but also ask for help when he needed it. The fact that he asked for therapy speaks volumes: Eric knew that he was in over his head and that he needed help.

• “Psychopaths appear to be lost causes. Within the psychiatric community, that has drawn stiff resistance to diagnosing minors with the condition. But clearly, many juveniles are well on their way.” Well on their way to what?! Dave, please be clear or just shut up. Diagnosing minors is something that’s very precarious, which is why the psychiatric community has devised precursor diagnoses that are indicators for adult diagnoses and created different tests for juveniles than they do for adults. Diagnosing a minor with a condition that is just slapped with the stamp “untreatable” is highly, highly questionable: their brains and emotional spectrums have not yet developed to their full capacity and they are still wiring and rewiring their responses to the world as we speak. Any teenager can check the psychopath checklist no problem, only to uncheck half or more of that come adulthood. Child development studies warn against treating a child as a lost cause for very many reasons. The reason described above is just one of them. This is my area of expertise here, Dave, and you’re not going to get away with this so easily.

• The chapter ends on a hopeful note in terms of future treatment for psychopathy, which is great and all that jazz and very cool to read about..

.. but then you realise that all of this made it into a book about Columbine, which is not the right platform for this kind of stuff at all. It would’ve been cool to showcase the history and future treatment of this specific diagnosis in a standalone article about psychiatric developments and the like. Dave could’ve done fine with that if he excluded Eric.

If he excluded Eric.

That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Dave does fine throughout his book for as long as he doesn’t involve Eric (or Dylan) in any capacity. The minute he does involve the boys, particularly Eric, is the moment where it all slides into a land of fantasy and offensive blanket statements. It’s a damn pity.

It’s also tragic that Dave spews blind propaganda and doesn’t even think to get his facts straight. This chapter review, more than anything, showcases where Dave and researchers like Fuselier fall short. And I would warn you all to not let their words be gospel, to not let their shortsightedness impact the way you view Eric and the case in general.. but the fact of the matter is also this:

• this is taught in schools
• parents and teachers are reading this media-promoted shit as truth
• there can be no progressive dialogue about the boys who shot up Columbine for as long as society chooses to pigeonhole them into standardised and easy-to-understand roles

Where do we go from here? Dave’s tentacles are everywhere in the media. Voices of dissent, even the strongest ones from the community around Columbine, are mentioned but not really heard by the general public. I’m pretty sure that Dave and his ilk would attempt to sideline me as an Eric Harris fangirl, just to try and prevent people from taking me up on my invitation of critical thought. This kind of close-minded and asinine monologue has dictated the landscape post-Columbine for sixteen long years. I’m not done yelling about it just yet, nor am I ever done speaking up about the huge problems I have with it. I have survived this chapter. And if you came this far into my review of it.. congratulations, you’ve survived it too.

Who else needs a drink?

Why do people joke about Dave Cullen having a crush on Dylan? Lol is it simply because he “felt bad for Dylan because he’s a ‘follower’ ” or what? Cool blog man :)

Well, I think it is because of a combination of the following factors:

• Dave is gay and completely out of the closet
• Dave has confessed to “secondary PTSD” (I’m still rolling my eyes) and claims to have cried over Dylan on at least two separate counts
• Dave completely glosses over Dylan’s accountability in the massacre, downplays his involvement, and takes away Dylan’s agency by having him be a slave to Eric

It’s easy to joke about Dave having a crush on Dylan, but it’s his behaviour concerning Dylan that made people think about that in the first place. This man completely threw Eric under the bus in favour of precious Dylan who would never have considered killing people on his own and was just led to the slaughter by an evil psychopath. *cries for days* (I think this is Dave’s type of inner monologue, anyway, because his quotes on Eric raise my blood pressure exponentially and I’m still not over him downplaying the fact that Dylan was responsible for Lance Kirklin’s terrible injuries.)

Thanks for the compliment, man. 😉

Reading Cullen’s Columbine: Chapters 36-39

I bet Dave Cullen thought he’d seen the last of me, haha. It has certainly been a while since a last chapter-by-chapter bulletpoint review of his book popped up on here, hasn’t it? For those of you just tuning in to this ‘project’: a long while ago, I decided I would do a chapter review of Dave Cullen’s book Columbine. I made it through roughly 35 chapters before putting the book to rest at the time. (I had been reading ahead of my own reviews and got to a chapter that made me ragefest beyond all recognition, and after several tries to get started on the reviews again I just kinda gave up..) Somehow, somewhere, I managed to drag up the willpower to continue with this.

The previous editions of this can be accessed through my ‘vital posts’-page, in case you missed out on my previous sense of despair regarding this book. They’re also all accessible through my “having a laugh with Cullen”-tag. (I don’t know how much there is to laugh about, in hindsight, because this man singlehandedly ruins every dialogue about mass shooters at present. But the tag stands, and so does his bullshit.)

My experience with the following four chapters can be summarised thusly:

Without further ado.. I give to you..

Chapter thirty-six:

• We’re back in the Columbine aftermath. One of the things I do like about Dave’s book is how he takes the time to go into the investigation and the community’s anguish. Dave does protect the investigators quite a bit, which is unfortunate given the many mistakes that were made in the evidence pile. Digging into that pile inevitably means I’m going to see mistakes and things that should’ve been followed up on but weren’t. I get that the investigation was a massive operation that spanned not only JeffCo but also a lot of other organisations, but somebody somewhere should’ve put two and two together (and not spell Klebold in the thousand different ways that made it into that final jumble of released documents, ugh).

• I don’t really like how Dave phrases the opening paragraph of this one. He speaks about Robyn, Chris, Nate, Zach, and other friends of the boys here as possible living suspects/accessories to the crime. They did all withhold information at first that was eventually given to law enforcement as questioning continued, but Dave specifically says “they all broke quickly” and I don’t think that speaking about “breaking” a juvenile witness is going to earn the investigators any damn brownie points in this one.

• Fuselier had several solid agents on the case and he still managed to fuck things up royally? If that’s the best the Feds can do, then lemme take their jobs. Please.

• Dave names Robert Perry and Joe Stair as shooters identified by witnesses. This is certainly true in Perry’s case, as he appears in quite a lot of statements as a possible suspect. Keep in mind, though, that the library witnesses all identified Eric and Dylan exclusively and that it’s mostly witnesses located outside the school that identified Perry and others as suspects. Dave says that their tall and lanky posture could’ve easily matched a description for Dylan, but some witness statements were a lot more detailed than just “tall and lanky”! (Are you changing evidence on me, Dave?)

• Perry’s got an alibi (as did Joe Stair) that was pretty shaky at first but was later confirmed by a neighbour of his. Conspiracy theorists: is Perry’s neighbour in on the plot? 😉

• Those home searches of their friends must’ve really soured them against Eric and Dylan for a moment there. I’m just imagining law enforcement coming into my room and going through every single one of my books and putting them back wrong and ughhh nope not having that. It’s such an invasive thing! I can’t even imagine the strain that would’ve put on family relationships, to suddenly have your house searched top to bottom just because your kid was friends with a kid who shot up his school..

• All signs point to Eric and Dylan having been the lone suspects. Fingerprints from items left at the scene and on evidence in their homes only showed theirs and nobody else’s, which is a fine testament to their “two brothers against the world”-pact if you ask me.

• I love how Dave just mentions Eric’s incessant need to plan and record things meticulously. It’s one of Eric’s character traits that just mean a lot when you want to write a good profile on the kid – a lot can be deduced from how he approached things in life that way.

• I love how Sheriff Stone is a conspiracy theorist. I love it. SHERIFF STONE ARE YOU AN AQUARIUS LIKE MYSELF PLEASE SAY YES

• Fuselier is such a typical FBI dude in that he never even stops to entertain the wonderful land of brainwashing conspiracies that cropped up around Columbine. I feel kinda sad for the dude, he’s missing out! But, yes, it’s very important to mention that Eric and Dylan basically took full-on responsibility for the act itself and that they planned it alone.

• Not to poop unicorn rainbows on your parade or anything, Dave, but I’m not so sure that none of their friends knew. There was no sign of it in the evidence, sure, but there’s no way they didn’t at least have a vague inkling.

• Well, I’m glad investigators and myself agree that there was no third shooter. FINALLY WE AGREE ON SOMETHING THE WORLD HAS ENDED

• “A tall shooter and a short one”, hahaha. That never gets old. Eric’s change of clothes really fucked the witness statements over, didn’t it? (Yo dude if you ever try that in a next life again, please don’t put on half a striptease during the thing because it will confuse the fuck outta witnesses..)

• That poor guy adjusting the air-conditioning unit, I’m imagining him toddling up there on the roof that morning thinking it was going to be a quiet day and then he suddenly got stuck in the middle of a school shooting and he’s up there being identified as “shooter on the roof” and I’m betting he was just sitting there with his lunchbox going “I wish I could chuck that air-conditioning unit at the shooters” and contemplating all the ways in which he was going to tell his boss that he couldn’t make it to any other appointments and yeah I have a lotta feelings about air-con guy.

• Eyewitness testimony isn’t accurate? No duh, really? Trauma can affect it big time. (I actually wrote a tidbit on that on my other blog, if anyone’s interested?) Misperceptions among library survivors were common, especially in terms of time distortion. Still, some witnesses were accurate and you can deduce the movements of the boys from their overlapping statements quite well. The fact that Dave has thus far neglected to take us into the library scene speaks volumes: he knows that his presentation of Eric and Dylan is undermined by the way witnesses said they behaved there. (And if he doesn’t know this, then why avoid mentioning those events? It can’t be out of respect for victims and survivors, because he goes pretty in-depth on their suffering otherwise..)

• what the fuck what the fuck fuck fuuuuuckkkk:

“Mr. D pointed out Dylan’s position and described everything Dylan was wearing: white T-shirt, military harness, ball cap turned around backward.”

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE! I GIVE UP. I give up. I give up on this goddamn book. What the effing flipping fuck is this. Is this a bad copy? Can someone please check for me in their copy to see if Dave actually confused Dylan with Eric in this paragraph? Because if that’s true, then what the fuck are we even doing taking this man seriously?

White t-shirt. Military Harness. Eric Eric Eric Eric ERIC ERIC ERIC ERIC NOT DYLAN IT WAS ERIC GET YOUR GODDAMN FACTS STRAIGHT.

• I do like the rest of the false memory description where what Mr D’s secretary recalls isn’t what Mr D recalls, because it’s a picture-perfect depiction of how trauma can really mess your memory up to the point where you believe something to have happened that actually never did.

• Awh, Kristi Epling’s note exchange with Eric is mentioned here. (And good on you, Kristi, for acquiring an academic scholarship!) Of course she didn’t mention those class notes when first interviewed, those were private exchanges that had no real bearing on the case directly.. can’t say I blame her on that one. They really pushed Kristi after finding out about the notes, though. She didn’t want to destroy them and thought that she would retrieve them someday when it was “more clear”.. I really kinda love that she stood with her memories of Eric and decided to not throw that away.

• Dave, honey, Dan Lab punching Eric in the face doesn’t qualify as a goddamn fistfight. I am also still baffled at how the blanks just get filled in here all the time.. Eric being nervous over Kristi telling him Dan was afraid Eric might “kill him”? Eric craving complete power over the kid? Hey, guys, Dave is a mindreader! I sure as heck can’t deduce that from those notes. It’s standard teenager talk to me coupled with Eric and Kristi actually talking things over rather than kneejerking about their differing opinions..

• What the fuck is Eric’s thing with the Marines seriously named as a trigger for the shooting? That’s the first mention of that I’ve ever seen in my life! It goes on to mention the Luvox and I’m left wondering how the hell the Marines were a trigger. But apparently, the media had deduced this in the early days: “the Marines rejected Eric, he quit the Luvox to fuel his rage, he grabbed a gun and started killing”. Later evidence would prove that incorrect.

• *howls angrily* Fuselier is pissing me the hell off over here, you guys. Dave writes: “He (Fuselier) knew what the media did not. There had been no trigger.” Of course there was a trigger. Of course there was. There were multiple triggers, in fact, that led to the massacre. All things start somewhere. All things find their origin inside and outside of people. It’s history 101: everything has its source and events unfold as a reaction to that source. What does it say when a so-called “leading expert” completely denies this for Columbine?

• Dylan’s parents forbade him from hanging out with bad influences? They sure as hell didn’t forbid him Eric, now did they?

• Eric was the quietest out of the friend group, huh.. I could see that, yes. He’s described by the Klebolds as “always respectful”.

• Oooohhh mama Klebold throwing minor shade at Brooks’s mom with the “Judy doesn’t like a lot of people”.

• Kate Battan was frustrated with the Klebolds for giving her a “fluff piece” on Dylan and I can’t help but wonder what the hell she was expecting 10 days after the massacre? These people saw nothing but good in their son. They were coming to terms with the fact that he’d murdered people. Of course they were going to provide a nuanced view of him and tell investigators what Dylan had been like prior to the massacre..

• That fucking NRA show went on, huh? 4000 in attendance meeting 3000 protestors? That’s amazing stuff. Three-thousand people with common sense.

• One of the people with common sense was Tom Mauser. I can’t applaud that man enough. It was just 10 days after the massacre. He was there, protesting against the NRA and talking about his son. Daniel’s mention to him of the Brady Bill’s loopholes would see the man fight with all he had to get that changed. I admire him so much, you guys, seriously.

• I don’t agree with Dave that trials are necessarily cathartic. I think some of those may make it more difficult for a victim to get any amount of closure. Dave does write “displaced anger would plague the community for years”, which is an interesting thing. Books like this one feed right into that, don’t they?

• I’m laughing my ass off over here and this is why: 

Early on, officials began to say the report would steer clear of conclusions. “We deal with facts,” Division Chief Kiekbusch said. “We’ll make a diligent effort not to include a bunch of conclusions. Here are the facts: You read it and make your own conclusions.”

You deal with facts? JeffCo wouldn’t know the damn facts if they danced naked in front of them wearing nothing but a flower crown. Dave says that they avoided mentioning their own conclusions in public because it’s the DA’s job to do that and present those conclusions to a jury.. but then again, the fact that there would be no trial should have led to at least basic conclusions being put out there because the general public is a terrible, terrible conclusion-drawer by itself..

• I’m giggling over Sheriff Stone being so fond of the conspiracies that his own team had to backtrack his statements all the time and begged him to please stop talking to the press. This man is probably responsible for a lot of the early crazy theories. It’s kinda amazing.. but it did lead to JeffCo completely closing up to the media and not sharing a damn thing anymore. Pity.

Chapter thirty-seven:

• “Eric needed professional help”. With what? I’ve said before, this book would work so much better if it was divided up into victim and perpetrator sections rather than into this jumbled mess where I’m suddenly back with Eric in one chapter and running around Littleton in the next. *grumbles* It’s sloppy writing.

• Oh now we’re at the time of the arrest for the van break-in. That explains the conclusion that Eric needed professional help, lol.

• You know what’s really quite sweet? I’m reading about how Wayne Harris kept this really meticulous notebook on Eric that was absolutely filled with bulleted items and to-do lists and all I can think of is how Eric resembled his dad with that.

• How does Dave know what Eric shared with his therapist? Dave says that Eric told Dr Albert that he had anger problems, struggled with depression, and had contemplated suicide. The files from Eric’s therapy were never released. All we received in light of Eric’s psychological state of mind was the questionnaire he filled out for Diversion. Dave is misciting his sources.

• Why does Dave insist on giving Dylan’s dream girl an actual name? Why not do as Krabbé did and call her “The Girl”?

• Dude, Dylan wasn’t beginning to see things Eric’s way. He already saw them Eric’s way before the van break-in. It’s all right to see that Dave doesn’t entirely gloss over Dylan’s homicidal tendencies, though.

• Eric’s resolve to go NBK did solidify after the van break-in, yes. He was fussing around with the pipebombs, sure, but his rants had always been pretty explicit even before this. I don’t know, I get the feeling Dave is purposefully making it look worse..

• “He shared none of Dylan’s desires for truth, beauty, or ethereal love. Eric’s only internal struggle concerned which stupid bastard was more deserving of his wrath.”

That is so blatantly untrue. From the kid’s own mouth:

“I have always hated how I looked, I make fun of people who look like me, sometimes without even thinking sometimes just because I want to rip on myself. Thats where a lot of my hate grows from, the fact that I have practically no selfesteem, especially concerning girls and looks and such”

Does that also sound like an internal struggle to anyone else yes/yes?

• Dave, honey, Dylan told Brooks about Eric’s website because Eric was making direct threats against Brooks. Not because Dylan didn’t wanna kill the whole fucking world.

• Do we know when exactly that URL-info was leaked? Dave has it happen on the day before their admission interviews for Diversion.. can we check that factually somehow?

• Eric didn’t quite skip “suicidal thoughts” in that Diversion mark-up, Dave. It’s interesting that both his parents worried about his angry blow-ups where he’d punch things, though. The addendum that Eric “never tried this in front of his dad” is telling: apparently he curbed the rage just fine there, but exploded out later.

• I wonder how Dave can tell Eric was “seething” as he answered the Diversion forms. To me, it looks like a rather desperate “help?!” from a kid who knows he’s in way over his head. Who’s not far enough gone for help to actually work.

• Apparently their Diversion judge came out with a statement post-massacre: “What’s mind-boggling is the amount of deception,” he said. “The ease of their deception. The coolness of their deception.”

• The affidavit Guerra compiled for the Browns against Eric was magically never signed or taken before a judge. Guerra being drawn away to another case is.. convenient. Hm. Eric got lucky there.

• I’m still pissy at law enforcement and here’s one of the reasons why: senior officials from the sheriff’s department, the DA’s office, and the criminal court were unaware of one another’s actions concerning Eric. Fucking hell, really.. you’d think they’d communicate at least a little bit, right? Bet it was a shock to their systems post-massacre to learn that they could’ve caught Eric redhanded before any of this murder stuff even went down..

Chapter thirty-eight:

• Aside from every part about Eric in this damn book, the thing that grates on me the most is the rampant Christianity. I grew up Catholic myself, but was never subjected to this level of worship and hallelujah-moments. The more I read about how it was in Littleton on a religious level, the more I comprehend the aversion of both boys against this.

• Cassie Bernall being in the “martyr hall of fame” is the most cringeworthy, tacky, painful thing I’ve read in a while. Good gods, y’all.

• The fact that Dave actually indulges this by mentioning evil/Satan as The Enemy throughout this damn chapter is even worse.

• I’m sorry for Cassie’s mom, I really am, but the description here just makes me cry tears of laughter: “It had been possession, pure and simple; that’s how Misty saw it. The Enemy had crept into her house a decade earlier, but remained hidden until the winter of 1996. She discovered his presence just before Christmas.” Surprise! It’s the Devil in your home, fucking up your Christmas and being a general creep!

• If half of what Dave writes over here is true, then Cassie was only a stone’s throw away from sharing the mindset of the boys and acting on it just as they had. It’s an interesting read, you guys – grab Dave’s book and hunt down this chapter, please.

• Cassie’s miraculous, almost instantaneous transformation here seems.. odd. It’s like she had this amazing spiritual breakthrough in the middle of a musical praise and worship service. Very good for her, though Dave does mention she struggled with these things right until her death.

• Val Schnurr’s story is included here as well as a counterweight to the whole “she said yes”-thing that made the rounds about Cassie. Val mentioned herself that people saw her as a copycat wanting to usurp Cassie’s fame. And I feel for her, I really do, when she comes out with this: “You know, it gets frustrating. Because you know in your heart where you were and what you said, and then people doubt you. And that’s what bothers me the most.”

• The local youth group Revival Generation had national touring shows with Columbine survivors? The fuck is this.

• Emily Wyant, who’d been under the table with Cassie, watched the whole hysterical parade going on around her in disbelief. She’d been looking into Cassie’s eyes as Eric fired his shotgun under the table. Emily knew what’d happened. (Hard to forget.. Cassie was killed by a single headshot with the shotgun. Nobody should have to watch that..)

• Bree Pasquale, who’d watched the exchange from further away, also knew what had happened. She watched Emily after her own exchange with Eric had taken place (Dave does describe Eric breaking his nose rather gleefully and quite detailed, yay!) and saw that Emily was biting her hands. After Eric and Dylan had left the library, Bree called out to Emily and waved her over to her position. They sat together against the bookshelves for a while. Time blurred.

• Audio of the murders was played for families, but withheld from the public as too gruesome? If the snippet we have of Val screaming her head off is anything to go on, I can’t imagine how traumatic the rest of that damn audio is when presented with all the clarity of that brief recording..

• Emily felt she was contributing to a lie by keeping quiet about Cassie never saying “yes” or exchanging anything of note with her killer. She wanted to go public. She just wanted to tell the truth. The Rocky Mountain News called in May, as one of its journalists was trying to sort out what exactly happened in the library. Emily was interviewed after it was agreed on that she wouldn’t be mentioned by name. The Rocky Mountain News had put in a lot of work investigating the truth and were just waiting out JeffCo’s final report before coming out with their own. (Note: I find this one of the most reliable sources on early-day Columbine and highly recommend their pieces.)

• Misty Bernall got that book deal real fast, didn’t she? Wow. Late May?!

• Craig Scott participated in a walkthrough of the library alongside other survivors. He was the one who’d initiated the story of “she said yes”, but upon retelling it.. it became apparent to one of the investigators present that Craig was pointing at the table Val Schnurr had been near as the table where the exchange had taken place! The investigator corrected Craig and said Cassie had not been anywhere near that table. Craig got sick and walked out of the library.

• Investigators learned of the book deal for the Bernalls and went to tell them the truth about the exchange. They didn’t discourage the book, but told the Bernalls to not include the martyr incident. Kate Battan clarified the details of Cassie’s murder. She played the 911 tape for her parents. The book did see the inclusion of the incident, as the Bernalls believed others who did say that it’d happened.

• Val’s family and Emily’s family had dinners with the Bernalls and informed them of the real course of events. They mostly decided to let things slide because of the obvious grief the Bernalls were going through, but the Schnurrs did take up issue with the publisher. To no avail.

Chapter thirty-nine:

• I’m feeling apprehensive about the chapter title (The Book of God) alone. This is probably not going to end well.

• You know what, Diversion sounds strict enough when it’s summed up like this but there are instances in the files where I can basically see Eric pull a parade of unicorns outta his ass and the fact that nobody really challenged him on those (somebody should’ve gone “where the fuck are all these unicorns coming from”) is grating a little on me. Maybe it’s because I worked with kids who really did try to downplay and bullshit me on stuff, but it seems amazing that he was actually pulling off a convincing act.

• I’ve only just noticed (thanks to Dave) that Eric began his journal exactly one day after his 17th birthday. The things you learn from reviewing the evidence.. (I’ve got Eric’s journal propped open simultaneously so I’m able to yell at Dave real good when he gets his facts wrong.) But Dave apparently didn’t realise it was Eric’s birthday the day before, because he writes “Eric stewed” about that day before the journal commencement and I can’t help but think that Eric would get a least a little tiny bit giddy (and deny it) over his own birthday.

• Dave actually says Eric wrote furiously in his journal and cites this in italics..

people are STUPID, I’m not respected, everyone has their own god damn opinions on every god damn thing.

.. but there is absolutely no such literal quote to be found at all in that journal. Also, if that line is a summary of the first entry then Dave pretty much missed out on the part where Eric gets really society-critical. It’s such selective writing, good gods.

• The journal sounds like a continuation of the website.. I’d argue that both show sides of Eric’s personality and that the journal is a little more in-depth because it’s not for immediate public consumption but written with the post-massacre audience in mind. The fact that Fuselier continues to take the journal at face value is making me wanna headdesk.

• Eric had a prepostorously grand superiority complex because he felt inferior and it’s easier to build yourself up with a god complex and separate yourself from humanity so you no longer have to compare yourself with them and fall short.. I don’t know, you guys, it seems like a no-brainer to me but apparently Fuselier and Dave disagree with me because they’re taking the superiority thing quite seriously.

• Can I just admit to loving Eric’s melodramatic journal entries? Can I?

• “Philosophically, the robotic conception was a rare point of agreement between the killers.”

THIS IS A GOOD LINE YES DAVE MORE OF THIS PLEASE

Both Eric and Dylan did write at length about their view on humanity and on their own place in it. It’s one of the few comparison points in their writing where you can see how they would build each other up and agree with one another on things. But then Dave ruins his own good line by writing the following:

“Dylan saw his distinction as a lonely curse. And he looked on the zombies compassionately; Dylan yearned for the poor little creatures to break out of their boxes.”
DAVE HONEY DID YOU MISS THE MEMO WHERE DYLAN ACTUALLY LOOKS DOWN ON US QUITE DERISIVELY HE IS NOT COMPASSIONATE HE IS FRUSTRATED AS ALL GET OUT OKAY

• I just have a hard time with Dave protecting Dylan and throwing Eric under the bus.

• “He (Eric) would sacrifice himself to accomplish it (imposing some natural selection).” Oh Dave. *sighs* This is a rather prevalent viewpoint about Eric: the idea that he only died as a sacrifice to the plan rather than as something he wanted for himself. And I can’t even tell you how much I really disagree but I do have this one post that means a lot to me in this respect..

• Eric’s desire to leave a lasting impression on the world sure as hell came true, didn’t it?

• It had taken Fuselier an hour to read that journal? Does that include re-reads? Because Eric’s journal is honestly not that long of a first read.. it’s when you start re-reading that you rabbithole it entirely and spend days with it.

• ALL YOUR HUNCHES ARE WRONG, FUSELIER
• YOU ARE NOT DEALING WITH A PSYCHOPATH
• ERROR ERROR ERROR

• This was a really, really short chapter that was not quite as dreadful as I expected from that title.. yay for small favours!

In case you’re wondering where chapter 40 is, as I commonly do five chapters per post.. Chapter 40 is a Special Edition Chapter. You might have a hunch about it: it’s indeed the chapter that made me ragefest so much that I had trouble continuing with these reviews at all. But! The review’s already written and is coming up VERY SOON after you’ve all had a chance to enjoy this one. ^^ Stay tuned, folks!

Every time I hear Dave Cullen… I can’t stop thinking of twilight and him sparkling and being all mysterious and brooding ;) Someone should make that edit! Actually, someone probably already has lol

unpopularnotions:

thedragonrampant:

*cackles wildly* Did you know he actually describes Eric in a really Twilight-y fashion? Here I quote from the fountain of literature that is Cullen’s Columbine:

“And he got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks. On
the ultimate high school scorecard, Eric outscored much of the football
team. He was a little charmer. He walked right up to hotties at the
mall. He won them over with quick wit, dazzling dimples, and a disarming
smile.”

I’m not sure if anyone’s made an edit of Cullen as a sparkly mess yet, but somebody needs to get on that pronto! Mysterious and brooding won’t happen, though – Dave is of the shallow variety. 😉

Jeffco-Sheriffs-office made an edit of him as Bella Swan. Haha :’)

http://jeffco-sheriffs-office.tumblr.com/post/87331668378

All that’s missing are the major sparkles! That is comedic gold. (Is it bad that I would actually call Twilight more engaging than Davey’s book, though..?)

Dave Cullen has the most obnoxious fake laugh ever, i literally feel embarrassed

yysj:

thedragonrampant:

Oh gosh. People, whatever you do, do not google this. (Can we, um, put Dave in a cone of shame? His obnoxious presence makes me feel punch-y.)

two minutes into his lecture had me like

*eye twitches* Every time I hear the words “Dave Cullen” and “lecture” in the same sentence, I feel like writing a book about Columbine and showing up in a talkshow where he is and just obliterating his good standing..

A girl can dream. I’d tell him this, too:

Randy Brown on the cancellation of today’s Columbine-related Oprah broadcast [old article]

“The biggest problem I have with Cullen’s book is his conclusion that Eric is a psychopath,” Brown adds. “Whether that’s true or not, Dylan wasn’t a psychopath – and these children had motivation for what they did. As
misguided and ridiculous as their response was, they had a motivation:
bullying at the school, and the atmosphere there. You can’t bully and
humiliate people without them having a response to it. Now, in this
case, that response was ridiculous and violent and wrong. But to just
say they’re psychopaths is so easy. People don’t have to think anymore.
They don’t have to worry. They can say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about
it.’ But that’s not true. You can do something. You can stop bullying and harrassment in schools and in the workplace.”

Preaching to the choir here on the problematic aspects of the psychopathy-question, Mr Brown, but the fact that Dave Cullen (alongside Dwayne Fuselier and Kate Battan) was prevented from appearing on Oprah is still one of the finest moments I believe you to be responsible for. Good times.

Randy Brown on the cancellation of today’s Columbine-related Oprah broadcast [old article]

Lifetime movie on ‘Columbine’ massacre sparks outrage (old article!)

A plan for a series of movies on Lifetime portraying one of the deadliest high school shootings in United States history has sparked outrage and an online petition to keep it off the air.

A little reminder that we are not alone in our disgust with Dave Cullen. Remember when they honestly wanted to make a movie out of this and everybody came out of the woodwork calling it a bad idea?

“This is a terrible idea for a movie,” writes Anne Marie Hochhalter on the petition. “I was injured at Columbine, and Dave Cullen’s book is inaccurate and sensationalized. Please don’t let this movie be made; it brings back all
the pain I experienced and is insensitive to all of us in the Columbine
community." 

Make sure to also read Alan Prendergast’s article, which this article links to, because it features this gemstone:

Yet it’s precisely the assertion of the project’s authenticity that most troubles its opponents. In the Columbine community, Cullen’s book is
widely regarded not as the definitive account of the massacre and its
aftermath, but one version of it, with its own biases and questionable
interpretations. The second chapter portrays Harris as a chick magnet,
an assertion based largely on the account of one reputed girlfriend whom
police investigators concluded wasn’t credible; several people who knew
the killers well believe both Harris and Klebold died as virgins.
("Right now I’m trying to get fucked and trying to finish off these time
bombs,” Harris wrote two weeks before the attack.) It’s one thread in a
larger dispute some readers have with Cullen’s work — which, in their
view, downplays the role of bullying and other factors in its efforts to
portray Harris as a well-integrated psychopath and Klebold as his
depressed, rejected follower.

[..]

A few of Cullen’s most vocal critics say they don’t trust his book because he relies so heavily on sources among law enforcement and school
officials, including Jefferson County lead investigator Kate Battan,
FBI agent Dwayne Fuselier, and principal Frank DeAngelis — people that
Columbine families accused of misleading them or providing self-serving
accounts. 

Lifetime movie on ‘Columbine’ massacre sparks outrage (old article!)

vodkasbike:

OH HELL NO

OH DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS NO

Dave Cullen, honey, seeing as it’s just been confirmed that you’re familiar with our lovely crowd here on Tumblr.. I would love to redirect your attention to this for a second. (Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit unless you actually like your book! And, yes, I know the review’s still incomplete but that’s because I can only take so much of your inaccuracy before I throw a gigantic ragefest..)

“Columbine”: A Chapter-By-Chapter Read of Everything Sucky:

1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, 21-25, 26-30, 31-35.

And, look, I even drew something for you!!

do-it-for-the-thrill-of-the-rush:

troubledtealover:

I CANT BREATHE I KEEP LAUGHING AT THIS

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

*inhales deeply* DAVE I PRAY YOU’VE READ MY CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER REVIEWS OF THAT SORRY EXCUSE YOU CALL A BOOK SO YOU’LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN OKAY

those-atomic-bombs:

Friendly reminder that Dave Cullen runs the biggest Brokeback Mountain Fandom Forum

This is the best thing I’ve seen all freakin’ year, lol. Next time on the chapter-by-chapters, I’ll probably tell Dave to write Brokeback Mountain fanfic instead..

I’m almost crying with laughter here gods help me.