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Columbine:
Whose Fault Is It?
By Marilyn Manson
It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books, movies,
games or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that Cain bashed his
brother Abel's brains in, the only motivation he needed was his own human
disposition to violence. Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the
final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death
and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs
in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all
our lives. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness? The world's most famous
murder-suicide was also the birth of the death icon -- the blueprint for
celebrity. Unfortunately, for all of their inspiring morality, nowhere in the
Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue.
A lot of
people forget or never realize that I started my band as a criticism of these
very issues of despair and hypocrisy. The name Marilyn Manson has never
celebrated the sad fact that America puts killers on the cover of Time
magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie stars. From Jesse
James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals
into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when they plastered those
dipshits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' pictures on the front of every
newspaper. Don't be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new
idols.
We applaud the creation of a bomb whose sole purpose is to destroy all of
mankind, and we grow up watching our president's brains splattered all over
Texas. Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.
Does anyone think the Civil War was the least bit civil? If television had
existed, you could be sure they would have been there to cover it, or maybe even
participate in it, like their violent car chase of Princess Di. Disgusting
vultures looking for corpses, exploiting, fucking, filming and serving it up for
our hungry appetites in a gluttonous display of endless human stupidity.
When it comes down to who's to blame for the high school murders in
Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you'll hit someone who's guilty. We're the
people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and we're the ones who
tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they do with them. I
think it's terrible when anyone dies, especially if it is someone you know and
love. But what is more offensive is that when these tragedies happen, most
people don't really care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends
or The Real World. I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right
in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children,
televising the funerals. Then came the witch hunt.
Man's
greatest fear is chaos. It was unthinkable that these kids did not have a simple
black-and-white reason for their actions. And so a scapegoat was needed. I
remember hearing the initial reports from Littleton, that Harris and Klebold
were wearing makeup and were dressed like Marilyn Manson, whom they obviously
must worship, since they were dressed in black. Of course, speculation
snowballed into making me the poster boy for everything that is bad in the
world. These two idiots weren't wearing makeup, and they weren't dressed like me
or like goths. Since Middle America has not heard of the music they did listen
to (KMFDM and Rammstein, among others), the media picked something they thought
was similar.
Responsible journalists have reported with less publicity that Harris and
Klebold were not Marilyn Manson fans -- that they even disliked my music. Even
if they were fans, that gives them no excuse, nor does it mean that music is to
blame. Did we look for James Huberty's inspiration when he gunned down people at
McDonald's? What did Timothy McVeigh like to watch? What about David Koresh, Jim
Jones? Do you think entertainment inspired Kip Kinkel, or should we blame the
fact that his father bought him the guns he used in the Springfield, Oregon,
murders? What inspires Bill Clinton to blow people up in Kosovo? Was it
something that Monica Lewinsky said to him? Isn't killing just killing,
regardless if it's in Vietnam or Jonesboro, Arkansas? Why do we justify one,
just because it seems to be for the right reasons? Should there ever be a right
reason? If a kid is old enough to drive a car or buy a gun, isn't he old enough
to be held personally responsible for what he does with his car or gun? Or if
he's a teenager, should someone else be blamed because he isn't as enlightened
as an eighteen-year-old?
America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on. But, admittedly, I have
assumed the role of Antichrist; I am the Nineties voice of individuality, and
people tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal
or immoral activity. Deep down, most adults hate people who go against the
grain. It's comical that people are naive enough to have forgotten Elvis, Jim
Morrison and Ozzy so quickly. All of them were subjected to the same age-old
arguments, scrutiny and prejudice. I wrote a song called "Lunchbox,"
and some journalists have interpreted it as a song about guns. Ironically, the
song is about being picked on and fighting back with my Kiss lunch box, which I
used as a weapon on the playground. In 1979, metal lunch boxes were banned
because they were considered dangerous weapons in the hands of delinquents. I
also wrote a song called "Get Your Gunn." The title is spelled with
two n's because the song was a reaction to the murder of Dr. David Gunn, who was
killed in Florida by pro-life activists while I was living there. That was the
ultimate hypocrisy I witnessed growing up: that these people killed someone in
the name of being "pro-life."
The somewhat positive messages of these songs are usually the ones that
sensationalists misinterpret as promoting the very things I am decrying. Right
now, everyone is thinking of how they can prevent things like Littleton. How do
you prevent AIDS, world war, depression, car crashes? We live in a free country,
but with that freedom there is a burden of personal responsibility. Rather than
teaching a child what is moral and immoral, right and wrong, we first and
foremost can establish what the laws that govern us are. You can always escape
hell by not believing in it, but you cannot escape death and you cannot escape
prison.
It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot of
information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a world
that's made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that you could
turn and run and start something better. But now America has become one big
mall, and because of the Internet and all of the technology we have, there's
nowhere to run. People are the same everywhere. Sometimes music, movies and
books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we do.
I've always tried to let people know it's OK, or better, if you don't fit into
the program. Use your imagination -- if some geek from Ohio can become
something, why can't anyone else with the willpower and creativity?
I chose not to jump into the media frenzy and defend myself, though I was
begged to be on every single TV show in existence. I didn't want to contribute
to these fame-seeking journalists and opportunists looking to fill their
churches or to get elected because of their self-righteous finger-pointing. They
want to blame entertainment? Isn't religion the first real entertainment? People
dress up in costumes, sing songs and dedicate themselves in eternal fandom.
Everyone will agree that nothing was more entertaining than Clinton shooting off
his prick and then his bombs in true political form. And the news -- that's
obvious. So is entertainment to blame? I'd like media commentators to ask
themselves, because their coverage of the event was some of the most gruesome
entertainment any of us have seen.
I think that the National Rifle Association is far too powerful to take on,
so most people choose Doom, The Basketball Diaries or yours truly.
This kind of controversy does not help me sell records or tickets, and I
wouldn't want it to. I'm a controversial artist, one who dares to have an
opinion and bothers to create music and videos that challenge people's ideas in
a world that is watered-down and hollow. In my work I examine the America we
live in, and I've always tried to show people that the devil we blame our
atrocities on is really just each one of us. So don't expect the end of the
world to come one day out of the blue -- it's been happening every day for a
long time.
MARILYN MANSON
(May 28, 1999)
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