Welcome to the Works of the Trench Coat

By Roger Rosenblatt

"They wore the same thing every day--black coats, stuff like that." --A student at Columbine High School

Two scenes of carnage and grief, side by side on television. Flip: a teenage girl lies on a gurney, her throat freckled with bloodstains. Flip: a mother in Kosovo keens over the body of her child. Flip: children running from the Columbine school. Flip: refugees dragging themselves up a mountain road. Flip: Serbian mass murderers. Flip: "Trench Coat Mafia" mass murderers. Two lines of categorical hatred meet at a point before our eyes, but it is imponderable still, out of the question, unreal--all that death.

One tries to make sense of the high school killings, and the ethnic cleansings in Kosovo may be a way in. A tribe of haters in Serbia and an ad hoc tribe of haters in Colorado have a dark kinship. Both discover self-worth by hating an enemy. Both define themselves in opposition to "the other." Both appear benign for long stretches of time and then seethe and explode in a murderous fury.

In an odd way, I think much can be explained by the trench coats, not because they are long and black and what the kids call Gothic, but because they look alike; they conceal differences. People who are attracted to clans and cults seek to lose their individuality and discover power and pride in a group. As individuals, the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were vulnerable, taunted by the other tribes in school--the cliques, the athletes--as geeks and nerds. "He just put a gun to my head," a girl reported. "And he started laughing and saying it was all because people were mean to him last year."

But join an ad hoc tribe, and you belong. You can all put on white makeup and eyeliner. You can all wear trench coats. You can annihilate yourself and disappear in plain sight.

Serbian ethnic cleansers can draw on long evolutionary memory for tribal hatred: by now it must seem that hate, like other tribal features, is carried in the genes. Suburban tribes have to hone enmities on the spot, so they require immediate inducements. The killers must be perceived as weak and ridiculous on their own before they seek group protection and justice. The group's main reason for being becomes revenge.

Flip: "They hated everybody," said a boy of the two who did the killing.

Out of feelings of inferiority grow ceremonies, sacred rituals and symbols of counterfeit power--swastikas, trench coats. One boy, Eric Harris, establishes a home page on the Web: "Welcome to the works of the trench coat." They have become their symbol. Disguised, secure, they are free to cultivate what W.B. Yeats condemned as "an intellectual hatred." For Trench Coat Mafia members no less than ethnic cleansers, hatred becomes an object of intense study, a major, a creed. There is pleasure in it, in being on the outs with society. The boys form a Nazi fan club. They pick up enough German to boast, "Ich bin ein Auslander." They are in it by being out of it, and now all that remains is to eradicate the insiders so that out becomes in.

Better yet: safe and invisible inside their trench coats, they can at last "express themselves." The world of movies and TV that applauds young males for destructive, passionate displays, such as putting fists through glass doors, is suddenly theirs. They do not even mind the idea of dying. Fear of others has taken them beyond that fear. "I think they thought they would never be known in their lifetime," a friend of theirs speculated, trying to explain their suicides. Death, the final disappearance, gives them their individuality back, gives them life.

No wonder they laughed. Risen from their former humiliation, they have turned the tables on those who laughed at them. Theirs is the last mirthless laugh, laughing at itself. And who were they killing after all but the dehumanized members of other tribes?

Here is tribalism pure and deadly. The people they systematically murdered were not to be considered people; they were the generic "them." Normal human feelings would only get in the way of seeing the enemy tribes as they must be seen--as targets. Harris and Klebold shot an African-American boy, Isaiah Shoels, directly in the face and remarked that his splattered remains were "awesome."

Flip: Isaiah's father Michael and a white boy, Craig Scott, sit side by side on the Today show. Craig's sister Rachel was also murdered in the school, and Craig was a friend of Isaiah's. As Craig talks about how much he liked Isaiah, Mike Shoels takes his hand. As Craig talks about Rachel, he places his other hand over Shoels'. No one changes channels now.

Welcome to the works of the trench coat. Welcome to the handiwork of the tribal haters--to the decimated lives, the unbearable pain, the absence, the tears, the sleepless nights, the memories, the dead.