Souvenirs From a Civilization That Kills Its Children

[Nevilledog]

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Caitlin Flanagan
@CaitlinPacific
At this point, all we can do is bear witness.

This is breathtaking, sorrowful, enraging. The final image is pure Faulkner.

By @ebruenig

theatlantic.com
Souvenirs From a Civilization That Kills Its Children
A visual record of the artifacts that accumulate after school shootings.
12:34 PM · Jun 18, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/school-shooting-condolence-artifacts/661303/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/mT5CG

In the halls of schools where students have learned about the archaeological remains of failed civilizations, they have unwittingly shed the wreckage of their own. The visual artist and author Andres Gonzalez spent six years dutifully photographing the debris of a society in a specific form of decline: the letters, cards, notes, mementos, keepsakes, toys, talismans, objects, and ephemera that accumulate following a school shooting. The artifacts pictured in the book American Origami, Gonzalez’s incredible collection of more than 700 such photographs and their stories, recount the process of our civilization coming undone—of us becoming people less sensitive, less noble, and more barbaric than we once were. Through scores of Gonzalez’s interviews, photographs, and ruminations, American Origami chronicles the rise of a dark cultural malignancy and recounts the way that it eventually defeated us, then visualizes the cost.

Gonzalez’s journey begins just as everything changed. When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, they and their echt suburban faces became the pop-cultural manifestation of every anxiety the last millennium had about the one to come. They were resentful outcasts who blew their relatively mundane teenage misery out of proportion in journals, notebooks, and homemade videos, fantasizing, between hours spent on old-school first-person shooter games, that they would eventually pay their ordinary Colorado community back for the combined crimes of—in their view—laughing too much and being pious. That is to say, they were proto-posters, the first sons of the nihilistic, lethally irony-poisoned moral cesspool of the internet about to be born. The two believed that they would be famous, that they would inspire more killings, and that they would have followers; they were correct on every count.

In that sense, they were the progenitors of a sinister kind of meme, one traceable through Gonzalez’s astute curation. In the archives of the Littleton Museum, in Littleton, Colorado, Gonzalez photographed a perfectly preserved letter written by a young stranger to Cassie Bernall, a teenager murdered at Columbine. Klebold and Harris, who had certainly been hostile to the eager Christian piety among some of their peers, became subjects of legend almost immediately after the shooting, especially with respect to Bernall, who was (mistakenly, it now seems) said to have answered “Yes” when one of the shooters prompted her to answer whether she believed in God. The story of Bernall’s martyrdom temporarily arranged a frame of meaning around Columbine. “You were always such a strong Christian,” the letter’s author wrote. “It is nice to know that you are smiling down on us … I admire you also for keeping your faith and believing in God. That is so cool! Well, I guess I better go. See you in heaven!”

Diptych: a tin foil star with a girls year book picture; a hand written letter
Diptych: a letter to a victim of school shooting ; a necklace with the word Jesus.
a letter with a teachers yearbook picture at the top
Diptych: A pamphlet with a couple walking on beach at sunset saying "When Someone you love dies..."; a collection of phone message notes
a cutout of a picture of Columbine students in the gym

In March of 2005, Jeff Weise, a student at Red Lake Senior High School, in Red Lake, Minnesota, murdered nine people and injured many more during a shooting rampage that began at his grandfather’s home and ended at school, with his own suicide. The Red Lake killing spree was the most lethal school shooting since Columbine, something that Weise evidently knew all about. After the murders, investigators found that Weise had posted about Columbine in online forums, where he also routinely considered the merits of Nazism and the trouble with women; Weise had also described himself as a fan of the film Elephant in a pair of user profiles, referring to the director Gus Van Sant’s hyperrealistic 2003 riff on the Columbine massacre. Klebold and Harris got their movie and their fans: According to witnesses, Weise asked a student whether she believed in God in order to decide her fate, in keeping with Columbine’s memetic canon.

*snip*

😢😢😢

[Karadeniz]

1. Our legacy of horrors... who would've believed this of us....