Darwinism
Less famous—or infamous, perhaps—than the dusters mistaken as trench coats with meaning is another item of apparel work by Eric Harris during the attack on defenseless students and teachers inside Columbine: a shirt reading “Natural Selection.” The understanding of the Darwinian tenet of “natural selection” was grossly misunderstood by Harris, but he didn’t let that stop him from making it an underpinning as well as driving mechanism of his seething hatred of everything he simplistically found “stupid.” As imagery, the recurring reference and allusions to natural selection gradually comes to reveal not just how far-ranging the targets of Eric’s hatred was, but how overstated his so-called “high” intelligence was when put to the practical standard of actually genuine critical understanding. The more he embraced Darwinian evolutionary concepts, the less he actually grasped their intricacies.
Martyrdom
The very nature of martyrdom as associated with Christian saints is based on a high degree of mythologizing or, at the very least, fictionalizing facts to fit with an agenda. Part of the legend of Columbine is the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall who is alleged to have said yes when Dylan Klebold asked her if she believed in God before he put a bullet in her head when she answered yes. The concept martyrdom, Cassie’s unquestioned religious devotion and the nature of investigative truth based on facts becomes a pattern of imagery the narrative returns to again and again in an effort to determine whether truth should be martyred in the name of inspiration following such a pointlessly horrific tragedy.
Trench Coat Mafia
One of the defining images of the Columbine massacre is both Klebold and Harris making their way through the school attired in long coats. Once the media discovered the brief existence of a Trench Coat Media among students, this image suddenly took on deeper meaning. Except that nearly everything associated with the Trench Coat Mafia had no application either to the killers specifically or any sort of ideological stimulation for the attack. In fact, the whole thing started with the purchase not of a trench coat, but a kind of long jacket called a duster and the stimulation behind that purchase was the creation of a Dracula Halloween costume.
Eric's Journal
Both Eric and Dylan kept extensive journals and investigators and psychologists leaped at the rare opportunity they afforded to get into the heads of teenage school shooters. At first, Dylan’s is seen as more promising because it was started earlier and was packed with five times as much material. It is the journal of Eric Harris which proved of greater value and provides a sustained sense of imagery feeding the book, however. The reason? Because by the time Eric commenced his journal, he had already become the psychopathic mass killer would become the only Eric Harris the rest of the world ever know. Thus, his journal lacks the attempt at self-reflection and self-analysis and instead is document of a killer with a purpose leading inexorably toward annihilation.
