The morning after the Littleton, Colorado, high school massacre, my eye was caught by a paragraph in the Los Angeles Times coverage of the shootings. The writer quoted some students at the school as saying that the shooters were "Gothics", because they wore black clothes and had on black fingernail polish. "Goths", the paper explained, were "obsessed with doom and Satanism".
Nothing like a good sweeping generalization to reduce the complexities of a horrifying event to meaningless but easily digestible bullshit. The shooters were, by most accounts, obsessed with fascism and paramilitarist activities and were "filthy" physically. This description couldn't be further from the realities of the Goth aesthetic, which glorifies poetry and fashion and is, if anything, a product of the political left.
The obvious danger here is that the American mainstream utterly misunderstands and is, frankly, terrified of anyone whose spiritual or artistic preoccupations have anything to do with death. For those of us who fall into these categories, the media's knee-jerk reaction to the Columbine High tragedy is only too predictable, but serves as a warning that we must, from time to time, remember that we cannot only be "outsiders", revelling in our differentness...we must find opportunities to explain our dark aesthetic and why it is not inherently violent or Satanic.
Return to Nemeton index
Return to my Homepage