Littleton’s Lessons? Intolerance and Ignorance Can Kill
From the moment I heard the name on the news, I recognized Littleton, Colo., but for months I couldn’t remember the source. Then I found it — a 3-year-old article from USA Today, with an arrow pointing to a spot in the middle of a map of Colorado marked “Littleton.”
The article was about a teacher at a place called Columbine High School. The man, Alfred Wilder, was being dismissed by the local school board for showing his senior-grade Logic and Debate class the 1970s Bernardo Bertolucci film 1900, which focuses on the rise of Fascism in Italy at the beginning of the century. But it was not the film’s obvious political content the board cited as its reasons for firing the 60-something teacher. Some of the adult characters in the film were depicted having sex, a subject the school board deemed inappropriate for the 17- and 18-year-olds in the class (despite their viewing the film being voluntary).
Several organizations came to the teacher’s defense, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition Against Censorship (uniting nearly 50 professional and religious national organizations) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. And more than 20 of Wilder’s students attended a judicial hearing to testify on his behalf.
Noted film directors also joined the protest, including Milos Forman, James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Bertolucci himself, who testified at the hearing by telephone from Rome. Bertolucci’s statement, in part, said, “I was directly thinking of that totalitarian dream, in which the voice of established authority denounced criticism or debate and used the high school classroom to silence other voices, including the voice of history. Now, is it not strange — when we see the totalitarian dream reemerging — that a teacher should face reprimand and the loss of his livelihood for debating this history, this collective memory, in a classroom dedicated to the study of logic and debate? There are too many ironies here, and they are all dark.
“The puritanical urge to divorce the sexual material in my film from its context is only a prelude to a similar desire to cut politics and history from the context in which they are embedded. … Wilder, I believe, was attempting to show his students that context. … How will future generations of children grapple with their present if they cannot be allowed to bear witness and debate the past?”
The hearing officer ruled that Wilder could not be fired for showing the film to his class. But Colorado law permits the ruling to be only advisory, and the school board decided not to accept it. They’d taken their stand and were sticking to it, judicial ruling notwithstanding.
Wilder’s comments in the midst of his ordeal were ominously informative, particularly in retrospect. He said he’d been a teacher for more than 40 years, the last 16 of which had been at Columbine. Before teaching there, he’d always understood a teacher’s role was to lead, to challenge and to inspire his students to think for themselves.
But the goal at Columbine, Wilder said, was conformity in order to mold a kind of industrial product.
I got a chill when I read the remarks. I began to better understand what might have happened to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Despite a complex relationship to many forms of popular culture — including consuming music, film, comics, television, video games and the Internet, media with which most of us have contact — their relationship to the non-synthetic, actual culture was one of alienation and pain, insofar as it existed at all.
Their peer environment was a place that not only did not encourage the exploration of personal identity and difference, but could not even tolerate it. Their fellow students participated in dispensing this policing, sometimes physically. Healthy creativity was warped through their maladjustment, personal demons and increasingly antisocial impulses into a need to hurt those who hurt them, a desire to kill what they felt was killing them.
OK, so that’s my reading of it, which I think the evidence supports enough to seriously consider. With no acceptance of their differences and no social outlets for its expression, the Littleton students’ frustration twisted into rage. “Every time someone slammed them against a locker or threw a bottle at them, they would go back to Eric and Dylan’s house and plot a little more,” a fellow student revealed after the shooting.
A Washington Post article back in July reported polls showing Americans had grown abnormally pessimistic about the future and cited as causes the attempted concealment and impeachment in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the inaction/late action/ineffectiveness in the warring former Yugoslav republics and, especially, the Columbine shootings. A pollster reported that people in her study group were deeply troubled by the student shootings because Littleton “didn’t look like their home towns; it looked better. So (the violence there) was a profound blow to their aspirations.”
What about Littleton looked better? Well, to me, it looked cleaner, whiter, more affluent and more homogenized than most places. The sky seemed bluer and the grass seemed greener — rather like grass of the past, the black-and-white days of Ozzie and Harriet, and further back to the Founding White Guys, George Washington and his fabled honesty and contented slaves, when the vast majority of Americans (non-propertied, non-white, non-male) had no civil rights.
Instead of being envious of such a cosmetically correct paradise that could produce and enforce something as monstrous as Stepford High and engender such unapologetically murderous rebellion, we should be grateful for an uglier reality — where beauty comes from its multiple identities, its imperfections, its truths, its problems and the creativity it must find to solve them.
G.L. FRANK is a Cincinnati free-lance writer.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 1999.
