Littleton and the Rush to Judgment

Something called CW is enduring on television and elsewhere in the aftermath of the killings in Littleton, Colo.

In his book, “Fooling America,” Robert Parry lamented a phenomenon that he identified as CW--short for Conventional Wisdom. He wrote in 1992: “The CW is neither Republican nor Democrat, neither liberal nor conservative; rather it enforces the dominant . . . attitudes of the moment.”

In short, CW is what everybody simply “knows” to be true, and the more it is repeated by TV pundits and others, the wider its acceptance as sacred.

Although Parry was writing essentially about CW spun by “Washington insiders” as a way of narrowly framing media coverage, it extends also to other “attitudes of the moment,” including scattershot charges emerging from the Littleton massacre. For example:

CW One. Here is the face that launched a hail of bombs and bullets at Columbine High School. It’s the face of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Basketball Diaries.”

Yet try this:

On the screen, a sexy young Hollywood icon.

Girls love him.

Boys imitate him.

Yes, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Amid mayhem.

In a movie where there’s violence.

Bodies to the left.

Bodies to the right.

Bodies to the rear.

Even surrounded by death, he retains his romantic glow.

Retains his charisma.

Mouth resolute.

Jaw determined.

Focusing forward like a laser.

Here in this atmosphere of turbulence and lives aborted, he endures as a powerful role model for teenagers, who can be expected to make his values--that is, those of his movie character--their values.

Yes, Americans searching for answers to the tragedy of Littleton are justified in their outrage over what their children are exposed to by the entertainment industry.

“The Basketball Diaries?”

No, “Titanic.”

The same “Titanic” whose enormous theatrical exposure has been expanded through multiple showings to TV audiences on HBO.

All of this is a long-winded way of wondering this:

Why is DiCaprio’s dreamlike murder binge in that relatively obscure 1995 film, “The Basketball Diaries,” thought by some to have driven Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to commit a massacre, when DiCaprio’s selfless heroism in the hugely watched “Titanic’ is not credited for inspiring young Americans toward righteous acts on behalf of others?

Why is DiCaprio’s glamorization of goodness in Oscar-winning “Titanic” held in many circles to be less persuasive than his glamorization of violence in “The Basketball Diaries?” How can that be when box-office figures for “The Basketball Diaries” were barely a blip compared with the blockbuster success of “Titanic?” And that doesn’t count “Titanic’s” substantial video sales and its audience on HBO, which says the movie was its highest rated theatrical premiere--with 8.6 million viewers--and is expected to become its most watched theatrical feature ever after 16 plays.

Does anyone know if Harris and Klebold saw “Titanic,” too? If so, shouldn’t they have been impressed by DiCaprio’s courage and life-giving benevolence as Jack?

If you sat the same 10 teenage boys before each movie, which would influence them most? How many would be turned on by DiCaprio the gunner in “The Basketball Diaries,” and how many by DiCaprio the sympathetic rebel nobly sacrificing himself to keep his beloved afloat in “Titanic’s” icy waters?

If the savage DiCaprio of “The Basketball Diaries” does supersede the virtuous DiCaprio of “Titanic” in the eyes of many youths, doesn’t it mean that the concept of constructive role modeling--of influencing by positive example--is largely a sham?

Or is it that those titillated by DiCaprio blasting away in “The Basketball Diaries” haven’t come to it with a clean slate? Specifically, that Harris and Klebold, for deep psychological reasons not understood, were predisposed to murder, and that blaming their evil deeds on their exposure to this movie and other segments of media is a convenient cop-out?

CW Two. Because Harris and Klebold were said to have worn black trench coats during their rampage at Columbine, all kids in black trench coats are trouble.

Or maybe not.

Among high schoolers participating in Thursday night’s CNN town hall meeting about Littleton--held in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., and hosted skillfully by Jeff Greenfield--was a student who related his own black trench coat adventure.

Two days after the Littleton killings, while wearing to his Illinois school a black trench coat he’d owned for four years, he passed a police officer who, he said, promptly went inside and advised school officials “that they should confiscate my coat.”

They did. But when they returned it, he said, they ordered him to “take it home, get a different coat, and don’t wear it at school again.” Why was he wearing the trench coat that day if not to cause trouble? Because it was raining, he said, “and it keeps the rain off.”

Which he said he explained to school officials. “And I explained to them that I am Jewish. And the Trench Coat Mafia (of Columbine High) wore swastikas, which is very anti-Jewish. I have a nonviolent past with the school. I don’t get into fights or anything like this. The very idea that just because I would wear a trench coat would mean that I’m gonna go shoot someone or kill someone or whatever is ridiculous. They know who I am, and they know that I’m not like that at all. And so why should they tell me, given that it’s my raincoat, that I should never use it again?”

Although suggesting there could be another side to the story, Greenfield said the boy’s experience seemed “a rush to judgment.”

The kind of frenzied rush that many are making in the aftermath of Littleton.

CW Three. Outcasts! There’s something wrong with ‘em!

And there was something terribly wrong with Harris and Klebold, who have been identified by their classmates as being part of a clique of outcasts at Columbine High.

On the other hand, “outcast” is being loosely, even gratuitously applied since Littleton, as if everyone so stigmatized were somehow creepy or potentially homicidal.

In fact, it’s the indelible mark tattooed on those rejected by mainstream society for being noncomformist. As one boy at the CNN town meeting noted, students at his school “usually are shunned because they have different ideas from most of the other kids or because they dress differently.”

Fitting in has always been important in high school. Yet some of our most brilliant thinkers have been nonconformists whose UW--unconventional wisdom--has made the universe a richer place.