The school shooter is a real 21st century myth; the sort that makes us wish we still had Roland Barthes around. The school shooter is a sort of Lumpen-revolutionary. They have been driven to suicide by America, but possess too American of a psychological constitution to die in a less American way. This is the war inside the human heart of America against America. It is this framework that lets us understand the apparent contradiction of the “organised” section of the movement of school-shooterism. Far from the solipsism that is usually assumed in the individualist, selfish, and idiotic violence of the American act, the school shooter is in fact capable of organisation. Their creed is simple and compatible with coalition and scale: I have been driven to suicide, but I refuse to die alone. Several mass shootings of recent years have been affiliated with the Order of Nine Angles, which is Satanist and nominally neo-Nazi, but in rather the same way that Otto Dietrich zur Linde of Borges’ Deutsches Requiem is a National Socialist. In the end of that story, as he sees the Third Reich destroyed by the Allies, zur Linde rejoices that, even in defeat, their project of total violence has been realised. If that Nazi torturer does not belong to Borges, but instead exists (as some Shakespeare characters might) as a ghost that leaps across pages, outside of his story, to move over the rest of reality like a rain shadow, he might have seen the USA in the 2020s and rejoiced again. The USA survives as Hitler’s successor, even as manifest destiny preceded Lebensraum as progenitor.
Authenticity and the Privatisation of Emotion
Time Is Not a Line
Fairy Tales and Their Antagonism By Modernity