Word: coatings
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...know too well, Adolf Hitler's birthday. In the handwritten diary of one of the suspects, the anniversary, say the police, was clearly marked as a time to "rock and roll." Some members of Harris' and Klebold's clique, tagged in derision a few years before as the Trench Coat Mafia, had embraced enough Nazi mythology to spook their classmates. They reportedly wore swastikas on black shirts, spoke German in the halls, re-enacted World War II battles, played the most vicious video games, talked about whom they hated, whom they would like to kill. Harris and Klebold liked...
When the shooting finally stopped at Columbine High School, and students ran out of their hiding places to safety, some of the most hulking male students had stripped off their shirts. They weren't posing for the cameras. Word had spread through the school that the "Trench Coat Mafia" was hunting for athletes, and at Columbine a polo shirt--and a white baseball cap--marked the wearer as a jock...
...other extreme are the Trench Coat Mafias of the world--the kids on the margins. Each school has its own brand of outsiders with their own names--nerds, freaks, punks, ravers. And each group has its own way of standing out. At Atlanta's Sprayberry, says sophomore Shawn Cotter, "the outcasts are mainly people who dress up differently, guys who wear makeup and dress in feminine ways, people who wear black leather and chains...
...side on television. Flip: a teenage girl lies on a gurney, her throat freckled with bloodstains. Flip: a mother in Kosovo keens over the body of her child. Flip: children running from the Columbine school. Flip: refugees dragging themselves up a mountain road. Flip: Serbian mass murderers. Flip: "Trench Coat Mafia" mass murderers. Two lines of categorical hatred meet at a point before our eyes, but it is imponderable still, out of the question, unreal--all that death...
...feelings of inferiority grow ceremonies, sacred rituals and symbols of counterfeit power--swastikas, trench coats. One boy, Eric Harris, establishes a home page on the Web: "Welcome to the works of the trench coat." They have become their symbol. Disguised, secure, they are free to cultivate what W.B. Yeats condemned as "an intellectual hatred." For Trench Coat Mafia members no less than ethnic cleansers, hatred becomes an object of intense study, a major, a creed. There is pleasure in it, in being on the outs with society. The boys form a Nazi fan club. They pick up enough German...