Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fairy tale, do we invite it? The biggest movie in history puts a double-bladed light saber in every child's hand or mind, and the lines between news and life and art and entertainment wind up in knots. Last week CBS dropped an especially violent show about the Mafia. "This is not the time to have people being whacked on the streets of New York," said network chief Leslie Moonves. Besides, the fall lineup was already crowded...
Though Columbine students tagged Harris' group the Trench Coat Mafia, a name that suggests some level of organization when there was none, every high school has its intellectual outsiders. There are those who stand proudly (if at times longingly) apart from the pep rallies and the dating rituals of the cool kids, and those who are just hanging on until college delivers them from the tyranny of the good-looking and athletically gifted...
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...
...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...
...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 to boast, "Ich bin ein Auslander." They...