Word: trenches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they all seem to belong to the Church of Wearing Your Cap Backward. A day later, as the teens grieve en masse, oldsters ask, "When we were kids, would we have worn sweats and jeans to a memorial service for our friends?" And of course the trench-coat killers had their own distinctive clothing: Johnny Cash by way of Quentin Tarantino. Should we blame the Columbine massacre on haberdashery...
...think much can be explained by the trench coats, not because they are long and black and what the kids call Gothic, but because they look alike; they conceal differences. People who are attracted to clans and cults seek to lose their individuality and discover power and pride in a group. As individuals, the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were vulnerable, taunted by the other tribes in school--the cliques, the athletes--as geeks and nerds. "He just put a gun to my head," a girl reported. "And he started laughing and saying it was all because people were...
...join an ad hoc tribe, and you belong. You can all put on white makeup and eyeliner. You can all wear trench coats. You can annihilate yourself and disappear in plain sight...
...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...
...initial assumption that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were Goths--simply because they wore black trench coats, painted their fingernails black and listened to Marilyn Manson music--got real Goths everywhere hot under the black leather collar. "Teenagers tend to go after the most powerful images they can," explains Seth Baker, a Los Angeles Goth. "They put together a lot of images." Real Goths have nothing to do with violence...