The Media Just Love Anniversaries, However Grim - 27 April 2001

We've noticed before that Americans, more than most nations, I think, are devoted to anniversaries, especially of historical events.

One of our network television stations saves one minute every evening, just before the half hour national news, for a brief recall of a national occasion.

It doesn't have to be of blazing significance, the end of the Second World War, say, or the memorable 4 March 1933, when the new President Roosevelt closed every bank in the country.

But how about this last week?

One hundred and eight years ago today the Chicago World's Fair exhibited the first slide fastener, later to be known as the zipper. Which, incidentally, reminded me that my old tailor in London took a dim view of this new-fangled American invention and yielded to his cutter "for trousers only" so late as 1975.

Lately we've started seeing/hearing not just anniversary notes but an increasing number of commemorations of a melancholy or tragic kind.

Last week we had a nationally-televised memorial programme about the atrocious bombing of that federal building in Oklahoma City and the christening - if that's the word - of a great memorial park on the site.

And now there's a tiny town high up in the Rockies which came into the news two years ago exactly - 20 April - when a school of the same name, but in a different location, experienced a shocker of an event.

The town is named Columbine - Columbine, Colorado. I don't know anybody who's ever heard of it, including friends in Colorado. Let's look it up in the federal guidebook to the states.

We're driving along US40 - a main, east-to-west federal highway. Turn onto a state road into High Valley country, full of lakes, trout streams, bridle trails, elk deer and the occasional bear.

Not much more than a century ago, it says here, lawyers travelled 100 more miles from as far away as the medical resort town of Steamboat Springs, travelled on snow shoes when the court was in winter session.

Ah, here we are.

The road goes through forested hill country, lying between the Elk Head Range and the massive barrier, seen on the right, of the continental divide. Up to the hill town of Columbine. Altitude 8,892ft. That's hill country. A deserted mining camp, population: 11.

Well, that's Columbine. That was in 1940. The other Columbine is a school in the Denver suburb of Littleton. It's a handsome place; spaciously laid out high school with four or five wings off the main building.

That's all we were likely ever to know about it before the morning of 20 April 1999 when 12 schoolchildren and a master were shot and killed by two fellow students who cannot be said to have gone berserk but had boldly, carefully, almost casually, carried out a massacre they'd been planning for months.

Since the day of this appalling event there has been a police inquiry, school investigation, meetings of district and state school boards in Colorado, other school shootings around the country, and meetings of school boards and parents all over the United States.

Last week a team of the Columbia Broadcasting System's investigative programme Sixty Minutes, led by Ed Bradley, finished its own inquiry into the role, or behaviour, of the police.

Their conclusion is not yet to hand but there will be more weight given, I think, to several parents' lawsuits after several of Ed Bradley's discoveries.

That, for example, it took at least 45 minutes for the police to arrive. Within an hour there were 75 of them.

Their job was to go in the main entrance and shepherd as many children as possible to safety. Which evidently they did.

But asked why they did not go into a side entrance to find other wounded in other rooms, or wait three and a half hours before they rescued a bleeding master - he died - one policeman in charge said: "Too dangerous."

I gathered - I may be wrong but others did too - that in the line of duty too many cops were over-anxious, as the phrase goes, not to put themselves "in harm's way" - an ignoble phrase that came in during the Reagan years, when administration officials got into the habit of encouraging men to join the army with something just short of a promise that they would not be put in "harm's way".

No administration big shot, from the president down, ever dared to say: "That's what soldiering is all about."

One of the puzzles of the Columbine school horror is the parents' claim, of one boy, that they were unaware their son was stacking his bedroom with an arsenal of tools and weapons and making pipe bombs through the night for several months.

One good thing has come out of this baffling claim: The school boards in several states have set up new forms of parent-teachers' councils and are starting to work out a system of informing between parents, staff, children - and a code of immediate reporting of threats, carrying of weapons, quarrels that might lead to violence, and so on.

Now that sounds reasonable. But it is a mighty undertaking in the schools of a continent which long ago rejected any national system of education. The locality is absolute.

And if American schools are united it is by one taboo, common I imagine to all democratic countries or for that matter to all countries which ever adopted a commandment like the one in the Judeo-Christian decalogue: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Translated into everyday American that is: "Don't tattle" - an injunction pressed on American children, all the more in the past half century since we in the West learned that in China tattling - reporting to the authorities any suspicious or seemly anti-government ideas, aired by your parents - had under the Communist regime become a patriotic act.

It doesn't take much imagination to see in that system, and now in this new American warning system, many possibilities of mischief by children who might like to dignify a tantrum - an act of spite or temper - into an act of loyalty to the school and the safety of its staff and children.

I suppose there's no remedy for this so long as there's as much ingenuity as virtue in human beings.

It could lead, also, to many false alarms - of crying wolf from coast to coast.

This problem has been weighed in several communities and, knowing the American gift for stretching to no limit the freedom of speech amendment, there are outcries from some parents that encouraging children to report on the chatter of their classmates defies either their Christian teaching or violates the First Amendment.

However, I guess that in most places the fear of the death or wounding of their children will overcome these high principles. It's a pity, but for any system that can more or less guarantee the safety of a school population there will be a price to pay.

It has taken two years for many schools and parents to agree on a seemingly simple and sensible rule: Have a daily airport security check for everybody entering the school, have any sight of a gun in a pupil's possession reported to the school principal.

But, as I've suggested, we are in far deeper waters than that.

I fear that we shall hear more and more of an incident that happened to our village on Long Island - a small town that, so far as I know, has never before made the national television news.

One day last week a student reported to the head that one pupil had threatened to kill another. The result was the detaining, or summoning, of the accuser and accused, and the rumour was serious enough to have the head close the school for a day.

There are, I find, two ways of taking this. Some people say reporting every single verbal threat in every nervous school is an absurd overreaction and could soon stalemate the entire schooling systems. The other is, I think, more general which is: Good, let every real suspicion of violence be aired.

There is one rooted consideration, however, that will not go away. It may have struck you as an echo of a phrase I used - "let every threat be aired" - of course I meant be reported, published, so somebody could act for our safety.

But the unconscious pun - p u n - in that phrase means also airing - putting on the air, broadcasting.

Television.

Now naturally television loves action - visual action - fires, earthquakes, shootings. It is less interested in filming ideas and yet ultimately ideas shape the world and change our lives.

No better example comes to hand than the television reporting of the rioters in Quebec at the recent Summit of the Americas.

In Quebec an immense idea was launched to make all the Americas a free trade zone.

But what we saw for an evening or two was a high table with seated officials, maybe a word from the presiding prime minister, but mostly the bizarre and ugly sight of chanting protestors and rioters, and police squirting tear gas.

The sublime, tragic misunderstanding on a single waved placard - "Free trade murders the poor" - made me realise that for the first time in my life I had seen rioters protesting in favour of trade protection.

Alas, television, without meaning to, often violates the truth rather than reveals it.

As for the unwitting but truly sinister influence of television on school shootings, I can guess only from confessions of young murderers that there will probably always be enough sick children around who think of television as the way to achieve Andy Warhol's promise: That one day everybody will have his 15 minutes of fame.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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