There, that should get the web counter spinning like a fruit-machine reel. No points on offer for guessing the subject of this week’s editorial: the events in Colorado where two disaffected teenagers gunned down twelve of their schoolmates and a teacher before turning their weapons on themselves, in a terminal act of rebellion. As soon as details started to come out, you knew what was going to happen: on April 21st, in an email to Chris, I wrote “I wonder how long it’ll be before they start blaming a) Marilyn Manson, b) the Internet and c) Hollywood.” And the very first newspaper headline I saw on the 22nd was the Telegraph’s “BLOODY REVENGE OF INTERNET NERDS OBSESSED WITH SATAN AND NAZIS”. Well, two out of three ain’t bad — and the Sun closes the innings off by blaming ‘The Basketball Diaries’ and ‘The Matrix’ because…get this…characters in them wear trench-coats. Yet the killers didn’t learn to worship Hitler from any Hollywood film, they did it because it shocked people. And ditto the massacre itself, the ultimate “fuck you all”. They weren’t disturbed *because* they listened to disturbing music; they listened to it because they *were* disturbed. This is so patently bleedin’ obvious, that the whole debate should merely be laughable — except that, of such things are witch-hunts made…

The reporting beggars belief: a totally innocuous webpage “The Written Work of the Trenchcoat” was reported by the Washington Post as being linked to the killers. It wasn’t, but it’s had to close down anyway. There has been so much utter rubbish written — here are a few of my favourites: “The trenchcoats…are a recurring theme in the Gothic subculture which has attracted so many American high school children. They symbolise everything from suicidal fantasies to mass murder to Hitler.” “Both were also obsessed with the Internet – widely used by neo-Nazi groups”. “Schools are responsible not to let kids like these wear black trenchcoats and funny hats, as children do all over the country. These boys could not have walked into school with guns if they hadn’t worn long coats”.

The last, perhaps the cream of fatuous statements (albeit reported in The Sun, so thus possibly entirely fabricated) came from Charlton Heston, NRA president. Yeah, Chuck, that’s right — guns don’t kill people, black trenchcoats do. And schools across America have indeed now banned them, though one imagines that the jock uniform will remain inviolate. Who cares, as the Financial Times pointed out, that they “freely admit to harassing and bullying anyone they find inferior”?

Though the funniest thing in the press coverage has been reading the Daily Telegraph’s explaining to their readers who Marilyn Manson is, and their tenuous attempts to drag poor old KMFDM in as well. The name of this (actually avowedly *anti*-racist and *anti*-Nazi) German band supposedly stands for “Kein Mitleid fur die Mehrheit”, or “No pity for the majority” — then again, it has also been said to stand for “Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode”, and no-one has gone and done that yet. But if you want lyrical relevance, they’ve got it: “More and faster, here we come, white and trashy and incredibly dumb…”

However, one interesting thing about the affair is how many people – and I’m talking about sane, rational, non-psychotic people – have expressed views bordering on the sympathetic to the Trenchcoat Mafia. My school-days certainly had their moments where easy access to automatic weaponry would perhaps not have been a good thing, and I was by no means the worst off, even in my class. For, let’s face it, anyone who had problems at school probably dreamt, if not of actually killing your oppressors, of them suffering a convenient accident. “THEN they’d be sorry,” you muttered in idle moments of day-dreaming during double Geography. The TCM guys didn’t pussy foot around in “what if…”, they took decisive action, and for this, I will admit to feeling a warped respect. It’ll certainly be a while before the jocks take the piss out of anyone in a long trenchcoat.

The surprise to me is less that Colorado happened, and more that it doesn’t happen with greater frequency. And if you really want to look for “influences” on their behaviour…look no further than CNN, where they could see their government describing the killing of a far greater number of entirely innocent civilians as mere “collateral damage”. When real life nods its head at such horrors, who needs Hollywood or Marilyn Manson?

A slightly delayed editorial this week, thanks largely to a surprise birthday party thrown for me by my girlfriend, which will be fully reported on here next time, and marked the start of an excellent (if rather self-indulgent!) weekend, in which the updating of this web site played no part at all.

The theme of said party was James Bond, which turned out to be somewhat appropriate, given my narrow brush with death on Saturday. Well, allowing for literary hyperbole anyway; the Brixton nail-bomb attack took place within spitting distance of the stop where I’d catch the bus back to Tulse Hill, which is uncomfortably close for comfort. Indeed, I was up in town at the time, and wondered why all the TV cameras were outside King’s College hospital when we went past a bit later.

The (slightly) more worrying thing is that it’s not all that unusual. In the past decade or so, I’ve come mildly close to such incidents a number of times, without ever getting directly involved. If some obscure form of terrorist group (an extremist splinter group of the National Viewers and Listeners Association perhaps?) are stalking my foot-steps, they are proving somewhat inept. This all seemed to start with the Clapham rail crash, back when I was commuting up from Farnborough: one of the trains involved had stopped there, but I didn’t get to the station until after it had gone. Ouch.

Next up, the Baltic Exchange bomb, which knocked the building where I’m typing this three inches off its foundations. The device was on the street I walked up most evenings on my way back to London Bridge, and succeeded in taking out my bank and my opticians. Fortunately, that evening, I was in the Scala cinema — a favourite venue for escaping historical events, I was also in there the day of the Poll Tax Riot. The IRA also bombed London Bridge, while I was on a train heading straight for it.

Is this normal, just an inevitable result of living in a bustling and multi-cultural metropolis? What’s strange is how FOCUSSED it all seems; I’ve never been in a car wreck or been felled by an industrial accident, and there have been no close calls involving natural phenomena of any sort. Save the rail crash, it’s been all terrorism.

The weird thing about the Brixton incident is, at the time I write this, no-one really knows who’s to blame; there have been no claims of responsibility, which you would expect any coherent terrorists to come up with — unless it was some paramilitary group of Trappist monks. Current favourites appear to be either Serbs or racists, which is really two different flavours of the same coin [Welcome to Outrageous Metaphor Mixing 1.0.1] However, my money is on one of three options: some kid who downloaded instructions off the Internet, only to discover, having made the bomb, that there was no info on how to defuse it, a highly confused NATO pilot, mistaking Brixton market for a Serb convoy, or somebody REALLY doesn’t like Iceland fish-fingers.

It is, of course, important to retain a suitably blase outlook, something at which we South Londeners are past masters. Bomb North London, and they squeal, demanding rings of steel and armed police. Bomb South London and we shrug, realising that Stockwell on a Saturday night is already far more dangerous. Besides, if we play our cards right, it’ll help keep the tourists out for the next century or so — we’ve only recently let on that bubonic plague is no longer rife South of the Thames [except in certain parts of Streatham]. Any interested proto-anarchists out there, wishing to tap into a groundswell of popular support should note that placing devices in a) Madam Tussaud’s, b) Rock Circus and c) the Rainforest Cafe would be the terrorist equivalent of the neutron bomb, taking out the tourists, but leaving the residents intact.

Thus, life will go on, given the lack of evidence to the contrary. What does not kill us makes us stronger, even if it’s at the cost of a few local bus diversions…

And for the third week running, I find myself inexplicably drawn to write about a war I, in all honesty, care nothing about — it’s looking less like an exploitation movie, and more like a studio franchise. But perhaps its this detached view which makes it so interesting, since I can stand back and view things with my usual degree of cynicism, untainted by mindless patriotism, jingoism or journalism.

For the first casualty in war is truth. Remember the stories of Kuwaiti babies taken out of their incubators by the Iraquis and left to die? Totally fictitious. Or perhaps you recall the vastly over-inflated reports of the casualties in the Romanian Revolution. Or the “sanitised for our protection” news handed out during the Gulf War. It’s inevitable; as soon as hostilities break out, each side will start lying about each other. This demonisation is why I don’t trust history: it’s written by winners. If the Nazis had won World War II, I’ve no doubt we’d be hearing what an evil man Churchill was.

And it’s looking like similar fabrications are going on in Kosovo: take the story of 20 teachers in a village school being slaughtered in front of their pupils, solemly repeated as gospel by the Foreign Secretary Robin ‘Make love AND war’ Cook. However, the village in question only has 200 inhabitants — so unless they’re all children, and Kosovo has a pupil/teacher ration the envy of everywhere else in the civilised world, there is no way the school has 20 teachers. Short of bussing teachers and pupils from a wide area in (and I think the Serbs have better things to do with their limited supplies of fuel), this one has the scent of a scare story, though these facts have received a great deal less coverage than Cook’s promotion of the “reality”.

At the moment, any story coming out of Kosovo is printed as gospel, without any apparent effort being made to check it for accuracy. One headline in the paper from last week: “Children raped and left to die”. No room for discussion, debate or doubt there. However, in the very first paragraph, we discover “Serb soldiers last night stood ACCUSED of raping Albanian refugees as young as 13”. [My emphasis] Ah, not quite the same thing, is it? Print that kind of headline about an alleged rapist in this country and you’d be hit with a contempt of court suit. But these are Serbs, and we all know they’re bastards, so the very next sentence, it’s back to “Women and children ARE being taken from their families, abused and then abandoned”. [Again, my emphasis] This is simple, Media Studies 1.0.1. stuff, and really shouldn’t need to be explained to anyone. These stories are the modern equivalent of the bogey men, urban legends spread by the mass media with a speed and efficiency undreamt of by more traditional methods.

It’s still entirely possible, of course, that these stories are based on factual events, and I’ve no doubt that there are a lot of very nasty things going on in Kosovo. But you can’t separate the wheat from the chaff, and the question has to be asked “If the Serbs are SO bad, why is there this apparent need to exaggerate things?” This is especially true because in war, the things that actually go on are often worse than anything you could make up: the exploits of the Japanese Unit 731, for example, would probably be rejected by Shawn Hutson as “too gruesome”. In such circumstances, it’s far better to stick to verifiable truth, without slipping into gratuitous embellishment, as that just devalues your case.

Plus, I think only an idiot would claim that the Kosovo Liberation Army are just a bunch of pacifists, reliant solely on civil disobedience. Actually, I just typed “Kosovo Liberation Front” — very sensible not to call themselves this. Would you be able to take a war featuring the KLF seriously? On the other hand, after six hundred years, I guess they would be entitled to call themselves justified and ancient…

Great lies of our time: “the cheque’s in the post”; “of course I won’t come in your mouth”; and “I hate to say I told you so…”. For NO-ONE hates to say they told you so — it affords an easy opportunity to remind people of your superior intellect, and so it’s perfectly natural. I am no different. Thus:

I told you so.

One week into the NATO assault on whatever-bit-of-former-Yugoslavia, and it’s become patently obvious that it’s all a horrendous screw-up. “A war with no plausible resolution or viable outcome” was how I described it, and a mere seven days later, even the majority of the tabloid press are beginning to wonder if this was really a good idea. When they turn on St.Tony of Blair, you know that something somewhere is well short of right.

A little further thought on this (which I can probably claim as “historical research” for tax purposes) has revealed a fair degree of precedent, and enabled me to formalise my theory of conflict thus: “don’t get involved in a land war unless it plays like a GOOD B-movie”. Thus we have World War II, which with some mild shoehorning, fits elegantly into the classical three-act story structure, and builds up to the biggest pyrotechnic display ever, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, we have ‘Nam, which reads like something Joe Eszterhas would use to line his cat’s litter tray.

Naturally, this depends on perspective. From the North Vietnamese point of view, it’s quite possible that it was A Good Idea, but a) one suspects they weren’t shouting “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” at a superpower, and b) they don’t exactly have a major B-movie industry, so this probably invalidates the comparison a little. Though “David takes on Goliath and wins” is certainly more interesting a story than “Goliath gets his ass kicked by small dude with a sling”.

The problem with this theory is that, in general, it only works with the benefit of hindsight. The Napoleonic War, for example, was pretty good (from a British standpoint), but it could all have gone pear-shaped at Waterloo and ended up as the historical version of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”. [I watched this last night; the ending is absolutely amazing, though I think it probably helps explain its relative box-office failure. I just can’t imagine Hollywood countenancing anything like that these days] However, while you can do almost anything to your audience in exploitation cinema, the one cardinal sin is to BORE them. Once you lose their interest, that’s pretty much all she wrote. Even if Bill Clinton and Tony Blair personally fight their way into Belgrade with a devastating display of martial arts, accompanied by a bevy of scantily-clad beauties, most people would stifle a yawn. Though it would make ‘Newsnight’ a good deal more interesting.

And so it is in war; it’s pretty tricky to win without the support of the people on whose behalf the conflict is being waged. “Hearts and minds” is, I believe, the term, though it’s usually applied to the people IN whose land you are fighting. Here, however, while the Kosovans may or may not be keen on the idea (it may be pertinent that I don’t recall anyone ever ASKING them what they thought), it’s pretty obvious that no-one here gives a damn. Put it this way; if they introduced conscription, can you put your hand on your heart and say you wouldn’t be on the first flight out?

The problem now is how does everyone get out of this with an acceptable degree of face. Milosevic {since last week, I have made an active effort to try and learn how to spell his name} ain’t going to resign; Clinton isn’t going to pack up and go home. The great thing about B-movies is that, even if they’re crap, they are rarely longer than ninety minutes. Unfortunately, this one has all the making of a Jim Cameron director’s cut. Where’s the remote control?

So, we’re at war. Funny, it doesn’t feel like it. And I speak as a veteran of several wars-by-proxy — I survived both Operation Desert Storm, and the Falklands Conflict (or at least the media coverage thereof), and those were REAL wars in comparison. Even though Kosovo is at relatively close range in comparison, there isn’t the same sense of…well, theatre. For good war is like good cinema; you need characters to empathise with, and a plot which will provide narrative thrust for the heroes’ actions. All this seems sadly lacking in this case; all you’ve really got is a load of Balkans being cruel to another load of Balkans. From the humanitarian point of view this is reprehensible; from the aesthetic point of view, it’s the rough equivalent ‘Friday the 13th Part VIII’ — nothing we haven’t seen far too often before. Am I the only person suffering from genocide fatigue?

It’s also kind of hard to work out what we’re going to accomplish here, since we are dealing with 600 years worth of conflict. A couple of days of bombing isn’t going to counteract that, no matter how many speeches Bill Clinton and Tony Blair make. Whatever happened to “hearts and minds”? We don’t like them killing each other so…we’re going to do it for them. I’m not entirely convinced by the moral argument apparently on view here.

Part of the problem is that NATO is now an organisation without an enemy; it’s as if James Bond suddenly discovered that SMERSH and SPECTRE had given up. He’d be left desperately casting round for alternative enemies. Looking at ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’, this means resorting to the sort of evil genius – no, make that Evil Genius – which is entirely unconvincing. And, for Jonathan Pryce read Slobodan Miloso…ok, so I’ve suddenly realised I don’t even know how to spell the bugger’s name. [You never had this problem with Hitler] And he certainly doesn’t seem to be coming across as more than lukewarm on the IQ scale, though the “evil” [*DR* Evil to you!] is predictably being pumped up. Last month it was Glenn Hoddle, this week it’s someone who sounds more like a tennis player than a threat to Civilization As We Know It.

We’re a bit lacking on the hero front as well. At least in Desert Storm, we had Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf; I’ve no idea who’s running the show this time, and I doubt whoever it is will be remembered in the same breath as General Patton or Montgomery. This is actually probably very sensible, since there’s not much glory to be had leading the combined armed forces of countries whose population totals 500 million or so, against…some Mig-29s and a bunch of enthusiastic ethnic cleaners. You are *expected* to kick serious ass; for professional soldiers this is the equivalent of a 3rd round tie in the FA Cup, away at a non-league side. Keep quiet, get the job done and pray you don’t screw up.

The script in this particular conflict also needs some tightening up, since we have the plot equivalent of a long-running soap opera: Bosnia is having an affair with Kosovo, but Serbia comes home early and finds them in bed together. Meanwhile Croatia is demanding to be taken seriously as an actress, while Slovenia is off opening a supermarket somewhere. Unless you’ve been following the story during, oh, the past couple of centuries, it’s understandable if you want to flip over from Newsnight to the Channel 5 documentary about striptease, or even The Weather In Norwegian.

All told, this is the military equivalent of ‘The Avengers’ — something that probably seemed a good idea at the time, but which in a few years time will be looked back on with raised eyebrows and a “What WERE we thinking?” expression. Because it’s , which is mere empty posturing and a chance to use up a few Cruise missiles before their sell-by date. It’s not often I find myself in line with the hardcore of the German Green party and Tony Benn, but pardon me if I opt to wait for the video of this one.