Columbine and Orson

I don't think it's morbid curiosity that has me engrossed in Columbine. It's more the idea of a pathology, psychopathy as not illness but irreversibly twisted wiring that makes a human being incapable of compassion. This concept -- the idea of a person who lacks empathy -- is so puzzling I close the book often and sit staring at the ceiling, pondering it.

The author of Columbine, Dave Cullen, was one of the first journalists on the scene on April 20, 1999. Along with all the other journalists that day, his priority was posting the story minute by minute. Over time, he realized that he had made many errors -- as had every other reporter -- and that the ideas all of us hold about Columbine are wrong.

The misconceptions bothered Cullen so much that he spent ten years on this book, talking to Dylan's parents, talking to the parents of children killed and the students who survived. This book tells a story of two boys, one depressed and one a psychopath, but the bigger story is how we share a story, how the media can imprint us with inaccuracies that we regard as truth ten years later.

Orson is the anti-Columbine. At a benefit for Project Open Hand, we sit upstairs with Deb and Janet and Elizabeth, talking about astral projection and horses, books and wines and mushroom hunting. We eat a soup so glorious that it makes you wonder how you've underestimated winter vegetables all these decades. We eat short ribs and a sous vide chocolate cake with hazelnut mousseline and a perfect little homemade Reese's cup (but way better than a Reese's cup). Jane, the psychoanalyst and dream interpreter at our table, can't finish her dessert so of course she turns to the one person at the table who can. "Ann," she says, handing her plate across the table to me. "Do you want the rest?" She's known me for 90 minutes and already she's got me pegged.

And I think about how this room feels -- peaceful -- and how we don't have as many of these warm, filled, peaceful evenings as we should but that for most of us humans this connection is the best part about being on the planet. And I think about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and how teenagers don't know. They know Bruce Willis, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and that Arnold is governor and all kinds of awful things about destruction and anger and violence and hatred but they don't know the power of peace and good will.

copyright 2010 Ann Krueger Spivack