With all that is happening with the Shooting last night at the premiere of "The Dark Knight" I will refer you to this statement that Marilyn Manson wrote after the Columbine Massacre.
Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?
by Marilyn Manson
It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed
no books, movies, games or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that
Cain bashed his brother Abel's brains in, the only motivation he needed was his
own human disposition to violence. Whether you interpret the Bible as
literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given
us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A
half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just
taken that for granted all our lives. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness?
The world's most famous murder-suicide was also the birth of the death icon --
the blueprint for celebrity. Unfortunately, for all of their inspiring
morality, nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue.
A lot of people forget or never realize that I started my
band as a criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy. The name
Marilyn Manson has never celebrated the sad fact that America puts killers on
the cover of Time magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie
stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception,
have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when
they plastered those dipshits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' pictures on the
front of every newspaper. Don't be surprised if every kid who gets pushed
around has two new idols.
We applaud the creation of a bomb whose sole purpose is to
destroy all of mankind, and we grow up watching our president's brains
splattered all over Texas. Times have not become more violent. They have just
become more televised. Does anyone think the Civil War was the least bit civil?
If television had existed, you could be sure they would have been there to
cover it, or maybe even participate in it, like their violent car chase of
Princess Di. Disgusting vultures looking for corpses, exploiting, fucking,
filming and serving it up for our hungry appetites in a gluttonous display of
endless human stupidity.
When it comes down to who's to blame for the high school
murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you'll hit someone who's
guilty. We're the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and
we're the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they
do with them. I think it's terrible when anyone dies, especially if it is
someone you know and love. But what is more offensive is that when these
tragedies happen, most people don't really care any more than they would about
the season finale of Friends or The Real World. I was dumbfounded as I watched
the media snake right in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of
dead children, televising the funerals. Then came the witch hunt.
Man's greatest fear is chaos. It was unthinkable that these
kids did not have a simple black-and-white reason for their actions. And so a
scapegoat was needed. I remember hearing the initial reports from Littleton,
that Harris and Klebold were wearing makeup and were dressed like Marilyn
Manson, whom they obviously must worship, since they were dressed in black. Of
course, speculation snowballed into making me the poster boy for everything
that is bad in the world. These two idiots weren't wearing makeup, and they
weren't dressed like me or like goths. Since Middle America has not heard of
the music they did listen to (KMFDM and Rammstein, among others), the media
picked something they thought was similar.
Responsible journalists have reported with less publicity
that Harris and Klebold were not Marilyn Manson fans -- that they even disliked
my music. Even if they were fans, that gives them no excuse, nor does it mean
that music is to blame. Did we look for James Huberty's inspiration when he
gunned down people at McDonald's? What did Timothy McVeigh like to watch? What
about David Koresh, Jim Jones? Do you think entertainment inspired Kip Kinkel,
or should we blame the fact that his father bought him the guns he used in the
Springfield, Oregon, murders? What inspires Bill Clinton to blow people up in
Kosovo? Was it something that Monica Lewinsky said to him? Isn't killing just
killing, regardless if it's in Vietnam or Jonesboro, Arkansas? Why do we
justify one, just because it seems to be for the right reasons? Should there ever
be a right reason? If a kid is old enough to drive a car or buy a gun, isn't he
old enough to be held personally responsible for what he does with his car or
gun? Or if he's a teenager, should someone else be blamed because he isn't as
enlightened as an eighteen-year-old?
America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on. But,
admittedly, I have assumed the role of Antichrist; I am the Nineties voice of
individuality, and people tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves
differently with illegal or immoral activity. Deep down, most adults hate
people who go against the grain. It's comical that people are naive enough to
have forgotten Elvis, Jim Morrison and Ozzy so quickly. All of them were
subjected to the same age-old arguments, scrutiny and prejudice. I wrote a song
called "Lunchbox," and some journalists have interpreted it as a song
about guns. Ironically, the song is about being picked on and fighting back
with my Kiss lunch box, which I used as a weapon on the playground. In 1979,
metal lunch boxes were banned because they were considered dangerous weapons in
the hands of delinquents. I also wrote a song called "Get Your Gunn."
The title is spelled with two n's because the song was a reaction to the murder
of Dr. David Gunn, who was killed in Florida by pro-life activists while I was
living there. That was the ultimate hypocrisy I witnessed growing up: that
these people killed someone in the name of being "pro-life."
The somewhat positive messages of these songs are usually
the ones that sensationalists misinterpret as promoting the very things I am
decrying. Right now, everyone is thinking of how they can prevent things like
Littleton. How do you prevent AIDS, world war, depression, car crashes? We live
in a free country, but with that freedom there is a burden of personal
responsibility. Rather than teaching a child what is moral and immoral, right
and wrong, we first and foremost can establish what the laws that govern us
are. You can always escape hell by not believing in it, but you cannot escape
death and you cannot escape prison.
It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they
have a lot of information in front of them. They can see that they are living
in a world that's made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that
you could turn and run and start something better. But now America has become
one big mall, and because of the Internet and all of the technology we have,
there's nowhere to run. People are the same everywhere. Sometimes music, movies
and books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we
do. I've always tried to let people know it's OK, or better, if you don't fit
into the program. Use your imagination -- if some geek from Ohio can become
something, why can't anyone else with the willpower and creativity?
I chose not to jump into the media frenzy and defend myself,
though I was begged to be on every single TV show in existence. I didn't want
to contribute to these fame-seeking journalists and opportunists looking to
fill their churches or to get elected because of their self-righteous
finger-pointing. They want to blame entertainment? Isn't religion the first
real entertainment? People dress up in costumes, sing songs and dedicate
themselves in eternal fandom. Everyone will agree that nothing was more
entertaining than Clinton shooting off his prick and then his bombs in true
political form. And the news -- that's obvious. So is entertainment to blame?
I'd like media commentators to ask themselves, because their coverage of the
event was some of the most gruesome entertainment any of us have seen.
I think that the National Rifle Association is far too
powerful to take on, so most people choose Doom, The Basketball Diaries or
yours truly. This kind of controversy does not help me sell records or tickets,
and I wouldn't want it to. I'm a controversial artist, one who dares to have an
opinion and bothers to create music and videos that challenge people's ideas in
a world that is watered-down and hollow. In my work I examine the America we
live in, and I've always tried to show people that the devil we blame our
atrocities on is really just each one of us. So don't expect the end of the
world to come one day out of the blue -- it's been happening every day for a
long time.
MARILYN MANSON (May 28, 1999)
