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it's almost time, dylan. inpatient.

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Why don’t other school shootings stand out as much as the Columbine High School Massacre?

This question is something I have been pondering over for a long time. Why did Columbine make such a huge impact when school shootings just like it happen so often? What made Columbine so unique? I have some theories as to why this could be.

1. The Duo: I believe the relationship Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shared is one of the biggest factors. The fact that there was not one shooter, but two, truly captivated so many people. How often can a person find someone willing to go through such heinous acts alongside them, and at such a young age? These two grew up together for many years and shared an intense hatred for the world around them. They knew what they wanted to do and began planning many months before the event took place. Because of this, the Columbine Massacre played out like no other. While most shootings have just one culprit acting on a short spurt of passion or anger, Eric and Dylan had been hellbent on revenge for a long, long time and worked together to make it happen. Neither one of them got cold feet or chickened out at any time, which proves how dedicated they were to each other and their plans. 

2. The Trend: Both of them knew how the world would react to their story, that they would gain a large following and a series of copycats. In the journals they wrote and webpages they created they stated many times how they knew society would allow their names to live on forever. They knew 100% that the media attention they would get after they died would cause a domino effect in the years to follow, and they couldn’t have been more right. Since 1999, the number of school shootings has skyrocketed and are even beginning to become a trend. There were 17 major shootings in 2012 alone. Eric and Dylan hated everyone and wanted them all to die, and they were aware that by going through with the Columbine massacre, people would continue to die because of them through proxy, even after they themselves were long gone. 

3. The Warning Signs: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold left a staggering amount of clues and raised many red flags in the time leading up to the massacre, but it still never occurred to anyone how two young boys were capable of doing such a thing. It never even crossed anyones mind. It’s like they left a trail of breadcrumbs that no one noticed until it was too late. The two boys intentionally left bombs and guns in desks and drawers in their rooms like it was a game, and anyone could have found them and prevented the whole thing… however Eric and Dylan both knew no one was looking. They left everything out in the open so that the world would feel the guilt after the tragedy.

4. The Reasoning: The two of them documented their journey and their thought patterns leading up to the day for the world to find after the damage had been done. They wrote their plans and what they were thinking in great detail on webpages and in journals, even taping or recording themselves talking about it. No matter how many times we look at their explanations or reasonings or justifications behind their actions, we will never fully understand why they did what they did, however Eric and Dylan really did try to make it so. 

5. The Making of an Icon: The way they looked, the clothes they wore, everything they did became absolutely iconic. You see a black t-shirt with WRATH written in red lettering or a white t-shirt with NATURAL SELECTION written in black and you know straight away where it’s from. The names Reb and Vodka will forever belong and make you think back to them. The black trench coats and suspenders and combat boots, the pair of gloves they shared on the day of the crime. It all seems like one big movie scene and it all links back to them. Nowadays you see the ‘new’ school shooters idolising and copying everything Eric and Dylan did, like wearing their own t-shirts with edgy phrases such as 'Humanity is Overrated’, all trying to stand out in the way the Columbine killers did so easily. 

6. The Timing: The 1990’s and 2000’s were a very significant time in our history. Eric and Dylan were a part of the first generation of people to grow up with revolutionary technology such as computers and the world wide web. In this time, media was really beginning to flourish like never before and while there have been school shootings prior to Columbine, none of them ever received such an astronomical amount of attention because the means for it had never really been there to that scale. Columbine was revolutionary and Eric and Dylan, both having an above average knowledge on computers, media and the internet, knew that it was the best time to make the attack. “Producers will be fighting over our story.”

Of course, there is no right or wrong answer to this question. No one will ever really know why Columbine stood out so high above the rest. Our society works in mysterious ways and with so many tragedies happening somewhere in the world every day, there’s no way of knowing what one will make the headlines next.

(via True-Crimes)

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note to self: dylan’s diversion program started march 19th of 1998, and ended february 9th, 1999, after he filed for early release.

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being close to the boys helps to make sense of the chaos. i can't think of a healthier reprieve than channeling my destructive energy into the rectification of the columbine tragedy.

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Dylan's origins -- Russian and German (among others)

Dylan’s birthday is a good enough reason to post about his ancestral origins, I suppose!

I’m quite impressed by how much Columbine stuff is on the internet in Russian!  Back in the bad old days of the Cold War in the 1980s, when I (and Eric and Dylan) were little kids, Russia, then the Soviet Union, was the “Evil Empire” that supposedly hated everyone and everything American and “the Commies” were going to nuke us all someday.  Then the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and kids today (fortunately) don’t remember any of that kind of stuff at all!

Unfortunately I speak approximately zero words of Russian, but the transliterations into Cyrillic are:

Колумбайн - Kolumbayn - Columbine

Эрик Харрис - Erik Harris - Eric Harris

Дилан Клиболд - Dilan Klibold - Dylan Klebold

Anyway, Dylan’s maternal ancestors, the Yassenoffs, were originally from Russia, more specifically Ukraine, which was under Russian rule at the time (and would be until 1991).  The city they lived in was called Yelisavetgrad (or Elisavetgrad, or Elizabethgrad), now known as Kirovograd (or Kirovohrad), in the south central region of the country.

A little background information: Jews in Russia in the 1800s mostly lived in what was called the “Pale of Settlement,” which consisted of areas now corresponding to modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and the westernmost parts of Russia.  You can see Elizavetgrad is right smack in the middle, in the south.

On April 15, 1881 (“old style”; April 27 “new style”; the Russians didn’t change their calendar until 1917), right at the end of Passover and during Easter Week, and 100 years before Dylan was born, a pogrom broke out in Elizavetagrad.  The reforming czar Alexander II had been assassinated about a month before and it was claimed that “the Jews” were to blame.  This was the first of what became a long and very ugly series of riots against the Jews, called “pogroms,” that took place between 1881 and 1884, and which led to thousands of Jews, including the Yassenoffs, leaving Russia for the United States and other countries.

Solly Leo “Skip” Yassenoff, a distant cousin of Dylan’s and a family historian, tells the story:

Interviewer: Can you tell us how your family came to the United States?

Yassenoff: What happened was, they all lived in a city called Kirovograd, Elisavetgrad. One of the earlier pogroms in Russia, I believe it was in 1880 during Passover and it was a very nasty pogrom, and supposedly Isaac Yassenoff, who was a young man, killed a Russian military person during the pogrom so he fled, I believe it was through Hamburg, and got to New York and for some reason HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society) sent him to Dayton, Ohio. Maybe there were some distant relatives there or maybe there was just a relative there or a family willing to take him in.

Interviewer: Do you know what year it may have been?

Yassenoff: I think he probably arrived in 1881, so he found his way to Dayton and apparently, he sent word back to the rest of the family and his four brothers came over one by one and then later his parents as well came over.

A contemporary account of the pogrom from a Reuters telegram of 1881:

The following details have been telegraphed by the Odessa correspondent of the Times : Since my telegram to you of yesterday stating that anti-Jewish riots had broken out at Elizabethgrad, a town of about 40,000 inhabitants, situated in the government of Kherson, the following particulars have been published here upon the authority of Prince Dondonkoff Kornakoff, the provincial governor general of Odessa.  The disturbance commenced at 4 PM last Wednesday [April 27], and the contents of several Jews’ shops were stolen damaged or destroyed.  The police called in the aid of the troops, who made every effort to stop the pillaging.  This was however, only effected on the following evening, and with great difficulty on account of the number of Peasants who had flocked into the town from the surrounding villages to participate in the general plunder.  During the night of the 28th inet. there arrived at Elizabethgrad three squadrons of Uhlans and yesterday a battallion of infantry.  One Jew was killed, but the number of wounded is not great.   In a later telegram the correspondent states that at Elizabethgrad things have remained quiet ever since the anti-Jewish riots.  These were quelled last Thursday evening.  It appears that 400 persons were arrested.  The rioting arose out of a dispute between some Christians and Jews.  The quarrel led to a general fight, which according to the Elizabethgrad Vestnik, assumed a more serious nature upon revolver shots being fired from some Jewish houses.  The Christians then attacked the houses and shops of the Jews indiscriminately by smashing doors, breaking windows, &c., up until a late hour on Wednesday night.  The violence was continued throughout Thursday, but in a different form.   The Jews, finding themselves vanquished, offered no further resistance and all fighting ceased ; but the rioters, aided by an influx of peasants from the surrounding villages to join in the general melee, sacked the houses of the Jews, destroyed their furniture, and stole or spoiled there wares.   The military and police are represented as having done what they could to establish order, but failed to do so at once, because while they were attempting that in one place, disorder was breaking out in another.  The Jewish population of Elizabethgrad is reckoned at about 10,000 persons and more than half their houses are completely ruined.  

(I wonder what Eric, self-proclaimed adorer of the Nazis, would have thought of his friend’s family history had he known about it…)

(Some of) Dylan’s ancestors (from this extensive family tree):

Sholmah Yisrael Yassenoff (born in Elisavetagrad) was the father of:

Abraham Yassenoff (born 1829 in Elisavetagrad, died 1911 in Dayton, Ohio), married Yetta Eydias Clara Fanarow (1832-1910)

were the parents of:

Isaac Yassenoff (1861 in Elisavetagrad, died 1920 in Dayton, Ohio), married Carrie Felsenthal (1863-1929)

were the parents of:

Leo Yassenoff (1893-1971), married Betty Luptonn (1888-1958)

were the parents of:

Milton Rice Yassenoff (1919-1967) (he was actually adopted from another Russian Jewish family), married Charlotte Emma Haugh (1921-1971)

were the parents of:

Susan Frances Yassenoff (born March 25, 1949), married Thomas Ernest Klebold (born April 15, 1947)

And their sons were Byron Jacob Klebold (born October 23, 1978) and Dylan Bennet Klebold (September 11, 1981 - April 20, 1999).

On the other side of the family, the Klebolds were originally from what is now Germany.

William (or Wilhelm) Klebold was born in 1844 in Alsace-Lorraine, in what is now France but was then German, and died in 1902 in Pearl, Texas.  It seems he fought for the Union in the Civil War in 1865 as an “artificer”. (Per this site, “artificer means “skilled worker”; during the Civil War, this designation was generally given to blacksmiths who repaired cannons and other items for artillery units. Artificers also did small-scale manufacturing of equipment.”).

He married Mary Elizabeth Dewees (1858-1935, born in Illinois), and their son, William Henry Klebold (born 1895 in Pearl, Texas, died 1959 in Toledo, Ohio) was Thomas Ernest Klebold’s father.  Tom’s mother was Lillian Grace Rae Klebold (1908-1953).  Tom lost his parents early and was raised largely by his older half-brother, Donald (born 1930).

So even though Eric was the one who was into German stuff, Dylan was (approximately) half-German.  The fact that Eric’s parents were married in a Presbyterian church suggests that part of his ancestry comes from Scotland, where the Presbyterian Church originated and where it was strongest.  (Also, the very fact that Dylan’s father’s family, the Klebolds were Lutheran would strongly suggest that they were of German descent, as the Lutherans were and are most numerous in Protestant regions of Germany.  Plus the name Klebold is pretty German all by itself!)

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What were Eric and Dylan's views on the after life and religions?

In the Basement Tapes, the police report notes that “They then begin discussing that ‘Religions are gay,’ and for ‘people who are weak and can’t deal with life.’” (JC-001-010380)  Certainly they didn’t care much for the “What would Jesus do?” tagline or the “godly little whores” in their class:

Dylan: “I don’t like you, Rachel and Jen, you’re stuck up little bitches, you’re fucking little.. Christian, Godly little whores!”

Eric: “Yeah.. ‘I love Jesus! I love Jesus!’ — shut the fuck up!”

Dylan: “What would Jesus do? What the fuck would I do..?”

Eric: “I would shoot you in the motherfucking head! Go Romans! Thank God they crucified that asshole.” 

Also, “They say they hope the afterlife - if there is one - is like spending eternity in Doom, the video game they love most. Harris says it would be neat if the afterlife included getting to look at the world’s mysteries. Like the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.”

Dylan mentions “My parents are going to fucking Passover” at one point, which I doubt he would have mentioned in that way if he’d had any regard for it.

I strongly suspect they felt more than a little suffocated with the strong evangelical Christian atmosphere so prevalent at the school and in the Littleton/Columbine area more generally, and lashed out accordingly.

Eric disavows any notions of absolute morality in his journal, so obviously he didn’t feel any religion or god had any authority to tell him what to do.  What he’s describing is basically nihilism.

theres no such thing as True Good or True Evil, its all relative to the observer. its just all nature, chemistry, and math. deal with it. (6/12/98)

you see, anything and everything that happens in our world is just that, a HAPPENING. anything else is relative to the observer, but yet we try to have a “universal law” or “code” of what is good and bad and that just isnt fucking correct. we shouldn’t be allowed to do that. we arent GODS. just because we are at the top of the food chain with our technology doesnt mean we can be “judges” of nature. sure we can think what we can think what we want, but you can “think” and “believe” you can judge people and nature all you want, but you are still wrong! why should your morals apply to everyone else. “morale” is just another word. and thats it. I think we are all a waste of natural resources and should be killed off, and since humans have the ability to choose… and I’m human… I think I will choose to kill and damage as much as nature allows me to so take that. fuck you, and eat napalm + lead! HA! only Nature can stop me. (7/29/98)

Dylan begs to differ—in his own journal, he refers to himself on several occasions as being a “god,” which I can’t quite make sense of.

“I think, too much, I understand, I am GOD compared to some of those un-existable brainless zombies.” (5/21/97)

“me is a god, a god of sadness” (9/5/97)

“Some god I am…. all people I ever might have loved have abandoned me, my parents piss me off & hate me … want me to have fuckin ambition!! How can I when I get screwed & destroyed by everything??!!!” (11/3/97)

“people eventually find happiness I never will. Does that make me a non-human? YES. The god of sadness….” (11/3/97)

“I know the meaning of each life: to be loved by your love, & to be happy with ones self. Only for the gods though (me, [redacted], etc.). the zombies & their society band together & try to destroy what is superior (what they don’t understand & are afraid of).” (2/2/98)

"Almost happiness is slavery – to be real, people (gods) are slaves to the majority of zombies, but we know & love being superior.” (2/2/98)

“I am GOD, [redacted] is GOD, the zombies will pay for their arrogance, hate, fear, abandoned, & distrust” (2/2/98)

"The zombies will pay for their being, their nature. I know everything, yet I know nothing. I am a true god…Soon we will live in the halcyons of our minds, the one thing that made me a god…I understand whatever of everything. I am the god of the everything.” (6/10/98)

Did he really believe that (in which case he’d be delusional) or was it more of a metaphor (lots of mystic poetry talks metaphorically about being one with God or being a part of God)?  Who knows?

I’m not quite sure if either of them actually believed in a “standard” notion of a monotheistic Jewish/Christian/Muslim deity, although at one point Dylan complains, “Why the fuck is he being such an ASSHOLE??? (god I guess, whoever is the being which controls shit). He’s fucking me over big time & it pisses me off.” (4/15/97)  It’s kind of stupid to complain about a being you don’t even believe in, but humans are weird that way.

Dylan is also heavy on the Manichean dualism:

The everlasting contrast….Dark. Light. God. Lucifer. Heaven. Hell. GOOD. BAD. Yes, the ever-lasting contrast. Since existence has known the ‘fight’ between good & evil has continued. Obviously, this fight can never end. Good things turn bad, bad things become good, the ‘people’ on the earth see it as a battle they can win. (5/21/97)

This is essentially the outline of both the Zoroastrian and Manichean religions (which all of the monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam borrowed from heavily): there is a Good force and an Evil force in the universe, and history is basically a fight between them and their minions (angels, demons, etc.) and humans have to choose which side to be on.

Dylan definitely seems to have believed in some kind of afterlife, when he could shake off the bonds of his human body and finally be free.  (Gnosticism and Manichaeism both strongly subscribed to the “matter/flesh evil, spirit/soul good” doctrine, and this too was “borrowed” by other religions.)

“wanna die & be free with my love” (11/3/97)

“We will have our revenge on society, & then be free, to exist in a timeless spaceless place of pure happiness.” (2/2/98)

“I know that this humanity is almost over, that we will be free.” (2/2/98)

“We will be free, to explore the vast wonders of the stars. To cascade down everlong waterfalls, & thru the warmest seas of pure happiness … no limits … no limits. Nothing will stop us.” (1/20/99)

“The humanity was a test. I love you, love. Time to die, time to be free, time to love.” (“5 days” before)

I suspect both of their “religions” or “philosophies” were pretty much an ad hoc mixture of what appealed to each of them most and wasn’t necessarily internally consistent.  Eric could be a total atheist and still hope for some kind of afterlife, for instance, and Dylan could be obsessed with purity and cleansing himself even as he simultaneously obsessed over getting his revenge on those “brainless zombies” by slaughtering them.

Anyway, this is QUITE long enough…

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Devon Adams on Dylan and Eric:

“’Dylan was a shy and sympathetic person. He was so sweet and kind and loving,’ his friend Devon says all these seven years later. ‘He was also disillusioned and hurt and angry at the world,’ Devon continues. ‘He had no outlet to vent his emotions; he bottled them up.’ Dylan’s disastrous depression, which was propped up by his journal entries, was talked about a lot in the papers. But in contrast to Eric, Dylan didn’t take medicine for his depression. He kept the knowledge of the depression to himself. Devon admits that in retrospect there was something weird in Dylan’s behavior from time to time. ‘One theory is that he had Disassociate Identity Disorder, which means that one has multiple personalities, because he literally changed from one person to another around different people or circumstances,’ Devon ponders. Dylan was a really talented person, an extremely promising and skilful poet. Devon agrees with this and also finds many other skills which he had. ‘Dylan was incredibly talented at sound design, at computer work, and at baseball,’ she says. According to Devon, Dylan’s talent didn’t get the value it deserved, which depressed him. ‘He didn’t make the Columbine baseball team because he didn’t have a ‘name’ for himself, so he just gave up. He became apathetic, which is so dangerous,’ she says. In this busy Western world, where creativity and being an individual isn’t valued enough, Dylan didn’t have a place to be happy. He didn’t have the ability to handle the world around him. It makes me think of the amount of humanity and potential which was lost that day. It was too much. It should never have been allowed to happen. Forlorn Devon remembers her last genuine encounter with Dylan. It is something, which she is never going to forget. It happened in Columbine High School senior prom. ‘At prom, just three days before the shootings, Dylan and I danced to Take my Breath Away,’ Devon remembers. ‘I meant to tell him what a good friend he was and how much I cared for him, but I chickened out,’ she regrets. ‘He asked if I wanted to see The Matrix movie on that Wednesday, April 21. I said yes. He had never broken his plans with me before. That’s why I believe that a deeper mental issue came into play,’ Devon says. ‘People who want to die do not make plans. And when they entered that building they knew they were going to die.’ Talking about Eric, Devon can’t be so insightful since she wasn’t so close to him as she was to Dylan. Nonetheless, she knew Eric and was his friend, through Dylan mainly. In the media Dylan was portrayed as a follower who in a way copied Eric. Devon, however, saw it differently. ‘Oddly, it was Eric who would copy everything Dylan did, which made Dylan so angry,’ she says. ‘But it was Eric’s stronger, more violent personality that won out over Dylan.’ Otherwise the picture of Eric made by the media and experts matches the picture of him drawn by Devon. Eric was an angry and menacing teenager. ‘Eric loved to intimidate and frighten people. He would walk through the halls wearing camouflage or black, just scowling,’ Devon describes. ‘He was bitter and angry and threatening. He hated everyone and everything.’” - excerpt from “A lasting impression. The impact of Columbine” by Sasha Huttunen (2007), pp.175-177

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Columbine West entrance stairs. 

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Columbine: Humiliation and Revenge -- The Story of Reb and VoDkA

The cover of Rolling Stone #814, June 10, 1999, from which this article is taken.  Unfortunately, this particular article isn’t on the RS.com site, even though, say, Marilyn Manson’s article on Columbine from June 24, 1999 is.  It’s really interesting how much of the story and how many details the writers managed to find out even though this must have been written within 3 or 4 weeks of the event!

Regarding the cover of this particular issue, I always associated Madonna’s Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me song “Beautiful Stranger” with the Columbine massacre, since it came out about the same time.

Parts of this story were previously posted, but then I found out that not all of it was typed up.  So I had to acquire the magazine in question, corrected the first parts that had been typed up, and finished it off.  It’s about 12 pages long in Word, or about 6,600 words.

Original sources:

http://pocketsfullofsorrow93.tumblr.com/post/94774701566/columbine-humiliation-and-revenge-the-story-of-reb  [Part 1]

http://pocketsfullofsorrow93.tumblr.com/post/94953744151/columbine-humiliation-and-revenge-the-story-of-reb  [Part 2]

http://pocketsfullofsorrow93.tumblr.com/post/95007663751/columbine-humiliation-and-revenge-the-story-of-reb  [Part 3]

http://pocketsfullofsorrow93.tumblr.com/post/95110726426/columbine-humiliation-and-revenge-the-story-of-reb  [Part 4]

http://pocketsfullofsorrow93.tumblr.com/post/95193498981/columbine-humiliation-and-revenge-the-story-of-reb  [Part 5]

Keep reading

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If Columbine never happened what do you think Dylan's experience at the University of Arizona would have been like? I definitely could not picture him getting involved in athletics/Greek Life, adopting the stereotypical fraternity lifestyle and dating the stereotypical sorority girl. However, athletics and Greek life are huge at University of Arizona so do you think his experience would be similar to his experience at CHS where the preps/jocks are at the top?

Hm, well, I don’t really know that much about universities in the US aside from the things I’ve seen in series and movies.. so I probably have a really skewed version of actual uni life in my head, haha. I never went to university or anything myself, either, so it’s a wildly foreign universe to me in that respect! Thank you very much for offering a context with your ask in this particular case — it’s very helpful. =)

I don’t think he was really the sort to focus on athletic pursuits in school, nor would he be the type to join up with some fraternity. I always have the sense that Dylan looked down on that ‘standard zombie life’ as much as he envied the ease and shallow happiness that would’ve come with living the way those people do. He would wrinkle his nose at the Greek Life, as you called it, but then bitch darkly about it in his writings in a way that really suggests a desire to belong. However, university would’ve probably given him a bit more focus. He would be learning things he actually was interested in and absorbing all of those like a sponge, although he’d probably still get bored out of his skull on a semi-regular basis if he was truly a gifted kid. I think he might finally find it in himself to push himself hard academically, and in this regard maybe also become more open to discussing academics and related topics with his peers. Dylan needed to learn, more than anything, that the human race is more innovative and warmly interconnective than we often give it credit for. He never had much of a chance for that in Littleton, where everything and everyone seemed to be firmly lodged into groups without the ability to transition back and forth between one thing and the other.

Athletics and Greek Life being huge at the University of Arizona is a small worrying factor in that respect, as we know that the stereotypical jock culture ran rampant in Columbine and often led to unfair situations where non-athletic students got the short end of the stick. I would say that a healthy school environment would take great measures to prevent the top-down culture from existing within its halls, although it’s also been my observation over the years that many teachers are clueless about how to approach their students as individuals rather than as a collective. Whether or not Dylan’s experience at the University of Arizona would be similar to the one he had at Columbine would depend on three things: teachers, peers, and Dylan himself. Dylan when out of his shell was a natural mediator, balancing on the dark side of hilarious, caring to a fault, and I have a sense that he could be quite inquisitive and focused on things he truly enjoyed. If he let himself start anew in a state where nobody knew awkward Dylan Klebold from Littleton, CO.. then maybe, just maybe, he may have actually found himself enjoying the experience despite the many, many eyerolls frat life would cause. ;)

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Dylan's "Fate"

Towards the end of his Existences diary/journal, Dylan starts using this symbol to mean “fate”:

From the 6-10-98 entry, JC-01-026412.

From the 1-20-99 entry (JC-001-026414).  Note that he crosses out “fate” and replaces it with the symbol.

I thought it would have been time by now.  The pain multiplies infinitely, never stops. (Yet b?) I’m here, STILL alone, still in pain, so is she.  The thing I have concluded is that fate [symbol] will decide when we should be together.  [Symbol] decided when our existence started, it should end the same way, with us unknowing, in limbo.  I love you [redacted].  Always have, will.

A bit later in the entry:

O, my humanity, O.  I don’t know if I should call her, or wait for fate [symbol] to act.  Yet, calling her is a state of humanity….

Dylan seems to have pressed the Chaos symbol, an eight-pointed star with arrowheads at each point, into service as his “Fate” symbol, though I have no idea what might have prompted him to do that.

To be honest, when I first saw this symbol in Dylan’s writings and being the ancient history nerd I am, I immediately thought of the Sumerian cuneiform symbol for “god; sky; heaven; the god An, Lord of Heaven.”

Sumerian logogram DINGIR, (“god, heaven, sky”)

That actually sort of fits the meaning the symbol has in Dylan’s diary.  If you replace “Fate” in the above passages with “God” or “Heaven,” they still make sense in a way that replacing them with “Chaos” would not.  E.g., “God/Heaven will decide when we should be together, God/Heaven decided when our existence started, it should end the same way,” “wait for God/Heaven to act.”

Probably just a coincidence, although Dylan does note in his datebook for August 22, 1997 (JC-001-026440) that one of his assignments is to read Chapters 2 and 3 about Egypt and Mesopotamia (which would include the Sumerians) for Social Studies class.

“Five days” before NBK (maybe it was really six given the delay, JC-001-026484-026485):

The humanity of here & now clouds all that I see.  Yet the me, the one, can now control the pain, & it is done.  5 more days, 5…..  A very influential number, another brick in my journeyed wall.  Humans are zombies, they scratch for acceptance & greed & kill themselves thru each other.  They will never learn, or maybe they will, but won’t have the strength to learn.  To be aware is not a trait, it’s a godlike thing, blessed god, not a christian, jesus, Mt. Sinai, Abraham, David, bible gay shit god, but a true controller of existence. [Symbol] has to make us this way.

If that isn’t depressing enough, here is a Mesopotamian depiction of the underworld that came to mind:

He turned his stare towards me, and he led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back. 

There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness.

I entered the house of dust and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away for ever; rulers and princes, all those who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old. They who had stood in the place of the gods like An and Enlil stood now like servants to fetch baked meats in the house of dust, to carry cooked meat and cold water from the waterskin.

In the house of dust which I entered were high priests and acolytes, priests of the incantation and of ecstasy; there were servers of the temple, and there was Etana, that king of Kish whom the eagle carried to heaven in the days of old.

I saw also Samuqan, god of cattle, and there was Ereshkigal the Queen of the Underworld; and Belit-Sheri squatted in front of her, she who is recorder of the gods and keeps the book of death. She held a tablet from which she read. She raised her head, she saw me and spoke: “Who has brought this one here?”

The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 7

Dylan had a much more positive view of the afterlife (continued from the previous “5 days before” entry):

These moments will be lost in the depressions & caverns of the human books forever, like tears in rain, but the thoughts will be eternal.  To explain the happiness is impossible even for fate.  It’s just a pure halcyon set to last more existences than a conceivable number.  Stupid gay nigger humans think I’m “crazy,” or they think I’m childish.  Hahaha, because I can’t solve Ssin52xcos3xdx That makes me dumb!  Because I can’t stay thinking in a 2nd dimension, I go to the 5th!  Ha ha.  So I wait 5 more days.  5 more days, 5 eternities, & I know her & I are w/ conceived from ourselves & each other, every night of the self-awareness journey, every thought we conceived, we have finished the race, time to die, everything we knew, we were able to understand it, to perceive it, into what we should, everything we knew, we know & use, an understanding of the everything.  An Einstein stuck in an ant’s body.  We are the nature of existence, the zombies were a test, to see if our love was genuine.  We are in wait of our reward, each other, the zombies will never cause us pain anymore.  The humanity was a test.  I love you, love.  Time to die, time to be free, time to love.

Man, didn’t anybody notice this poor bastard absolutely falling apart inside?  Obviously not, and that may be the saddest part of all.

[tec-nique-blog]

Dylan's origins -- Russian and German (among others)

Dylan’s birthday is a good enough reason to post about his ancestral origins, I suppose!

I’m quite impressed by how much Columbine stuff is on the internet in Russian!  Back in the bad old days of the Cold War in the 1980s, when I (and Eric and Dylan) were little kids, Russia, then the Soviet Union, was the “Evil Empire” that supposedly hated everyone and everything American and “the Commies” were going to nuke us all someday.  Then the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and kids today (fortunately) don’t remember any of that kind of stuff at all!

Unfortunately I speak approximately zero words of Russian, but the transliterations into Cyrillic are:

Колумбайн - Kolumbayn - Columbine

Эрик Харрис - Erik Harris - Eric Harris

Дилан Клиболд - Dilan Klibold - Dylan Klebold

Anyway, Dylan’s maternal ancestors, the Yassenoffs, were originally from Russia, more specifically Ukraine, which was under Russian rule at the time (and would be until 1991).  The city they lived in was called Yelisavetgrad (or Elisavetgrad, or Elizabethgrad), now known as Kirovograd (or Kirovohrad), in the south central region of the country.

A little background information: Jews in Russia in the 1800s mostly lived in what was called the “Pale of Settlement,” which consisted of areas now corresponding to modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and the westernmost parts of Russia.  You can see Elizavetgrad is right smack in the middle, in the south.

On April 15, 1881 (“old style”; April 27 “new style”; the Russians didn’t change their calendar until 1917), right at the end of Passover and during Easter Week, and 100 years before Dylan was born, a pogrom broke out in Elizavetagrad.  The reforming czar Alexander II had been assassinated about a month before and it was claimed that “the Jews” were to blame.  This was the first of what became a long and very ugly series of riots against the Jews, called “pogroms,” that took place between 1881 and 1884, and which led to thousands of Jews, including the Yassenoffs, leaving Russia for the United States and other countries.

Solly Leo “Skip” Yassenoff, a distant cousin of Dylan’s and a family historian, tells the story:

Interviewer: Can you tell us how your family came to the United States?

Yassenoff: What happened was, they all lived in a city called Kirovograd, Elisavetgrad. One of the earlier pogroms in Russia, I believe it was in 1880 during Passover and it was a very nasty pogrom, and supposedly Isaac Yassenoff, who was a young man, killed a Russian military person during the pogrom so he fled, I believe it was through Hamburg, and got to New York and for some reason HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Aid Society) sent him to Dayton, Ohio. Maybe there were some distant relatives there or maybe there was just a relative there or a family willing to take him in.

Interviewer: Do you know what year it may have been?

Yassenoff: I think he probably arrived in 1881, so he found his way to Dayton and apparently, he sent word back to the rest of the family and his four brothers came over one by one and then later his parents as well came over.

A contemporary account of the pogrom from a Reuters telegram of 1881:

The following details have been telegraphed by the Odessa correspondent of the Times : Since my telegram to you of yesterday stating that anti-Jewish riots had broken out at Elizabethgrad, a town of about 40,000 inhabitants, situated in the government of Kherson, the following particulars have been published here upon the authority of Prince Dondonkoff Kornakoff, the provincial governor general of Odessa.  The disturbance commenced at 4 PM last Wednesday [April 27], and the contents of several Jews’ shops were stolen damaged or destroyed.  The police called in the aid of the troops, who made every effort to stop the pillaging.  This was however, only effected on the following evening, and with great difficulty on account of the number of Peasants who had flocked into the town from the surrounding villages to participate in the general plunder.  During the night of the 28th inet. there arrived at Elizabethgrad three squadrons of Uhlans and yesterday a battallion of infantry.  One Jew was killed, but the number of wounded is not great.   In a later telegram the correspondent states that at Elizabethgrad things have remained quiet ever since the anti-Jewish riots.  These were quelled last Thursday evening.  It appears that 400 persons were arrested.  The rioting arose out of a dispute between some Christians and Jews.  The quarrel led to a general fight, which according to the Elizabethgrad Vestnik, assumed a more serious nature upon revolver shots being fired from some Jewish houses.  The Christians then attacked the houses and shops of the Jews indiscriminately by smashing doors, breaking windows, &c., up until a late hour on Wednesday night.  The violence was continued throughout Thursday, but in a different form.   The Jews, finding themselves vanquished, offered no further resistance and all fighting ceased ; but the rioters, aided by an influx of peasants from the surrounding villages to join in the general melee, sacked the houses of the Jews, destroyed their furniture, and stole or spoiled there wares.   The military and police are represented as having done what they could to establish order, but failed to do so at once, because while they were attempting that in one place, disorder was breaking out in another.  The Jewish population of Elizabethgrad is reckoned at about 10,000 persons and more than half their houses are completely ruined.  

(I wonder what Eric, self-proclaimed adorer of the Nazis, would have thought of his friend’s family history had he known about it…)

(Some of) Dylan’s ancestors (from this extensive family tree):

Sholmah Yisrael Yassenoff (born in Elisavetagrad) was the father of:

Abraham Yassenoff (born 1829 in Elisavetagrad, died 1911 in Dayton, Ohio), married Yetta Eydias Clara Fanarow (1832-1910)

were the parents of:

Isaac Yassenoff (1861 in Elisavetagrad, died 1920 in Dayton, Ohio), married Carrie Felsenthal (1863-1929)

were the parents of:

Leo Yassenoff (1893-1971), married Betty Luptonn (1888-1958)

were the parents of:

Milton Rice Yassenoff (1919-1967) (he was actually adopted from another Russian Jewish family), married Charlotte Emma Haugh (1921-1971)

were the parents of:

Susan Frances Yassenoff (born March 25, 1949), married Thomas Ernest Klebold (born April 15, 1947)

And their sons were Byron Jacob Klebold (born October 23, 1978) and Dylan Bennet Klebold (September 11, 1981 - April 20, 1999).

On the other side of the family, the Klebolds were originally from what is now Germany.

William (or Wilhelm) Klebold was born in 1844 in Alsace-Lorraine, in what is now France but was then German, and died in 1902 in Pearl, Texas.  It seems he fought for the Union in the Civil War in 1865 as an “artificer”. (Per this site, “artificer means “skilled worker”; during the Civil War, this designation was generally given to blacksmiths who repaired cannons and other items for artillery units. Artificers also did small-scale manufacturing of equipment.”).

He married Mary Elizabeth Dewees (1858-1935, born in Illinois), and their son, William Henry Klebold (born 1895 in Pearl, Texas, died 1959 in Toledo, Ohio) was Thomas Ernest Klebold’s father.  Tom’s mother was Lillian Grace Rae Klebold (1908-1953).  Tom lost his parents early and was raised largely by his older half-brother, Donald (born 1930).

So even though Eric was the one who was into German stuff, Dylan was (approximately) half-German.  The fact that Eric’s parents were married in a Presbyterian church suggests that part of his ancestry comes from Scotland, where the Presbyterian Church originated and where it was strongest.  (Also, the very fact that Dylan’s father’s family, the Klebolds were Lutheran would strongly suggest that they were of German descent, as the Lutherans were and are most numerous in Protestant regions of Germany.  Plus the name Klebold is pretty German all by itself!)

[tec-nique-blog]

“Dylan slipped chocolate chip cookies to the girl who sat next to him. Jeniffer Harmon, who took creative writing with the two boys who later would shoot up her school, says the shy Klebold regularly passed Chips Ahoy - the chewy kind with big chocolate chunks - as a way to make friends in class.”

(via vodka-666)