April 20th is an odd date — see…

1939 – Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany.
1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and injured 21 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
2010 – The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months.

You can throw April 19th in while you’re at it.

1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, USA, is bombed, killing 168.

And in a drip of notations about media spaces on these inglorious anniversaries, I had a small spit take when I saw this one this is a very strange article.

It’s been sixteen years since Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris reigned terror upon an unsuspecting Colombine High School and changed a community forever.  The two, dressed as members of the Trenchcoat Mafia, painfully reminded America of our own homegrown-terror threat posed by white supremacy groups.

That case, and the thing that is called “School shootings”, was always a Rorschach test, but this is a peculiar one.

The perpetrators were a) sinister circle of teenagers who flirted with the edges of the US’s extreme right-wing.

Basically what you have with this one is an attempt to co-opt the story into the framework of their political cause against extreme right wing groups.  It’s difficult for me to tell if the writer believes what they’re writing, or is cynical, but it is worse than the usual — which at least approach various concerns of media violence, gun culture, and bullying — that relate somewhat to the tragedy.

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