Empty lessons: going to lunch on the ruins.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: The Columbine High School shootings

With a tone that was simultaneously hysterical and pompous, the pundits started searching for "the lessons of Littleton." Hundreds of commentaries later, only one lesson seems clear: No event is so unique or horrific that it cannot instantly be reduced to an editorialist's cliche.

The very day of the massacre - long before we even had an accurate count of the dead - Peter Jennings was treating viewers to a clip from The Basketball Diaries, a fantasy sequence in which a trench coat-clad Leonardo DiCaprio carries a gun to school and blows his classmates away. Littleton, Jennings announced, was sure to "reopen the debate" (had it been closed?) on the effects of media violence. He did not, however, stop showing footage of the terror, surely as intense a blast of media violence as anything in any movie.

So it began. Editorialists, activists, preachers, politicians: Everyone with a platform became an instant expert on the inner lives of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the boys who killed 12 students, one teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School. Within a day of the assault, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens was declaring that the murderers didn't "have the same moral background as the rest of us." Bill Davenport, a Baptist pastor in San Clemente, confidently asserted that the killers didn't value life "because they haven't been taught about God." On CNN, criminologist Mike Rustigan declared, "Obviously, here, we are seeing non-parenting parents."

And where did these people acquire this insight into the shooters' moral upbringing? From thin air.

If you didn't like some part of pop culture, Littleton was a gold mine: Anything and everything could be attacked. Want to blame movies? MGM recalled all videos of The Basketball Diaries, letting the commentators turn their tut-tuts against Heathers and The Matrix. Want to blame video games? No report from Colorado was complete without the obligatory allusion to Doom. Want to blame music? Critics attacked Rammstein, KMFDM, and Marilyn Manson; the last bowed to political pressure and canceled the rest of his concert tour. (One wonders how many of the Marilyn-bashing moralists used to giggle to the folk ditty that begins, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school/We have murdered every teacher, we have broken every rule...")

The president himself weighed in, taking a break from his own massacre in the Balkans to declare that he would meet with "some high-level folks from the entertainment...