Business is business. Who knows what really went through the mind of Eric Harris as he rolled strikes in his 6:15 a.m. bowling class on the morning of the murders. But if the culture has so heavily invested in the empowerment of youth (and youthful spending) that kids have actually come to believe that, yeah, just like on any grown-up-devoid WB show, they are firmly in control and call the shots -- is there anything to be done except let the impulsive, highly hormonal chips fall where they may? The latent Humberts among us might like those budding hard bodies on the tube, but there seems to be a cost in ceding the cultural landscape to the wrinkle-free. It was lies, all lies, but what ever happened to the days when Father Knew Best? Back then, as a zombie teen, I used to delight as Paladin, of Have Gun Will Travel, gunned his way through the West. But Paladin was a grown-up bounty killer, with world-weary, adult remorse at the fulfillment of the nasty but necessary commitments of his job.

So, when Dylan Klebold's distraught father (who had referred to his son as "pure normal") says, "Our society feeds off our children," who can argue?

In our clueless, blunted authority, we're into panic mode. Shoe on the other foot, it's Reefer Madness all over again. We rail at the Internet, as if it's one giant Loompanics catalogue chocked with bomb recipes like Betty Crocker. We chastise Clinton, only one of us, after all, who sets such a slack example. There's no respect in the nation, I tell you. A breakdown of religious discipline. Trouble right here in River City. What ever happened to good old repression, anyway? Is the "Just do it" ethic a tad out of control?

Rationalizations 'R' us. But what else is left? Rekindling the notion of the Bad Seed? The acceptance of palpable evil in our midst? More remakes of Village of the Damned? Then, of course, there is Hitler, ever the hardy perennial. It was almost astounding that in its earliest coverage, the New York Times was slow to mention that the shooting occurred on Hitler's birthday. Seems as if the Hitler awareness, to tap into the DeLilloesque mystique that much of the Littleton incident recalls, was flagging at the newspaper of record. Despite 420's recent codification as a street moniker for marijuana and the ominous specter of four and twenty blackbirds flocking from pies, April 20 had slipped as an infamous date in the public brainpan. If the killings had happened only a day earlier, on April 19, likely the Waco-Oklahoma City correlations would have made the opening graphs.

The mind of the parental unit reels. Just the other day, as my daughters were watching the Columbine coverage, my 9-year-old son sat at the dining-room table with four of his friends. Game Boys linked, they were electronically transferring Pokémons, the Japanese animation characters (a.k.a. Pocket Monsters) that are all the rage with their bunch. Indeed, in that day's Times, with Columbine dominating above the fold, another story told of how Nintendo had made billions from Pokémon, the cartoon-show-and-action-figure complex recently held responsible for the alleged inducement of epileptic fits among youthful Japanese TV watchers. This said, compared with some of the other body-count extravaganzas my son has run up on the screen, Pokémon is pretty benign. The idea is to be an honorable, nurturing sensei for your menagerie of weird little creatures -- not just to teach them to fight like cybercocks but also to help them evolve onward to a more ennobled state.