Yet who really knows about these things? As any old pinball wizard who could never beat a single level of Asteroids can tell you, if there's a Time-mag-style generation gap fomenting, it is a disparity in hand-eye coordination as much anything of the mind or heart. Things are hooked up different these days. Needless to say, I have read over my son's Pokémon manuals and still can't grok the methodology by which Charmander, the baby "fire" Pokémon, mutates into Charizard, a 200-pound monster whose breath can melt boulders.

I watch my son and his e-coven of friends conduct their cyberséance and wonder: Who knows what malignancy lurks in the heart of the Poké-matrix? If, as it is fashionable to say now, memes (what used to be called ideas) travel like viruses, contagious and fast-acting like Melissa or Ebola, could not Pokémon, shiny, bright, and preternaturally popular, be the perfect surreptitious vector for such infection? Was this the transfer happening at my own kitchen table, a controlling Manchurian Candidate virus being downloaded into the wetwear of my own son and his buddies at this very moment? How long would it take for this murderous brainwashing to germinate? What kind of school-annihilating hardware might be available by the time this virus came full-blown?

Likely, by the time this next upgrade of teenage Frankensteins hatch out, their programming will be too well refined for them to exhibit such warning signs as watching Natural Born Killers twenty times in a row, or sharding up hundreds of Coke bottles for shrapnel like a personal Kristallnacht. Ever since teenagers were invented, back in the days of Elvis, they've been perceived as a kind of (self-propagating) Other. A separate adolescent species. Them of the dirty room, them of the smart mouth, them who cut classes. Them who once sat in your lap and now can't stand the sight of you. Them.

Here in the city, we pride ourselves on at least partial immunity from these meme-loaded violence tropes. It might have been part of Eric Harris's master plan to hijack a jet plane and crash it into midtown Manhattan, but here there is a sense that we New Yorkers are too practical, too hard-bitten, for Columbine-style psycho-killing. If someone stabs you for lunch money, shoots you because you're black and they're a cop, well, that's earthly old New York. Saucer-freak suicides and role-playing pseudo-soldiers are not our style.

Yet the other day I found myself driving over to the William McKinley Intermediate School in Bay Ridge, where it was alleged that five Chinese eighth-graders, all of them in the top "E"-tracked classes, had plotted to blow up the building on graduation day. The five were also supposed to have compiled a "hit list" marking many of their classmates for death. The plans were overheard in the cafeteria, and police from the 68th Precinct arrested the kids, which led to much bewildered hand-wringing in the nearby Chinese community, known more for producing quiet, Stuyvesant-bound achievers (as these kids were -- the band teacher, clearly distressed, bemoaned, "I'm out my best trumpet players!") than mad bombers. In the wake of Columbine, the media descended on William McKinley, one of only two intermediate schools in Brooklyn named after an assassinated president. Before the 2:45 dismissal, as blue-haired ladies in large plastic glasses made their way along the sidewalk, the mid-spring Bay Ridge sky was cluttered with news-truck trees.

The students were equally poised. Well versed in the nuances of the Colorado coverage, they jostled for camera position and delivered their lines. The whole thing was "a big surprise," said one 14-year-old, because even if the supposed bombers were "outsiders and unpopular," they "weren't that unpopular. . . . You know, they were hated, but they weren't that hated." No one "ever thought they'd do anything like this." Later, it was said, the so-called bomb might have been little more than a Gilbert-chemistry-set-style assemblage of vinegar and baking soda. And despite several kids' running around screaming "I'm on the hit list!," that, too, might have been "a joke." This isn't to make light of the situation at McKinley -- the threat, in context, was real, the reaction efficient and emotionally genuine. But there was a deadening lack of surprise in how absolutely, how instantaneously -- faster than a speeding e-mail -- the language and tenor of Columbine had transmuted to dese-and-dose Bay Ridge.