Welcome to the Works of the Trench Coat

"They wore the same thing every day--black coats, stuff like that." --A student at Columbine High School

Two scenes of carnage and grief, side by side on television. Flip: a teenage girl lies on a gurney, her throat freckled with bloodstains. Flip: a mother in Kosovo keens over the body of her child. Flip: children running from the Columbine school. Flip: refugees dragging themselves up a mountain road. Flip: Serbian mass murderers. Flip: "Trench Coat Mafia" mass murderers. Two lines of categorical hatred meet at a point before our eyes, but it is imponderable still, out of the question, unreal--all that...

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