For these are only symptoms and symptoms can’t be shamed

For these are only symptoms, and symptoms can’t be shamed.Curiously though, a book published in Britain a few days ago tells the story of an all-American murder the print media was oddly unwilling to notice In this true story, there are no guns and no parents. Instead, there is a group of teenage outsiders who might have stayed home and gunned down their classmates, but instead ran away from their small towns and managed for a time to be big fish in a glittering goldfish bowl of their own creation. And a look into this goldfish bowl gives us a clearer view of the dysfunctionality of American culture than any amount of squinting at Columbine is ever likely to.The book labours under the unedifying title of Disco Bloodbath: He Came; He Partied; He Killed. If this sounds like the title of a slasher movie, you’ll hardly be reassured to learn that the film rights have been purchased, and the search is on for a big-name star. Negotiations with Macaulay Culkin, that standard bearer of messed up American childhood, are well under way.The writer is a shallow, childish 30-year-old who calls himself James St James, and his book charts the rise and fall of his friend and colleague Michael Alig. These two were central players in the rise of New York’s notorious “club kid” culture, which started, like everything else we now consider to define the Nineties, in the Eighties.The teenage Alig turned up in New York at the time when the post-Warhol club scene was reinventing itself, and hung around trying to ingratiate himself with the denizens of the scene, including St James. Initially rejected by the bafflingly hierarchy-obsessed princes of cool, he plugged away at his ambition to be a club promoter, gathering around him a group of runaway child-misfits like himself, who behaved as bizarrely as they could.Like the heirs of Warhol that they were, these lost children became media celebrities in no time, and for no further reason than that they existed.

Even though they were mixed up in all kinds of dangerous and illegal anarchies, all of this remained unquestioned by the media that never tired of rearming the celebrity that was their raison d’etre.It goes without saying that drugs were a central part of this scene, and while Alig was initially scathing of drug use, by the early-Nineties, he had become a heroin addict himself. During an argument with a dealer – called “Angel” Melendez because he always wore a huge pair of wings – Alig and one of his hangers-on hit Melendez over the head with a hammer, smothered him with a pillow, and injected him with a drain cleaner called Drano.His body was kept for a week in Alig’s bath, where it was seen by some of the many people coming and going in his home. When the smell became unbearable, they dismembered the body and dumped it in the river. Alig confessed about the murder to many of his friends, and there were various lightweight and almost celebratory reports of the alleged murder in the US media over many months.

Despite this, journalists made little attempt properly to investigate the story.The police, too, remained as uninterested in bringing Alig to justice as his contemporaries on the club scene and the media which gave them the attention they lived for. With no body, New York’s finest said, there was no murder case. Eventually, after nearly a year, the police realised that, in fact, Melendez’s body had been in their mortuary all the time.Still, they weren’t too bothered about bringing his killer to justice. Instead they made a deal with Alig, whereby if he would give them the evidence that would help them to nail club owner Peter Gaiten for drug dealing, he would escape a murder trial Alig remains in prison untried. Gaiten was tried, but the case against him collapsed.This whole story speaks of such widespread moral redundancy, such institutionalised subversion of decency, and such a lack of curiosity about what was going on in the heads of these feral children, that it’s hard, while reading it, to remember it is fact, not fiction. Instead it reads like a story that has sprung from the mind of Bret Easton Ellis, whose last novel, Glamorama, also charted the rise and fall of an “it boy” on the New York club scene.And it’s here that I have to come to the unpleasant conclusion that no one has come closer than Ellis to pinpointing the real malaise among American youth.