It's precisely this kind of pressure to conform that led to last spring's massacre, but that didn't stop the school's football coach from telling CNN that jocks (he calls them "athletes") are oppressed by kids who don't dress properly.

Once the Nuremberg-style rally was over, students entered a building that has been carefully sanitized of its physical and psychic stains. The bullet holes have been plastered up, the bloodstains have been painted over and the library, the main killing site, has been sealed off by a fresh wall of lockers, its bloodied books burned.

"We want students to feel good about being back here," says Jack Swanzy, director of planning for the Jefferson County School District. "If students can walk down these halls and not cringe, we feel we've been very successful."

A little cringing never killed anybody. While keeping the school in disarray would have been pointless, leaving a few bullet holes or bloodstains behind (perhaps with an explanatory plaque) might have served as a cautionary tale for future bullies and their victims. But we live in ahistorical America, where no one will blink at mounting a trophy cabinet to house the reliquaries of jockdom on walls where teen-agers have died.

Those who claim that their faith is your business spent the night before The Return at a special back-to-school evangelistic rally (there's that jock thing again!) for 3,000 loud believers at an amphitheater near the school/crime scene. Speaker Bart Campolo of Philadelphia said: "You'd better believe that good overcomes evil or I don't know how you can go back to school."

Massacre recap deux: Harris, 18, and Klebold, 17, were not the living incarnations of Ba'al, the Antichrist, Mephistopheles or his Southern sobriquet, Old Scratch. They were kids -- confused, angry, shortsighted, dumb kids. And their 13 victims were not the living embodiment of innocence. They were kids, too, with all the good and bad that that entails.

Hours after the self-congratulatory pep rally, three swastikas appeared, scrawled in the school's bathrooms. "It hurt," parent Tammy Theus said. "The rally was great. They've made changes in the dress code, like not allowing trench coats. Then I see this. It's like they are laughing in our faces, 'Ha, ha, school's back in session and so are we.'" Perhaps. Or the graffiti could be a protest against a school in denial about itself, a community incapable of admitting that its core values are corrupt, hollow and hypocritical -- in the simplistic parlance of the adolescent, fascist.

Meanwhile, a state panel has been convened to help law enforcement agencies coordinate their responses to future Columbine-like tragedies in the Denver area more effectively. Based on reports from Littleton, they'll be needed sooner rather than later.

(Ted Rall, a cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate, is author of "Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.")