Ouroboros: Meditations on American History X

I thought about this paper as I was writing the introduction blurb for Issue 5. I’ve always been fascinated by the ouroboros—the snake devouring its own tail, the endless loop of hunger and rebirth. Watching American History X, I saw that symbol made flesh. This piece is my attempt to hold that cycle in language, to observe both its horror and the fragile moments where it might finally break.

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A shooting is beautiful in the way each crack of gunfire paints the world in blood, like fireworks collapsing into art.

A shooting is beautiful in the way the bullet casing choreographs a dance, the corpse taking his final bow before his world goes black.

A shooting is beautiful in the way hate breeds hate, and violence embraces violence; over and over does the cycle spin.

I watched American History X last night. Holy shit.

What struck me was not just Derek’s rage, nor the swastikas tattooed like brand names on flesh, but the way violence feeds on itself, recursive, inevitable—an ouroboros swallowing its tail. Hate is never content with a single death; it needs rebirth, repetition, ritual. One boy pulled into the tide, then another, then another, until the beach is littered with bodies and the ocean red.

The film doesn’t just show racism; it shows inheritance. Hatred passed down like an heirloom, polished with every retelling of grievance, every family dinner, every whispered justification. The Lord infects the father, the father infects the son, the brother infects the brother, and the cycle spins again.

And yet, in the spaces between—inside the prison laundry room, in a stolen basketball game, in the word enough—there is a rupture. A possibility that the snake can stop mid-bite. That the cycle can be broken, even if only for a moment.

But no amount of reconciliation or reform can mend something systemic. Laws can change, schools can teach tolerance—but in a system built on repetition and bias, everything can unravel in a blink. Danny could have never been saved; the forces surrounding him were stronger than any single intervention. One wrong glance, one misstep, and the snake bites.

The fragility of human choice is laughably small against the momentum of hate.

Maybe the real horror isn’t the gunfire, or the swastika, or even the brutality. It’s the question left hanging when the water touches the shore: how many cycles must complete before someone chooses not to turn the wheel?