DID pop culture drive Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to kill the Columbine 13?

Yes, say some, who believe the voracious appetite that the two had for gory video games, violent films and savagely dark pop music fueled their rage, resulting in the massacre.

No, say others, who point out that countless other kids partake of the same toxic, pop-culture diet and don’t murder their classmates. And besides, free speech must be held sacrosanct.

There’s truth on both sides, but the appalling thing about this argument, which is launched every time teen-agers make national news with lurid crimes, is the way self-serving parents use both positions to abdicate responsibility for the moral education and discipline of their children.

What’s become more than a little absurd is the notion that the content of entertainment media (films, songs, books, video games, the Internet) has little to do with the kind of person a kid turns out to be.

You expect cynical entertainment executives to take this line to protect their businesses, but parents? The same people who have to contend constantly with the effects of TV advertising on their impressionable children?

Many parents comfort themselves with the lie that all kids rebel. Hey, I had to shock (MD+IT)my (MD-IT)folks (the argument goes), so I shouldn’t be surprised that my kid wants to appall me. But there’s a vast difference between the Rolling Stones warbling, ‘Let’s spend the night together” and Trent Reznor screeching, ‘I want to f – – – you like an animal” on stage with his band, Nine Inch Nails.

Yet many parents (and teachers, principals, clergy, etc.) would rather let youth have its quarter than do the hard work of getting to know these kids and challenging them about the stuff they put into their heads.

Who really wants to listen critically to the aural sludge and hideous caterwauling of Marilyn Manson?

Who wants to argue with their 15-year-old about the point of admiring a guy who feigns oral sex on stage, desecrates a Bible, pledges allegiance to Satan and praises murder and destruction?

A friend of mine used to handle fan correspondence for Marilyn Manson when Manson and his band, then called the Spooky Kids, were merely a regional phenomenon in Florida. She had to quit when the content of the letters – and they came in by the hundreds – disgusted her beyond her ability to cope.

The worst, she said, were desperate epistles from 14-year-old girls, written in their own blood, begging Manson to rape them and help them sell their souls to the devil.

Brad and Misty Bernall are examples to us all. They are the parents of 17-year-old Cassie Bernall, who was murdered by Klebold and Harris for professing her faith in God. When they discovered some time ago that their troubled daughter was involved in witchcraft, drugs and alcohol, they didn’t wring their hands. They acted.

The Bernalls put Cassie in a different school. They began searching her backpack and room regularly. They cut off contact with her former friends. She hated them for it – at first.

‘It’s the hardest thing a parent will ever do, and it’s to put your foot down and say it stops right here,” Brad Bernall told ABC-TV.

But it worked. Cassie experienced a religious conversion and she turned her life around. The tragic irony, of course, is that she was killed for it. But who knows how many kids will be saved because parents across the country heard her story?

How many vacillating parents will now act firmly to prevent their home and their teen-ager’s heart from being incubators of suicidal despair and violence?

The dispute over the (MD+IT)content(MD-IT) of popular culture obscures a more fundamental discussion about its overwhelming (MD+IT)presence(MD-IT).

There are simply no institutions or forces to compete with or counter the ubiquitous and irresistible culture foisted on kids through the entertainment media.

Parents are either willfully clueless or complicitous. I often see moms and dads bringing their young children into gruesomely violent R-rated films.

The church? Forget it. The clergy, lacking any idea what it’s up against, prefers divine disengagement from dealing with the world its parishioners live in.

Teachers? Those I’ve known who tried to take an interest in at-risk kids have had to deal with parents furious that their angels are being picked on by authority.

Kids are left to form their consciences according to the superficial dictates of television, the movies and the radio, whose de facto philosophy discourages thinking in moral terms.

I speak to student groups on occasion, and they are invariably surprised when I suggest that they make moral considerations an important part of evaluating movies.

The thought had never occurred to most of them. Like their parents, they’ve learned to judge solely by a crudely aesthetic criterion: Did it entertain me? Was I stimulated?

This slovenly thinking leads to a dangerous passivity in the face of the assaultive nihilism of American popular culture.

David Cronenberg’s latest film, ‘eXistenZ,” imagines a world in which people have become so dependent on the entertainment of sophisticated video games that they lose interest in reality. They escape boredom by descending into the game’s hallucinatory, synthetic world.

As the protagonists go further and further into the game, seeking more intense stimulation and release from what they take to be their dull, deficient lives, the line between fantasy and reality disappears.

To maximize the thrill, the player has to unlearn empathy for others, treating everyone he encounters as if they exist only for his personal pleasure. If it pleases him to blow someone away with a handgun, why, it’s just a game. The player learns to love killing.

But what happens when you can no longer tell the difference between the game and real life – and have lost a moral grounding that might have kept you from acting out your worst urges?

It’s not just a question posed by a sci-fi horror movie. When parents, priests and authority figures lack all conviction, and the worst purveyors of pop-culture garbage are full of passionate intensity, we should expect more trench-coated Klebolds and Harrises, slouching into high school with shotguns, preparing to die – and take as many with them as they can.