: : What's going to be the result of all of this media publicity surrounding the kids who killed fifteen people (incl. themselves) at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado? More authoritarian legislation aimed at kids? Anti-gun legislation? Pro-gun legislation? Better attempts to integrate high school kids into "mainstream society"? I hope the latter...: Or will we just see endless attempts to divert the blame onto the mass media, Gothic music, computer games, "The Internet" and knee-jerk condemnation of the "alternative" lifestyle?
SDF: The kids who killed were apparently into Blood Axis and stuff like that... it's amusing to read interviews like this, where characters like Moynihan are reminded of their Nazi activities and deny them... I'm amused by the interviewer's characterization of Hitler, that he "wished for a people to rise to their inherent capabilities," because at the same time we have the US Army running TV commercials promising us, "Be All You Can Be -- In The Army." You can promote all sorts of evil things with a catchy slogan. Doing good requires THINKING these days.
: (Coupled with various respectable beacons of the community standing up for Truth, Justice and the American Way Of Life; which (of course) includes the right to bear arms.)
SDF: Interestingly enough, the National Rifle Association will be having its annual convention in Denver next weekend. Already some people are asking, "What is it about guns that makes people so stupid?
There's also the fundamentalist reaction to the massacre at Columbine -- just like you said above, only also with an element of "we must privatize the public schools".
People like the one whose page I just linked are just not paying attention. Note the stuff about deterrence on his page -- "the deterrent of the penal code is designed to make society a safer place to dwell in by imposing penalties for infraction of the law." Like society can punish the two boys who killed themselves after killing 13 others! What are they going to do, spank the kids' dead bodies?
More typically, there's the Seattle Times response -- more supervision, less permissiveness, as if parents who are working day and night just to pay the rent can really provide "more supervision." Meanwhile, we can read in the same article that "Nationally, the chances of a child being killed at school are nearly one in a million, according to a study last year by the Justice Policy Institute in Washington." It's easier for a kid to die in a car on the road than at school.
: This puzzles me - if, as some of the pro-American-capitalism devotees here maintain, advertising does not influence people's decisions, why should the other forms of mass communication.
SDF: I'd like to know where these devotees post such opinions. Advertising is the "glue" of American culture, it's what pulls us together. We don't think of it that way because advertising has trained us not to think. Advertising is the primary reason for American community -- we've all been exposed to ads, that's the main thing we have in common. Advertising is so successful because people buy its products without even thinking about all the ads that told them to buy these products. Advertising works through what psychologists call a "conditioned response," it trains people to buy products in the same way that dog trainers train dogs to sit, roll over, and fetch, only in a more complex way, because after all people are much more complex than dogs. Advertising pervades culture so much that it has become just another "program," it's entertainment just like the "programming" that WE have been "programmed" to watch on TV. (Advertising is not just on TV, of course.) Advertising is part of an environment of entertainment that persuades us that 1) entertainment is everywhere, 2) you might as well buy its product, and besides, 3) there is nothing else to do. We are entertained by the polar bears who push Coca-Cola because they are just more entertaining characters in the TV show we are watching, and we respect the Marlboro Man because he is just another classy poseur in the issue of ROLLING STONE we respectfully read. Advertising has become America's alternative to boredom.
Of course, kids, your public schools are never going to teach you what a conditioned response is, because they're trying to teach you to behave according to conditioned responses. Being a good doggie means not knowing how good doggies are controlled. When the instructor tells you to do something, you must do it, and that goes for Kindergarten through 12th grade. Sit in your seat. Pay attention. Turn your homework in on time. Go to the detention hall. Open your test booklet.
: The last few days have been moderately depressing for me; granted, what those kids did was not good in any way. However, the fact that they felt alienated by society, listened to Goth music, used the 'net and played Doom doesn't in itself make them killers; it disturbs me to see the mass media sieze upon these snippets of information and start a witchhunt from it.
SDF: Moderately depressed? But Gideon, isn't that what "Goths" are SUPPOSED to feel? At any rate, consumerism is not a "safe" pose. It's time for America to read about the culture industry.: Mind you, speaking as a Goth (New Romantic and "classic" Goth, rather than industrial), player of Half-Life, I.T. professional and dresser in black, my opinion is probably highly suspect anyway. Hell, I'm probably even a secret devotee of Hitler and a closet psychopath to boot...not that that's stereotyping of any sort...oh no.
:Gideon
: (Wondering when "The Crow" will become a banned subversive film - as distinct from a pretentious action-flick...)
SDF: Banning films is sure to increase their popularity among this segment of the public...
