Down With This Sort Of Thing!

It might have come to your attention that our society is being destroyed from within. It's true. Our morals are steadily being degraded through the evils in our culture. Our precious children are growing wicked and disobedient, and I think we all know the cause: Sex and violence on television. Or, wait, was it rap? Or Harry Potter? Could it have been video games? How about Catcher in the Rye? I thought it was comic books. Yeah, that or Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe I'm thinking of Rock & Roll, with that Elvis shaking his hips, or maybe jazz. It could even have been "beer, pinchback suits, galloping in horse races ("Not a wholesome trottin' race, no, but a race where they sit up right on the horse!"), smoking, ragtime music, knickerbockers rebuckled below the knee, dime novels, modern slang words like "swell", and "So's your old man""? I just can't remember which of those modern evils we're supposed to be outraged about this week.

Some of these might sound nuts, but I swear, they've all been for real. (Except, possibly, for that list at the end, that was a parody out of The Music Man.) Don't believe me? Go check out the work of Jack Chick. On second thought, don't, that dude's just disturbing. Poe's Law in action, but he insists he's for real, and people on both sides certainly treat him as such. (Dammit, I'm getting off track here.) The point is, as long as there's been culture, people have decried the so-called "moral degradation" of the younger generation. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, ranging from an overly active sense of nostalgia to a feeling of "surely WE weren't like this!" Hell, one of the reasons for Socrates' execution was purportedly a corrupting influence on the Athenian youth, and Socrates himself was famously opposed to the idea of WRITING IDEAS DOWN. Yes, it really does go back that far, and get that nuts. Astonishingly, despite all this evil we've apparently built up, somehow society has absorbed it all and remained intact.

The moral crusaders of today of course claim that exposure to the modern media's sex and violence is hurting children and all that. They usually have some anecdotal examples from relatively current events, but they frequently suffer from two major flaws. Firstly, they often fail to due any real research on the events in question, thereby missing the fact that the connections are often EXTREMELY tenuous. Case in point: Virginia Tech. That just HAD to be because Cho had played violent video games! What? He didn't play them? And he was an unmedicated schizophrenic? So what? It fits what I already know is true, and that's more important! This brings me to the second issue: Even if they do find something, they ignore that it's the exception, not the rule. Most of these anecdotes are just like that guy, they already had something majorly wrong with them. Hell, I'm listening to some Black Sabbath right now (seriously), and I'm just sitting here quietly writing, not out going on a rampage.

Further, the draconian solutions these people propose are, I think, rather telling. People tell them that they do, in fact, have the power to keep their kids from watching programming they object to ( very different from "objectionable programming"), but they worry about their kids being able to see it at a friend's house, or go online and watch it, and so on, and so on, and so on. What, then, do they propose? Why, it should be taken off the air entirely! At that point, I lose what little sympathy I had, because at that point it stops being about them living their lives, but rather telling us how to live ours. Our society is not so weak as to be demolished by a bit of language, sex, fake violence, or girls wearing pants instead of a dress. To Mary Whitehouse, Bill Donahue, Jack Thompson, and other crusaders: Your concern is noted, now go away and let the rest of us enjoy ourselves.

While I'm at it, the inspiration for this post's name seems as good a way as any to finish off.