-Caveat Lector- http://www.suck.com/daily/99/05/18/ "a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun" for 18 May 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY. It Takes a Village of the Damned It was an announcement so grim that the president needed to bite his lower lip before speaking. We have "a changing culture that desensitizes our children to violence." Most teenagers, he continued, "have seen hundreds or even thousands of murders on television in movies and in videogames before they graduate from high school." Not surprisingly, then, "too many young people seem unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their actions, and "all too often, everyday conflicts are resolved not with words but with weapons." Oops, that was 1998, during the White House Conference on Youth Violence, which convened after the Springfield, Oregon, school shootings. This year, the White House Conference on Youth Violence convened after the Littleton, Colorado, school shootings, and there was an awkward prelude to the teen-baiting. In the increasingly familiar cadences of the presidential apology-that-isn't-quite, Clinton took up the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade: This was a "tragic, isolated incident," whereas "the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo ... is a deliberate and systematic crime," which of course can only be resolved with weapons, not words. Now, on to the horrors of teen violence.... This ham-handed moral channel-surfing is typical of the great kids scare of the 1990s. According to social scientist Mike Males, author of Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation, in every behavioral realm in which kids are imagined to be loutish, lawless, and lethal (and the more so the darker their pigmentation), the real high achievers are white, middle-aged adults. The numbers on teen crime, teen drug use, teen pregnancy, teen suicide, and even teen smoking have all been on the decline (with a few intermediate bumps) since they peaked in the early 1980s. It would seem, in fact, that the only ironclad, youth-culture predictor of violent and criminal behavior is landing child-acting gigs in very special sitcoms. Meanwhile, as Males demonstrates, an unprecedented crime wave and moral meltdown have overtaken the 30-to-49 set. FBI figures show that boomers were involved in three-quarters of the nation's violent crimes in 1996, and the number of 30- to 49-year-olds cuffed for serious crimes of all kinds has more than tripled since 1980 - from 450,000 to 1.5 million in 1996. At the height of school shoot-'em-up melees last year, on-campus fatalities worked out to four deaths a month; adults were offing kids, meanwhile, at the rate of six a day. And if the grown-ups seem to be particularly jumpy, violent, and glassy-eyed, it's probably because they're so very fucked up so much of the time. Emergency room visits involving thirty-somethings' drug overdoses rose from 60,000 in 1980 to 200,000 in 1995; heroin and cocaine emergency cases, uh, shot up from 10,000 to 100,000. (All these increases far outstrip even the boomers' fabled overrepresentation in the population at large.) Even the all-important grieving process became another platform for boomer self-involvement. After expressing some pro forma devastation over the Littleton victims and their families, Generation Me returned to what it knew best: "How does this make me feel ... about me?" In a cross-branding triumph as ghastly as anything a child would encounter in the upper levels of Doom, Salon rallied to comfort grieving Littleton voyeurs with an excerpt from its newly published Mothers Who Think anthology - an off-topic but wrenchingly emotivist essay about coping with a child's death. The subtext was just slightly subtler than the marketing/editorial/infanticidal strategy: "If one of those monsters opened fire on your helpless child just think how you'd feel." Is there any way we could get Janet Reno and the FCC to crack down on mawkish mournography once they get through banishing Marilyn Manson (and finding a suitable replacement)? Not to be outdone, the right flank in the Kulturkampf adopted as its very own saint Cassie Bernall, the born-again teen who answered "Yes" when her Littleton assailant asked her if she believed in God. Weekly Standard reporter Matt Labash produced a lavishly detailed, six-page cover profile of Bernall, culminating in the question of whether a 17-year-old sporting a "What Would Jesus Do?" pin on her backpack would "enter the pantheon of the faith's great martyrs." Just in case this made things a tad too ambiguous, a separate editorial pronounced Americans "full of astonishment at the birth of an American martyr." If Bernall's story seemed fresh, it was because we'd heard it so many times before. Americans relish the child as an all-purpose symbolic scrim, contorted in the reflection of all sorts of adult anxieties. As the iron grip of Calvinism gradually loosened in the mid-19th century, children were no longer presumed to be automatically damned. Instead, they became creepy repositories of undifferentiated, quasi-religious sentiment. Dead children were especially venerated as symbols of purity and innocence. Portraits of newly departed babes claimed pride of place in middle-class salons, and their gooey, imputed virtues furnished inexhaustible material for Victorian poets and songsmiths. In recent memory, kids were conscripted, initially, into similar innocent-victim duty - in the successive missing-children and satanic-ritual-abuse hysterias of the 1980s; that is, until the scares were found to be family-instigated and fraudulent, respectively. And as more feckless boomers - relentlessly tutored in the canons of self-love - stepped forward to do their bit for the propagation of the species, they began to chafe at the impertinence of these kids who had dared to take their place at history's center stage. Thus the image of the child became a much more unrelieved (though no less surreal) study in curdled moral development and outright sociopathy. Every time you turned around, the perverse imps were impregnating one another, carjacking, gang-banging, "wilding," smoking, and prolonging Harmony Korine's inexplicable career. Not long before all the recent playground gunplay, criminologist John DiIulio was forecasting the arrival of a new breed of "superpredator" teens who would rack up unprecedented body counts on the nation's streets. Why? Because there were going to be so many more kids! And they'd do still more drugs and create an even more amoral culture! Do the math! This pathology infects the good as well as the evil. Even the Standard's coverage of American Martyr Cassie Bernall contains more Stuart Smalley than Little Nell, dwelling at length on her recovery from a troubled early adolescence, which features all the requisite flirtations with Satanism, drugs, alcohol, and suicide (miraculously, a church camp pulled her back from the brink, just in time for her to die in the act of professing her faith). Bernall's 12-step canonization is just the flip side of Klebold and Harris' consignment to monstroid video-Goth hell. All three are serving only as projection fields for adult culture warriors and are granted adolescence or maturity mainly according to adult whim. Thus, while the 18-year-old Harris was seized upon as a poster child for the plight of kids, the American justice system is striving to outfit younger and younger offenders for adult punishment. Which sets up a Solomonic riddle: If a 14-year-old is sodomized in a maximum-security prison, does his rapist get charged as a child molester? Teen-violence hysteria has produced, in cultural debate, a genuine missing-children crisis: Kids are deemed incubators of lethal social pathology (and occasionally, redemptive virtue), yet it's clear they have no discernible subjectivity of their own. The Clintonoid guns-and-media theory of youth violence - whereby entertainment and firearms executives have cunningly crossed the wires of a psychological time bomb in the echoing cranium of the average American teenage boy - is indistinguishable from its alleged moral antidote, wherein teenage girls achieve the utmost piety as victims. The leering unreality of all this is discomfitingly close to Americans' morbid fascination with JonBenet Ramsey's own Colorado demise, which now threatens to outrun her actual lifespan. For all their rank sentimentality, at least the Victorians let their dead children have lives of their own. courtesy of Holly Martins Wired News | Wired Magazine | HotWired | Webmonkey RGB Gallery | Animation Express | Webmonkey Guides | Suck.com Send us feedback | Work at Wired Digital | Advertise with us About Wired Digital | Our Privacy Policy Copyright © 1994-99 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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