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hi Joe - I remember that movie - quite disturbing. How
about the Lord of the Flies - Goldings' novel spoke truth and the first movie
visualised it well.
Of course anti-social behaviour has been a facet of society
forever. The worst of it is the waste of young humanity that is escalated by not
being able to get the most vulnerable and the most
capable interested in each other - the former to accept and the
latter to give help.
A friend of mine has a 19 year old son whose last 10
years have been spent playing video games, failing at school, getting fired from
or quitting labour jobs, smoking dope and worse, avoiding responsibility and
eye-contact, hating his parents and stealing and trashing their cars and finally
pleading guilty to robbing a 12 year old behind a convenience store. That's a
waste and he KNOWS, but doesn't seem connected enough to his family or
society to care what happens.
There was a recent segment on 60 Minutes about the male-female
imbalance in China due to the one child policy producing more males than
females. Societies in which there is even some imbalance say 51+/ 49- leads to
fewer men married and more lawlessness as they form gangs outside civil society.
There are so many more unmarriagable men in China - already at a plurality of
nearly 20 million men! - 53/47 or so - that in the face of so much undirected
and misdirected energy - producing lawlessness,
the maintenance of all civil society is in doubt. That's
why the communist repression will actually be needed to
keep their society intact - that and massive induction into the armed
services and a war to thin the ranks - I hope not.
On the other hand there is a positive potential - small though
it might be - to there being single men. The ancient Norse used
"unattached" men as their shock troops - berserkers. Michael Crichton in
The Andromeda Strain posed the "odd man" protocol - there was an
unmarried male who was part of the group sent to quell the outbreak - which
premised that only he would have enough dispassion (disconnectedness from the
group with appreciation of what had to be done for the greater good which itself
is an abstract) to terminate the group if required to solve the problem,
because he had nothing outside himself to lose.
We need to reach out over and over - this is not an abstract problem.
Craig
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:43
AM
Subject: Re: [MOPO] illeteracy and mind
control
Hi, Craig, from Joe Bonelli.
You are so correct.
And it is most interesting that the age group you refer to is just that
one that can be so easily controlled by appealing to that sense of "power"
that those games, etc., give them.
A perfect illustration is Louis Malle's chilling film "Lacombe, Lucien,"
at last released on dvd. It is about a hulky and rather slow French
teenager who finds "importance" as a collaborater during World War II.
Superb and disturbing viewing-- and more pertinent than ever.
Joe B
Craig Goebel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Interesting comments about the loss of reading skills -
even as recreation, as its use in schools is diminishing; only
home-based, parent-endorsed and exemplified reading of books and newspapers
might hold back the erosion of these skills or even the desire to attend to
them minimally.
Literacy - mostly in males - is falling off dramatically -
as an entire group from 6 to 16 years has serially for nearly 20
years spent its time slouching, actually and intellectually,
through mindnumbing - usually violent - video games - parental efforts and
exasperation notwithstanding. These are the new wasted generations. And
with the need for these people to support the bigger group of retiring baby
boomers, the whole civic compact could be in fraught sooner than we think.
Friend is not spelled freind - has everyone just been
"ironic" about this?
Craig
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 6:42
AM
Subject: Re: [MOPO] DEAR OLD OLD OLD
OLD FREINDS and all the Ships at Sea!!!
"Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Nawth Americur and all the ships at
sea"?
.....................whoops, think I plagiarized
that............!
Ok, I want to play! who remember the announcer
that usually began his 1/2 with, "
"Ah, there's good
news tonight!" even if there wasn't.
you have to dig
deep for this one.............Vaughn
At 09:24
AM 5/16/2006 -0400, Dave Rosen wrote:
JR:
Agree with what you
say.
My real point was that we live in
an age of self-absorption. Ignorance of history is just one small
symptom of that. My parents went through crushing poverty during the
Depression, then both served through a horrific war. This and their
insistence that we educate ourselves helped give me and my siblings some
context into which we could place our lives and experience. What I see
around me now is an almost willful ignorance of the world that does not
bode well for the future. (Jeez, I can't believe I just used the word
"bode" in a sentence.)
*sigh*
BTW, I do know who
Winchell was, can still his nasal voice-overs from The Untouchables,
which I watched as a kid. Later I found out what a despicable little
weasel he was during the McCarthy era. Give me the other Walter
(Lipmann, not Cronkite), anytime. Now does anyone here remember who Drew
Pearson was? Hmmm?
Cheers,
Dave
- Dave,
- I agree with all you say -- except the implied statement that it
is somehow *just* the North Americans who are "ramping up their
pursuit of self-indulgent happiness to the detriment of the planet as
a whole." Been to Europe lately? Autobahns and Expressways
crisscrossing the continent now, with everyone doing 90 to 150 mph as
a matter of course on the open stretches. That's going the North
Americans one better by a whole magnitude of gratuitous waste. In
China, it is reported that Buicks are selling like hotcakes as the
emerging Chinese middle class rushes headlong into consumerism. In
India and the rest of Asia, it's a similar story and applies to all
the other goodies -- from plasma screens to expensive sneakers, and to
people all over the world. The minute they get a little cash or credit
they rush out to start plundering the planet, driven by a pent-up
lifetime of consumer-envy. As for the dumbed down media... most of the
TV and radio in other countries is actually *far worse* and more
mindless than the American variety. Hard to believe, but true. The
North Americans were just ahead of the exploitation curve because of
our unique position at the end of World War II -- but the rest of the
world has now caught up and is trying hard to surpass us. So I'd
suggest widening the scope of your indignation.
- Not sure what this thread had to do with movie posters, but since
everyone else was in an off-topic mood I thought I'd join in... :)
- -- JR
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Dave Rosen
- To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
- Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 17:03
- Subject: Re: [MOPO] DEAR OLD OLD OLD OLD FREINDS and all the
Ships at Sea!!!
- Agree with all this but also believe that education,
like everything else, really begins in the home. Or at the very least,
needs to be supported there by parents with an awareness of its
value.
- Reading is especially crucial for developing
intellectual curiosity and independent thinking. I am still stunned
when I walk into someone's home and don't see a book anywhere in
sight. Meanwhile, the TV (sometimes more than one) blares away,
whether anyone is actually watching it or not.
- Lulled by the big-screen nanny, many parents no
longer see or understand the value of reading to their children and
helping them to develop an interest in the world outside their
subdivision.
- Meanwhile, the news and entertainment media serve up
funhouse mirror views of the past, where nothing pre-dates the Second
World War or WW I at the earliest because the optics are not good
enough to interest someone brought up on high definition, plasma
screens and CGI.
- Even when post-WW II events are dealt with we are
usually handed a pastiche of top-40 hits and clips from old TV shows
instead of proper scholarship and analysis. Talking heads are BORING.
Going into the reasons things really happen is BORING. Real history is
BORING. That's the message.
- Yet nothing could be further from the
truth.
- I see this increasing lack of interest in or
understanding of or even simple recall of history as distressing while
North Americans ramp up their pursuit of self-indulgent happiness to
the detriment of the planet as a whole.
- (Sorry to go all earnest on you. Guess who was a
history major in college?)
- Dave
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