“Utterly without redeeming social value”
Here’s a point to think about in the terrible case of Virginia Tech and Mr. Cho Seung-Hui. Society, and universities, have become so debased that signs of madness are today passed off as nothing more than lifestyle choices or flights of imagination.
Forty years ago, if the Rolling Stones had tried to realease a song with the lyrics of the euphemistically titled “I wanna love you” by the despicable Akon, they might have been thrown in jail, and certainly the record would have been universally banned — instead of having the song available for ten year olds on iTunes.
Forty years ago, the plays of Cho Seung-Hui, written as school assignments, would have shocked his classmates with their language, violence and unremitting rage. It is easy to imagine swift action by teachers and school adimistrators to intercept and deal with the violent and demented mind they had on their campus.
Lest you think we exaggerate, consider that it was only forty years ago that the 18th century novel Fanny Hill was ruled not obscene by the Supreme Court. Among the reasons that the book was not banned was the finding that it was not “utterly without redeeming social value.” Arguably the arts have gained by freer expression over the last forty years, but one cost has been a much degraded sense of what other generations would have recognized as manifestly abnormal.
UPDATE
The WSJ notes that in today’s world, taking action as a result of observing abnormaility would probably result in a lawsuit. This too is an important part of the problem.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:42 am
Agree with your analysis about the debasement of our culture and the mainstreaming of deviancy
under the guise of acceptance and tolerance.
Now what can we do about it?
Withdraw and start a counter-culture?
April 19th, 2007 at 11:58 am
And, that in a nutshell if absolute truth Dinocrat. The tinfoil hatted leftist loons changed as much of our culture as they could over the first of the last seventy years and with Clinton they gained considerable power until today with Kos, mydd and huffpo, more people are beginning to become aware of what has become of this country. When our culture was forced to close the mental health institutions and put patients in the streets we began the decline of this once great country. Today everything goes…the loons have been successful in taking down almost all the rules and look who has had to pay for their deeds, the 32 murdered students at Virginia Tech.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it Reagan who closed down the mental institutions? I’m quite sure that this is the case.
People like Cho are like lightning bolts; they can strike anywhere. In the nearby town of Gainesville, Florida, a madman called Danny Rollings brutally murdered six college students in the early Nineties; people reacted with shock and horror because it is not the sort of thing that is supposed to happen to young people at University. It is true, as another note posted here suggests, that our culture infantilizes SOME young people.
It’s a great tragedy that no one was willing to address the meaning of this young man’s violent fantasies. My mother said, “We have too much freedom now.” What she meant is that people mistake anarchy and nihilism for freedom, just as someone along the line mistook Cho’s disturbed ravings for, what, art? Creativity? This is not the fault of “tinfoil hatted leftist loons” but of a culture that is increasingly unwilling to discriminate between guns and butter, apples and oranges, piss and vinegar.
It is arrant nonsense to blame Kos or Clinton for Cho. I might as well blame the gun lobby for what happened; I could certainly trace a more direct causal connection between conservative policies respecting guns and this madman’s easy access to them. I am not going to do that because the gun issue is now too complicated to be resolved by politics and you can’t reach any sort of solution or compromise as long as people keep yelling insults at one another across the great divide.
The causes of the Virginia Tech killings are complicated as well. Some of them have to do with Cho, some with the lack of controls on access to guns, some with the general litigiousness of society, and some with an increasing unwillingness on the part of full-fledged adults to get involved in the private lives of young people.