By J. Crohn

Given only insipid cultural options, is it any wonder some middle class kids choose the nihilistic ones?

     As a parent I’m often surprised to find that one of the most difficult things about rearing children is establishing a suitable cultural context in which they can develop—something driven by my husband’s and my preferences about how to live. These aren’t, perhaps, what you’d assume. I’m terribly concerned, for instance, that my offspring will become conditioned by the likes of "Barney" to associate ad-like jingles and the sickeningly false emotion of commercialized PBS programming with the pleasures of childhood, and that this will one day become for them the insidious subliminal vocabulary of a reflexive consumerism.

     Quite a phobia, isn’t it?

     I’m less worried my kids will be influenced, as a result of watching violent re-runs of "The Roadrunner," to drop an Acme two-ton weight on the dog. Do I cringe if my 2 ½ year-old spies some actress’s nude rump on the tube one night when he should be in bed, but is determined stay awake indefinitely? No. But I grind my teeth every time Paula Poundstone pops up between episodes of "Sesame Street" to tell us in Children’s Television Land that if we have conflicts with one another, "Remember to… work it out!"

     I worry more about cultural dreck in general than about media violence or depictions of sex in particular. It’s the stupidity of the subtexts underlying depictions of sex and violence, like the stupidity underlying much of the rest of TV and movie fare, that I suspect is truly dangerous. Just about anything produced by the Disney Corporation, for instance, is anathema to me. I’m repulsed by Disney’s Los Angelized caricatures of masculinity and femininity, its Broadway-derived conceptualizations of grandeur, the cheap mugging of stock characters that range from the mawkish to the cockily precocious. I’m sorry: Disney, and all its aesthetic cousins in popular entertainment—they’re crap.

     I don’t think I’d mind so much if the crap weren’t so pervasive. But I (and my kids, and yours) can scarcely get away. It’s on TV, in movie theaters, in children’s books and book stores, on video monitors at daycare centers, and in the heads of our children’s peers. Crap is their lingua franca.

     I believe TV programming like, for example, the absolutely unwatchable (but apparently very popular) network drama "Touched By An Angel," along with most of the sitcoms aimed at black Americans and virtually any of the daytime talk shows whose great underlying doctrine holds the Importance of Being Seen is all, are as potentially mentally destructive as any weapons-glorifying blockbuster, especially to children old enough to understand them. It’s just a variety of destruction no one seems to notice—one that, perhaps, primes people to think so simplistically, so much according to prescription, that they can’t possibly respond with anything but jingoism and palaver to something so horrible as, say, the recent shootings at Columbine High School in suburban Colorado.

     (I happened to catch about five minutes of The Montel Williams show the other day. The topic of the program was the Littleton tragedy. It featured a collection of six or eight young people who’d been somewhere near the scene of the horror, and Dr. Joyce Brothers, on hand to explain their reactions for us. Thank God America has pop television shrinkology, otherwise how ever would we know what to do with our pop television feelings? Thank God for talk show circuses, for what of those poor souls who would otherwise grieve in obscurity?)

     Ideally, the cultural context I want for my kids should not insulate them from the world, however idiotic the world might be. But it should provide certain parameters for them. That is, it should tell them who and what they are not, while leaving them to decide, once they’re grown, who they are and what they will be. I can’t help but wonder, who and what were those gun-wielding kids in Littleton? Were they formed by choices that, symbolically at least, amounted to a contest between Marilyn Manson and The Lion King?

     I think most people intuit that the Littleton kids were products of some confluence of American cultural trends involving media imagery and access to guns. But even the most violent trends don’t ordain that all or most adolescents act on fantasies of brutality and combustion. One of the first lessons in ethics we’re all supposed to learn is that the fact that one can do something does not necessarily mean that one should do it. Who or what determined the parameters that allowed these kids to conclude they had the right to decide, so early in their lives, that they would become suicidal murderers? How did they come by such an extraordinary sense of agency?

     It's hard for me to avoid the conclusion that  lack of parental restraint combined with a failure of parents and society at large to convey to adolescents some sense of what it means to be a decent human being must be at the root of why fifteen more people are dead today from gunfire in an American high school. Set aside, for heaven’s sake, such weirdly freighted trivia as the wearing of trenchcoats. Does a decent human being play at Nazi-worship, or maintain an internet hate-site? Does a decent person absorb uncritically the ugliest and most insipid profferings of corporate Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and then become them? Does a decent adult ignore her child’s most terrifying inclinations? Do decent kids turn a blind eye when they know their friends are bringing guns and explosives to school?

     It’s likely there’s no single reason for what happened in Colorado: guns by themselves aren’t the problem. Bloody television, the internet, even violent video games are not the problem. Parental leniency or inattention, in themselves, can't be the whole problem either. For these things—including the internet—have been with us for years, in one measure or another, and massacres by crazed teenagers have not. Nevertheless, it’s likely that removing any one ingredient from the catalyzed broth of an American culture which has permitted school shootings to become something bordering on a predictable event would help make sure they become less so in the future. It’s just that cutting any ingredient from the mix requires doing something Americans are loath to do: give up a degree of our freedom.

     We have legislative choices, of course, which might force us to be better as a society. We can attempt to restrict gun ownership more tightly—thus provoking firearms enthusiasts and their lobby, possibly generating a backlash, or simply accomplishing too little good because the number of guns already available, and the avenues of availability, are too great to control. We can attempt to restrict the media’s depictions of violence, thus raising the specter of free speech infringement, and probably targeting some innocent "culprits" in the process. (Which Teletubby is a thinly disguised cop killer?) We can attempt to regulate some aspect of parenting, and risk interfering with legitimate rights many consider more sacrosanct than the right to free speech. And we can try a little of all these curtailments. Which is what we’ll probably do.

     But there’s another, entirely extra-legal thing we might consider.

     Middle class America could take seriously for a change its failure to examine critically its own milieu: its failure to want more than idiocy and crap for entertainment, its failure to pay sufficient attention to its own banal indecencies, its failure to limit our children’s options and actions—not only via mean, old parental restriction, but by teaching our kids discernment, compassion, and ethics. America might examine its failure to expand our children’s options, too, so that when they seek images after which to pattern themselves their choice is not between the gods of sport, the angels of smug, middlebrow piety, and the icons of the latest commercially engineered counterculture.

     We can maybe even dictate, to a far greater extent, what and who our children will not be. We can do it by insisting that our vilest, stupidest cultural options not be written off as "normal" expressions of American youth culture—because they’re only normal, after all, if we collectively say so. We can judge that even the merely banal offerings of the entertainment industry really are not a suitable or complete enough diet for our children, or perhaps, for anyone.

     Does all this strike tender populist sensibilities as terribly anti-democratic? Well, too bad. If crap—in the form of popular music that preaches not merely rebelliousness but literally calls children to arms; in the form of action films that barrage their target audiences with nothing more complex than seductive mirages of muscle-bound invincibility; in the form of dumb, obnoxiously unimaginative TV programming that teaches "values" that amount to little more than sanctimony; in the form of laissez-faire attitudes toward child-rearing, and unexamined views concerning what freedoms like the right to own firearms must entail in citizen responsibility—if crap is the best we can offer ourselves and our progeny, then maybe it’s time we just sat back, popped open another Coors Lite, and learned to take in stride the inevitability of high schools awash in blood, armed guards at the door, and increasing legal restrictions on cherished freedoms.

     Maybe that’s what slobs like us deserve. Call it the price of cultural lassitude. Call it the cost of having shitty standards.

     J. Crohn edits The Sun's Eye.