5/3/99 Misc. column
Big Mouths, Little-ton
MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can't hemp
noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo
event this Saturday for the video release of You've Got Mail, that
romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores
like Borders.
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of
the venerable Misc. World site. We're now at Miscmedia.com, so
adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It's all part of a
big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which...
UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc.
is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the
instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of
the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years' worth of
reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release
party's tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.
UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar's strip joint in the
newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off
municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb's
governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club's ability to
earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.
Now, the club's trying another tactic. It's declared itself a non-profit
"private club," and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t
commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you've got to fill
out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out
if you've been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for
the privilege of spending more money on table dances.
An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get
donated to assorted kids' charities, and that the whole setup's a small but
necessary step to keep America from succumbing to "a Brave New World in the
form of a Christian conservative state." Actually, the flyer's author (club
attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous
Huxley's novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and
sexual "freedom" (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family
bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It's
George Orwell's 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about
to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience.
Speaking of which...
FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You've read the media
analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you've even read the
analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn't make
it into some of the analyses: -
Real goths don't collect assault weapons.
They might get into fantasies
about vampires and post-nuclear zombies, but their real-life personas tend to
be far more pacified. (South Park, set in a Littleton-like Colorado
town, employed Cure singer Robert Smith for a guest voice as an action hero
precisely because the role was so out-of-sync with Smith's non-action
image.)
As noted in the Weekly, the Euro metal-punk band KMFDM (whose
headman Sascha moved to Seattle as the band's career was winding down) played
aggressive music but was always opposed to real-life violence. In its biggest
U.S. hit, the band referred to itself as "The Drug Against War."
The Trench Coat Mafia boys had their own tribal thang going on. They took
bits and pieces from various subcultures and stitched them together to form
their own particular monster. Besides industrial and heavy-metal music, they
took notions and concepts from neo-Nazis and militia cults. The racist aspect
of their ideology is something you just don't find in more orthodox nerd or
goth cliques (which tend to be pasty-face white but to profess solidarity with
other outcast groups, including minorities).
The conservative commentators, as might be expected, went all over
themselves to get nearly everything wrong ("Guns don't kill people, video games
and Internet chat rooms and liberal moral relativism and do").
The middle-of-the-road commentators (particularly the likes of Dateline
NBC) got almost as much wrong. By stereotyping goths, punks, nerds, geeks,
smarties, role-playing-game players, video-game players, and just about anyone
else who's not a jock or cheerleader as walking time bombs, the media
know-nothings are only encouraging the school officials and the "popular" kids
to dehumanize and persecute the unpopular kids even more harshly.
The liberal and quasi-left commentators liked to compare the Littleton
massacre to what they see as America's "real" culture of violence--the one that
presently gives us bombers over Serbia and Iraq. I wouldn't quite take it that
directly. Kids have been cruel to one another in times of relative military
peace (like most of the Clinton years), and in times of military conflict (like
the Vietnam and Desert Storm eras). Besides, our supposed objective in the
Balkans is to stop the kind of ethnic-purity crusade our homegrown neo-Nazis
like to dream about.
Violent media don't kill people; violent people do. (Note Japan's relative
lack of youth violence and its abundance of youth-oriented-media violence.)
Right-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Spawn and
Doom. Left-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on
Schwarzenegger and the World Wrestling Federation. Corporate media defenders
might love to blame Littleton on cultural phenomenon outside of corporate
control (especially on that bad-ol' Internet). All these blowhards have done is
exploit 15 senseless deaths to promote their own agendas. Some of these agendas
are as potentially divisive as that of the Trench Coat Mafia.
If anything can be learned from the horror, it's that kids can be, and are,
cruel. Especially Caucasian American kids (perhaps a legacy of Britain's even
crueller boarding-school culture). As seen in very mild form in the current
crop of teen movies, the typical high school caste system rewards the
conceited, the athletic, and the "beautiful," and disdains anybody with more
than half a brain or more than half a conscience.
Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens,
I've found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who
wasn't a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media
largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a "Prep Athlete
of the Month" segment, another used to have a "Student Athlete of the Week,"
but nobody in local news (until this year's revival of the Washington Spelling
Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school
system wouldn't just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it
would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
Perhaps we could use a new kind of PR campaign. One that celebrates the
brainy ones, the nonconformists, what that Apple commercial called "the crazy
ones." I wouldn't go the way of Times columnist Jerry Large, who
once called for papers to promote community-volunteer kids as sexy role models.
Instead, I'd honor the girls and boys who neither followed role models nor
tried to be them. After all, it's the geeks and the brains these days who
(given at least a modicum of adult or peer encouragement) grow up with a chance
at creative lives and/or hi-tech careers. It's the girls who stop worrying
about becoming popular who're more likely to get to 18 childless. It's the boys
who face the taunts and the name-calling who're more likely to successfully
weather the slings and arrows of grownup office politics. It's the kids who
think learning's too square who end up clerking at Kmart. But it's the brainy outcasts who are constantly harassed and put down who can end up with the lifelong scars.
'TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public
access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B.
White: "A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom--he fears a
drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold."
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