Violence in Movies
Politics under our current campaign finance laws can be a treacherous endeavor, so we should be a little forgiving of the Gore campaign's recent interactions with the entertainment industry. On the one hand, Hollywood executives are purveyors of what Joe Lieberman has called a "culture of carnage," brazenly deceiving the general public and corrupting the innocent minds of children for profit. On the other hand, they just gave the Democratic National Committee about $10 million of that filthy lucre. On the one hand, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein once circumvented the ratings system to market his movie Kids, which features 13-year-olds shooting drugs, getting infected with HIV, and having random, wretched sex. On the other hand, Weinstein helped put together a massive Radio City Music Hall fund-raiser for the vice president a week ago. This is politics, after all. In a sign of their increasing confidence, Al Gore and Lieberman even described their attendance at these events as a profile in courage. Not every politician, we were informed, is prepared to look wealthy Malibu donors in the eye, tell them they're poisoning children's minds, and then ask for a check. Not that Gore and Lieberman pushed their luck. In Beverly Hills, the ever-p
liant Lieberman, fast becoming the ideological Gumby of American politics, reassured the moguls, "We will nudge you. But we will never become censors." Take the alleged curse of graphically violent video games, often marketed to the underage as innocent toys. This was once one of Bennett's hobbyhorses. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, he went on "Larry King Live" to bemoan "the video games, the movies, other things. I don't think there's anybody [outside the entertainment industry] ... who doesn't understand the coarsening effect of a lot of this cultural crud on our kids." Bennett was referring to games like Mortal Kombat, which debuted in 1992; Doom, which debuted in 1993; and Quake, which came out in 1996. But Bennett has his data the wrong way around. Teen assault rates actually peaked in Mortal Kombat's first year and have been falling ever since, a coincidence recently pointed out by the author Mike Males. In roughly the same period, teen murder rates have fallen almost 50 percent--one of the steepest declines ever. Juvenile violent-arrest rates have also headed south since Doom began darkening America's computer screens, and they are still falling. But didn't Columbine highlight the crisis of violence in our schools? Actually, no. From 1993 to today, the number of children carrying guns to school has been halved, according to a recent survey of almost 140,000 schoolkids. Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association was ridiculed for mentioning some of these statistics in his congressional testimony, but his numbers went unchallenged. One of them is particularly striking: The percentage of the under-18 population arrested in 1997 for violent crimes hit a five-year low of 0.41 percent. This is Lieberman's "culture of carnage." Well, maybe the kids have stopped killing eac
Some common words found in the essay are:
Shakespeare Love, Picture Association, Lieberman Gore, Mike Males, Gumby American, Drugs Compared, Gore Lieberman, Harvey Weinstein, King Live, , popular culture, violence sex, entertainment industry, violence sex drug, culture carnage, gore lieberman, teen violence, sex drug, shakespeare love, crime rates, children's minds,
Approximate Word count = 1215
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
