I’d sort of love to go back in time and grab Tipper Gore from out of those PMRC hearings in 1985 and just zap her forward into 2018. I don’t know if she would feel like she had been proven right, or if she would just let out a wounded scream and drop dead. She was seen as terribly uptight at the time, but I don’t think anybody could have figured out how insane things would become. There was just no way that pop culture could continue to get more and more outrageous and explicit every five years.
After Punk it seemed like it had gotten about outrageous as possible, but everyone underestimated Rap music both good and bad. If she wanted to be offended by 2 Live Crew, god bless her because no one else was taking them seriously.
My attitude was bad parenting was bad parenting, stop making people live by the rules you should be setting for your own kids.
My favorite part of the hearings was where they grilled Frank Zappa over this album cover.
Zappa basically said “If you can’t look at a picture of a chain blade carving its way through a man’s genitals, without realizing that it might not be for little Johnny, you probably aren’t a very good parent.”
I still pretty much believe that way. Most of those songs revolved around drugs and sex as they had for over thirty years and offended parents usually seem to be really, really bad at talking to their kids about drugs and sex.
Finally, the hard core acts just embraced the sticker and went on as if nothing had happened at all.
John Lennon’s first solo album is probably the earliest that I’d ever heard the work “fuck” in a pop song. In 1985, it was still considered pretty outrageous when you heard the unedited version of Who Are You on the radio, and for some reason when people went to see the Who and heard the “They’re all wasted!” part people always cheered as if the writer considered it to be a compliment.
Since then, I’ve seen a ten year old kid rapping along to a song about raping a woman and who really knows what I think anymore? My niece’s playlist is almost all rap or dance, and every other word is about sex, drugs, with about an average of at least 10 uses of the word fuck in them. Who knew I’d be nostalgic over the loss of impact of the word fuck. Oddly enough, my niece just doesn’t take it seriously. It’s all kind of just funny to her. She’s not on drugs and she’s not promiscuous, which says something about her parenting.
So I’m still pretty much of the opinion – raise your kids, talk to them about sex and drugs.
I have a more complicated history with guns and violence. My dad was a hunter. He never had a side arm. He took me deer hunting once, which has to be like the most boring thing ever. You sit around all day in a tree fort desperately trying not to make a sound, and never see a single deer ever. I only went once so that is at least accurate for me. At night, they would go out spotting which is looking for deer with a big flashlight, and you’d see deer everywhere. Apparently, deer had gotten smart enough to know that people weren’t allowed to shoot them during the day.
I kind of liked skeet shooting and pistol shooting, but I didn’t go crazy for it either. Guns were just tools to kill things and hand guns were just tools to kill humans.
A girlfriend of mine invited me to Connecticut to meet her parents and it was really important to her that we get along great. Her father at the time was obsessed with the Bill Mahar show Politically Incorrect and he made us watch a bunch of them. Suddenly, after one was over he made it really clear to me that he wanted to debate about guns. I was a State Champion debater in high school. I didn’t want to argue about guns with him. He had already thrown that hook out there twice and I wasn’t biting, but he put me on the spot in front of my girlfriend and a friend of hers, who was doing a full Eddie Haskell on her father.
He didn’t even own a gun. He just loved the NRA. So essentially for 40 minutes nobody talked except for me and him. She had actually missed a mass shooting at her job by like five minutes and I didn’t even remember to bring it up. Since then I’ve grown to think of the NRA as a racist, terrorist group, but I wasn’t stained back in 1993.
He kept saying over and over again. It’s a slippery slope, what they really want is to ban all guns, and humorously enough I never even contradicted him. I just kept saying. “I’m pretty sure if you asked the Brady’s (Jim who got shot with Reagan and his wife) they would tell you that is exactly what they want to do. My only real argument was I didn’t like seeing people die and John Lennon was killed by a gun. I’m sure we went through government tyranny, the second amendment (it’s an amendment, which means you can amend it) and all kinds of other nonsense. I just wanted to get out of that argument alive.
Finally after retracing the same steps over and over again to the silence of the other two, he said “They have a billboard in New York, listing how many gun deaths there have been so far that year. What is that for?” To which, I finally got frustrated and said, “Maybe it’s because they are trying to say wake the fuck up!”
That didn’t go over well. My girlfriend started crying and left. He followed her out, and Eddie Haskell said something mean to me, which he had been doing since we met days earlier.
Since then I’ve pretty much granted that I can’t win a gun argument. I can show you how racist the history of guns has been. I can hold my own, but in the end gun owners who love guns always know more about the laws involved because sadly they spend all their time either shooting guns, or reading about people who want them to stop shooting guns.
At this point, I’ve just thrown my hands up. The only reason you need an AR-15 is if you are in a militia afraid of a tyrannical government, and we’ve seen time and again with the Black Panthers and WACO that even if the government is out of control, you’re going to get your ass handed to you and it will be ugly.
I even believe that kids that are brought up with respect for hand guns are probably less likely to ever shoot anyone.
Where do I love guns? In movies and video games. I’m sad to say that a few days after the Vegas apocalypse I’d become so jaded that I was actually worried about the Punisher being moved back on Netflix, because of its violence.
Do I think kids should watch violent movies? Not particularly, and I’ve always found it to be extremely hypocritical that a breast and then even a cigarette could get you an R rating where tons of gun play and violence could still muster up a PG-13.
And yeah, every video game I’ve played for the past 30 years has been a first person shooter game. I don’t think my nephew was every really into shooter games, but he spent thousands of hours playing them, which is sadly a perfect way to train you for life in a cubicle. So yeah, I want my movies and TV and video games, which I inevitably always get stuck on after like 15 hours, and I still don’t want to raise your kids.
But man most people just really suck at it. Show them Terminator 2 at 13 because all of their friends have seen it if you have to, but let them know it’s not real or a game. Don’t let them see it at six, because I’ve seen six year olds at video stores bring that baby up to their parents.
Force your kid outside sometimes. Make them go deer hunting, that way they’ll stay out of trouble and be as bored as I was.
I’ve been on psych meds for years, and I honestly have no idea if everybody has always been crazy or if it’s all a huge pharmacological fraud, but I’m still of the opinion raise your kids or don’t have them. Then again I’m old and old people prove to be wrong every single day.
I have no idea what to do about people that aren’t raised well that shoot the well raised ones at a school or a concert. With guns, we all pay for the worst, most egregious sins of the worst parents and I don’t know how to solve that.
Also mass shootings have nothing to do with ghetto violence in Chicago. Stop saying that.
I agree it’s hard to raise kids in a society soaked to the gills with porn, drugs, drinking and violence. More reason to make having one a more thought out and well considered decision.
One thing I do want to comment on is real violence vs. popcorn violence.
Just about all video game violence is popcorn violence.
Reservoir Dogs was considered extremely violent back in its day, but it wasn’t actually that violent. Sure an ear gets cut off, but you never see it happen. The reason Reservoir Dogs was considered super violent was that the violence in it had serous repercussions. It’s was real. It made getting shot in the gut and bleeding to death look like it really sucks and I’m sure it does.
Just about every Quentin Tarantino movie is about violence and he does it really well. Take Django Unchained, there is tons of popcorn violence where it is fun if not outright funny to see people get shot, but there is also the real violence in there with dogs killing a man, and the branding of a woman. The latter are unpleasant and let you know that you shouldn’t enjoy the popcorn violence too much, because in the not movie universe, violence is a real drag.
Movies with real violence don’t get shown at family movie nights, but popcorn violence is a feel good Saturday night activity. It should be the opposite.
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Coincidentally, I’m finally making my way through the Punisher, after 5 episodes it finally got good and it actually has some valuable things to say about all of this.
I don’t really know anymore. Think of what Charles Whitman would have done with today’s firepower? Culture is unstoppable, it’s no less easy to stop it than guns. F tha Police came out in 1988 and there’s is no way it would ever be released today. Twenty years of constant war hasn’t helped. Income inequality hasn’t helped. Twenty years of being split down the middle ever more angry hasn’t helped. Kids are bombarded with porn and language that would have been inconceivable in my day. I’d spend all night hoping that a soft core movie would come on Cinemax, but compared to 1968 strides have been made. I have no real idea anymore to be honest. My other niece has no interest in alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, or anything that isn’t working pretty much non-stop to keep up with how competitive the world has become. I worry about her too. I even understand white supremacists, they’re dying out and they know it. Trying times.
I actually even understood why people voted for Roy Moore as sick as I find it. He was the best person to push their agenda. Once, I asked a friend if she could name me one preacher that was a really good person and she said Billy Graham. I read about him and saw that he exchanged anti-Semitic slurs in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon.
In the end though, I still believe it’s all about money. Are we all mentally ill or have the pharmaceutical companies just convinced us that we are? I’m not sure, but my family’s issues go way back. One night my grandfather, who was quite well off especially given his age, was up at 3 AM and refused to go to sleep for hours because essentially his checking account was off by a few dollars. My childhood was pretty ideal, but it exactly corresponded to Reagan’s years and there was a lot of stuff going on under that blanket of “everything’s fine” that wasn’t fine.
As far as perfect people go, not that anyone could be perfect, I’m pretty much down to Mr. Rogers and that’s about it.
The culture is more powerful than good parenting. That’s why we should be very careful about what we allow into it. It’s why our culture is sick today. It’s why prior to about 25 years ago there were virtually no school or other mass shootings. Libertine and progressive mores have saturated American culture. This is one of the results.