I HAVE NEVER seen a film or TV show where a troubled sociopath shot up anywhere and it was glorified.
But the United States' relationship with guns is sick. It always has been. The video below is moronic. It shows just how adolescent the gun cliche has become in our culture.
As the inevitable Columbine rehash happens over the next few days, please remember that we heard this all before. And nothing has changed.
Change requires will. And will requires generational rage. You are the ones being killed, in Iraq and on your own campuses. Your culture is producing these damaged people.
What will you do to stop them?
While you're at that, I'm going to say a quick prayer for the dead.
UPDATE: Just because it happens every time I post something like this, I should remind upfront that I am, in fact, American-born. I vote proudly, and have always been proud of the good that the United States of America has brought to the world. Like a lot of Americans living abroad, I've had a rough few years keeping the candle lit.
But there's another motion here, too. For any Canadians reading this, I get slagged each and every time I mention something like this, but go read Jim Henshaw's post today about the amnesia at root in Canadian society. We love it when Rick Mercer goes Talking To Americans, while we all cede anything in Canada that makes the culture here slightly different.
And then something like this horrific shooting happens. I know. We've had a few here in Canada. But the difference is that after women were murdered by Marc Lepine in Montreal, things changed. Gun laws changed. That, at least, is not part of the Canadian amnesia. This country doesn't produce psychopathic spree killers at quite the rate as the United States does.
The U.S. and Canada have been moving apart culturally for years. But the people selling the stories and the people buying the stories here aren't actually, you know, buying the stories. Our cultural future is American. Stop being smug about being Canadian...because if your kids don't know Vimy and everything else, then what's the difference? Run up the Stars & Stripes and be done with it.
Ooh. Yes. Someone's blood sugar is low today.
13 comments:
Thanks Denis, I agree the loss of will is a North America wide thing - our grandparents (or in some cases parents) managed to handle the Great Depression followed immediately by WWII - we can't (so far) manage driving more fuel efficient cars. Nothing is going to change until we collectively relocate our ... um..intestinal fortitude.
Amen...
Badlands. Taxi Driver. natural born killers. all the heroes (and they are glorified) are troubled sociopaths and while their victims are not clean cut college kids not all their victims deserved death, not by a long shot. In these movies the murderer is the hero.
The belief that a hero is someone who takes matters into his own hands (even if those hands are going to commit mayhem) is a tradional value. Chuck Bronson anyone? Rambo?
These movies arn't shit movies -- at least two of them are close to the best American cinema there is.
Amen, Denis.
Here's to the death of cultural amnesia. And the kind of rage that brings only helpful change of the kindest sort.
(I guess I've got Callwood and Vonnegut's voices haunting me today...)
Yow. The soldiers killed in Iraq and the sociopath in Virginia have nothing at all to do with each other.
And I suppose the difference between the U.S. and Canada is that we generally don't let sociopaths determine our constitutional rights. If the Constitution creates the right of gun ownership, then a blood-crazed murderer in Virginia or two ass-clown kids in Columbine don't get to take it away.
After all, isn't that part of the argument against Bush's War on Terror -- that a religious nut in Pakistan on dialysis doesn't get to serve as a pretext for unwriting the Bill of Rights?
Kit Carruthers, Travis Bickle and the Knox's are most certainly not heroes, and are never portrayed as such (unless ironically, in the case of the latter.)
Protagonists, yes.
Heroes, no.
There is a very significant distinction between the two.
Also, to use Natural Born Killers as an example of glorifying troubled sociopaths is an example of not getting the point of the movie in the first place. The movie itself is about how the media turns such individuals into celebrities.
travis bickle is portrayed almost completely in heroic fashion -- a menacing hero, for sure -- but heroically nonetheless and almost thirty years of emulation show us that he is the character in the film that the audience identifies with and wants to be. he is the heart and soul of the movie no matter how poised that heart and soul may be.
the characters in badlands have done nothing but define romantic teen suicide death love, these characters are admired and romaticized and have a violent sexual appeal that transcends the earlier couple in "gun crazy" -- micky and mallory are in my humble opinions just an end of the century update on the badlands couple with a soucon of Paul and Karla thrown in for good measure.
I don't buy that this is some kinda Oliver Stone cautionary tale about the media creating romantic icons out of monsters in that the most sympathetic characters in the pic are mick and mallory -- they are certainly to be more admired than robert downie, rodney d, et al...
you wnat to call them protagonists fine, IMO they are the heros of their respective stories and the filmmakers are lionizing them.
but don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with that.
"If the Constitution creates the right of gun ownership, then a blood-crazed murderer in Virginia or two ass-clown kids in Columbine don't get to take it away."
Uh huh. I think a lot of Americans need to remember (or maybe learn) that the whole point of enshrining the right to bear arms in the U.S. Constitution was so the people could rise up and take out their leaders if they became corrupt or drunk with power or refused to leave when they were supposed to.
Please. Go right ahead.
It's probably a little early to try to find lessons in this tragedy. Xenophobia is as likely to be what's rehashed rather than simply Columbine.
I don't think the right to bear arms has anything to do with sociopaths.
I'm a diehard Canadian, a journalist teacher and before that a scientist. I've looked and looked at reams of studies.
I've concluded that gun ownership has only one effect: it increases suicide rates. It has no effect on murder rate whatsoever.
So why do Americans kill each other so much more often than Canadians or Europeans? It's cultural. Americans kill each other in states that have gun control at the same rates as in states that have freer gun laws. Gun control solves nothing.
The culture glorifies violence and the state allows the private ownership of automatic weapons so you have to expect these sorts of things to happen. Once the marines currently in Iraq are demobed you'll see a great many more such incidents.
"Badlands" and "Taxi Driver" are pretty obvious critiques of the society. "24" they ain't.
"The culture glorifies violence and the state allows the private ownership of automatic weapons so you have to expect these sorts of things to happen. Once the marines currently in Iraq are demobed you'll see a great many more such incidents."
1. For all the complaint that American culture glorifies violence, R-rated movies are in the vast minority, and generally perform less well at the box office. (Grindhouse, anyone?)
2. Private purchase of automatic weapons has been illegal in the United States for more than 20 years.
3. The "once the Marines are demobed..." argument is just one of those "I'm going to be right, I just know it" positions.
4. And this just in -- the guy who killed all those people was: Not even American. He was a South Korean national, living and studying abroad.
"Under Virginia code, localities may no longer regulate the firearms with sole exception of regulation of discharge of firearms.[29]
NFA34 weapons are allowed under Virginia state law but machine guns must be registered with Virginia State Police."
Andrew might be confused by the 1994 "assault rifle" ban which expired in 2004. So, yes, you can buy, own and operate an automatic weapon in Virginia.
Both guns used by the English Major were semiautomatic weapons
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