FREE ESSAY ON POP CULTURE

POP CULTURE

In Risk and Blame, Anthropologist Mary Douglas describes the cultural basis for witch
hunts in traditional societies. Whether the witch is able to do harm or not, the
attribution of a hidden power to hurt is a weapon of attack against them....A successful
accusation is one that has enough credibility for a public outcry to remove the
opportunity of repeating the damage. A moral panic starts with an unspeakable tragedy
which sparks an attempt to ascribe blame and responsibility. Initially, accusations flow
freely but focus on those targets who are already the subject of anxiety. Once one
accusation sticks, it becomes easier to pile on charges. Our rush to judgement overwhelms
our ability to rationally assess the evidence. Our need to take action supersedes our
ability to anticipate consequences. Moral panic shuts down self-examination at the very
moment when real problems demand careful consideration.
Several weeks after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the
United States Senate Commerce Committee launched a series of hearings, chaired by Sen.
Sam Brownback ,on the marketing of violent entertainment to children. Introducing the
investigation, Brownback explained, We are not here to point fingers but to identify the
causes of cultural pollution and seek solutions. The phrase, cultural pollution, of
course, already presumed a consensus that popular culture was a worthless iritant which
was to blame for various social harms. Brownback was prepared to sweep aside
constitutional protections: We are having endless debates about First and Second
Amendment rights while our children are being killed and traumatized. Brownback focused
his ire on forms of popular culture that met youth rather than adult tastes: I am willing
to bet that there aren't many adults who are huge fans of teen slasher movies or the
music of Cannibal Corpse and Marilyn Manson. Sen. Orin Hatch declared Manson's music
tremendously offensive to everyone in America who thinks, a category that seemingly does
not include a significant number of high school and college students. William Bennett,
former Secretary of Education and self-proclaimed guardian of American virtue, called on
Congress to make meaningful distinctions between works that used violence to tell  a
larger story such as Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, or Clear and Present Danger, and
works that gratuitously exploited violence, such as The Basketball Diaries, Cruel
Intentions, or Scream. His commonsense distinction was at heart an ideological one,
separating works that offered adult perspectives from those which expressed youth
concerns.
Though they understood the hearings as a ritual humiliation of the entertainment
industries, the senators were feeding a cultural war which was more and more focused on
teenagers. As a GOP operative Mike Murphy explained in that week's Time, we need Goth
control, not gun control. Hatch engaged in homophobic banter about whether Manson was a
he or a she while Brownback accused members of the Goth subculture of giving themselves
over to the dark side. Such comments reinforced bigotry and fear. Adult fears about
popular culture were being transfered towards those people who consumed it. The Goths
were a relatively small subculture whose members drew inspiration from Romantic
literature and constructed their personal identity by borrowing from the iconography of
the horror film and S/M pornography. The group could claim a twenty year history without
much public attention because they had previously not been associated with violent crime.
However, the Columbine shooters had been mistakingly identified in some early news
reports as Goths and as a result, this group had been singled out in the post-Littleton
backlash.
From the outset, Congress was unlikely to set federal policies to regulate media content,
which would not have sustained constitutional scrutiny. They counted on public pressure
to intimidate the entertainment industry into voluntarily withdrawing controversial works
from circulation. Manson canceled some concerts. MGM stopped selling The Basketball
Diaries. The Warner Brothers Network withheld the airing of the season finale of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer until midsummer.
The biggest impact of the moral panic, however, would be felt in the schools - both
public and private - as teachers and administrators increasingly saw their students as
threats to public safety and suspected popular culture of turning good kids into brutal
monsters. Online journalist Jon Katz's remarkable series, Voices from the Hellmouth,
circulated hundreds of first-person accounts of how American schools were reacting to the
shootings. As Katz reported, Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt
for oddballs -- suspects in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange and the
alienated. Suddenly, in this tyranny of the normal, to be different wasn't just to feel
unhappy, it was to be dangerous.
Many schools took away web and net access. Many kids were placed into therapy based on
their subcultural identifications or interests in computer games or certain kinds of
music. Students were punished for taking controversial positions in class discussions or
on essay assignments. In one case, a student was suspended for wearing a Star of David to
school because his teacher thought it was a gang insignia. Another was sent home for
wearing a black coat that was officially part of his ROTC uniform. One school district
banned heavy coats. Knowing little or nothing about the popular culture consumed by
teens, teachers, principals, and parents were striking out blindly.
Other educators took risks, challenging the crackdowns on Goths in their schools and
bringing the materials that Katz had gathered back into their classrooms for dialogue
with their students. Local journalists investigated Katz's reports and found them
accurate. Civil rights organizations were confronting a record number of complaints from
students who felt their constitutional rights were being infringed. Then-Presidential
candidate Dan Quayle added fuel to the fires with a speech attacking the concept of
students rights as an unjustified interference with classroom discipline, insisting that
Our children cannot learn in an environment of chaos ... If we're going to make an error,
err on the side of school safety.
I personally think all of this is ridiculous. I feel censorship of music and movies just
angers the sane kids out there who actually know right from wrong and fantasy from
reality. People need to open their eyes to the fact that human beings are not a perfect
lifeform. And if some kid is sick enough to shoot up his school it wouldn't matter if he
listened to Michael Bolton records every night he would still have done that. We need to
own up to our flaws and stop looking to teen culture as a way to place blame and instead
of wasting time placing blame maybe put more money into actually helping kids who need
mental or emotional help and take some action instead of sitting back and hoping someone
else does.