Word: adult
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...play. But that is a way to approach the otherwise mystifying spectacle of children gunning down children. First of all, play is not necessarily innocent. Nor is childhood. The innocence of children (which was the unspoken premise of much horrified commentary last week about the Arkansas shootings) is an adult myth. The reality is children's extreme vulnerability; their storms of anger and irrationality and their dramatically imaginative lives, which conjure monsters and heroes and set them in motion--whole Iliads. Those imaginations sometimes indulge crazy fantasies of revenge and annihilating vindication. The vulnerability, anger and extreme fantasies of children...
...movies are cynically targeted at 12-year-olds. That's not exactly the point: the makers of those shows in effect appropriate the imaginative world of the child because the youthful brain is the environment most frictionlessly sympathetic to fantasy, no questions asked. The tiresome, responsible brain of the adult breaks into the action and says, Now wait a minute...
...distant and featureless that it lies beyond the reassuring certitude of maps. So says Australian novelist Janette Turner Hospital at the outset of her grim, millennial novel Oyster (Norton; 400 pages; $25.95). Such travelers--an Australian father, say, and an American stepmother, joining forces to track down backpacking adult children who had disappeared months before--would soon become disoriented. Even in their car they would be dazed by heat and a pervading stench from the reeking carcasses of drought-killed cattle and sheep and the burned hulks of stranded vehicles...
Bruce Handy, a self-professed "liberal member of the media elite," stated that young girls should not be portrayed as "ripening, imminently deflowerable teases" [SPECTATOR, March 16]. Yet Handy "doesn't have a problem with genuine obscenity when it involves adults." I'm amazed when men who think of themselves as thoughtful and intelligent refuse to recognize the irony of their own duplicity. Child pornography is an early step in desensitizing males to accept adult pornography that depicts women as "deflowerable" and even abusable teases. How genteel of Handy to suggest we condone and support those same degrading messages only...
...Golden, 11, will not face the death penalty. They will not spend the rest of their lives in prison. In fact, if convicted of killing five and injuring 10, they are likely be out of prison at age 18. In Arkansas children under 14 cannot be tried as adults, and juveniles face a maximum sentence described by state law as "indeterminate," which means not to exceed their 21st birthday. And, says Gerry Glynn, law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, "most children are released at age 18 because the state does not have the facilities to hold...