Word: littleton
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Sift through teen movies of the past 10 years, and you could create a hindsight game plan for Littleton. Peruse Heathers (1989), in which a charming sociopath engineers the death of jocks and princesses. Study carefully, as one of the Columbine murderers reportedly did, Natural Born Killers (1994), in which two crazy kids cut a carnage swath through the Southwest as the media ferociously dog their trail. Sample The Basketball Diaries (1995), in which druggy high schooler Leonardo DiCaprio daydreams of strutting into his homeroom in a long black coat and gunning down his hated teacher and half the kids...
...Littleton's wake, the culture industry has gone cautious. CBS pulled an episode of Promised Land because of a plot about a shooting in front of a Denver school. The WB has postponed a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode with a schoolyard-massacre motif. Movie-studio honchos, who furiously resist labeling some serious adult films FOR ADULTS ONLY, went mum last week when asked to comment on any connection between violent movies and violent teen behavior. That leaves us to explain things...
...paper looks impressive (one of mankind's most important words, invested with the dignity of mystery and theology). But evil in actuality, when it touches down on earth like a tornado for a moment--as it did in Weston's visit to the Capitol, or last week in Littleton--may have a style so tacky, so moronic or so indelibly crazy that it gives off a radiant tabloid weirdness. This almost novelistic sheen of the loony makes the tragedies curiously hard to evaluate. The evil effect is evident--innocent blood everywhere; the cause, in the case of Littleton anyway, remains...
...activist liberal, a voluptuary of governmental solutions, so his concession carries an interesting significance. You saw it from the political right too. "There's not a magic wand you can wave," said Gary Bauer, a conservative activist who coincidentally launched his presidential campaign the day after the Littleton murders. Even Pat Buchanan, after firing off a few half-hearted rounds at the "poison of our popular culture," could offer little more than a shake of the head. "There was something sick and wrong inside those boys," he said. "I don't know how to stop...
This is something new in American politics, but it didn't start with Littleton. It has been in train for many months or maybe longer, and it crosses party lines. A bipartisan consensus--that holy grail of establishmentarians everywhere--has been reached that politicians can no longer concern themselves merely, even primarily, with the workaday stuff of politics: marginal tax rates, crime control, defense expenditures, environmental and labor laws, the international balance of power. Our politicians are transcending politics. They are turning their attention, for better or for worse, to matters of the human heart...