Word: serials
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is violence of a special kind, not "brother, can you spare a dime" stuff but anarchic, pointless, Clockwork Orange violence. It is particularly reviled because it is perfectly senseless. We tend to call serial murders senseless, but we know that buried deep inside a Wayne Williams lies a horrible, though perhaps unfathomable, purpose. We suspect a reason, some powerful, twisted logic. Anomic violence, on the other hand, is truly senseless. Thus crimes of madness elicit from us revulsion; crimes of need (like Jean Valjean's) sympathy; but crimes for fun, for a video game, for no purpose, elicit rage...
...battle against an evil imperial foe and uses wit, grit and brute force to win the day and make people feel good about their country. This fantasy of an all-righteous America fills movie theaters even as it fuels presidential elections. Who is Indiana Jones if not the movie-serial avatar of White House Reagan, leaping up from near fatal assaults with a wave and a joke? Who is Superman if not the Krypton Gipper, fighting for truth, justice and voluntary school prayer? At the end of a campaign year that played like one long half-time pageant, two entertaining...
...lack of incisive exchange between the opponents reminded us that the debates are not actually debates, but serial press conferences. A real debate is judged by the campaigns to be too dangerous--there's no telling what outrageous clip the networks might run. That prompted us to think back to the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, when the two U.S. Senate candidates squared off in seven three-hour debates before Illinois crowds as large as 15,000, using no amplification. It's impossible to imagine candidates trained to think in 15-second sound bites in the setting of a real debate...
There is much the same vicarious and slightly evil satisfaction of watching Walter F. Mondale turn the tables on the Great Communicator that some down in Florida feel when the latest serial killer gets fried in the old electric chair. 'Fry' is the operative word here, because Mondale did to Reagan in 90 minutes what Democrates, the press, and just about everyone who believes an elected public servant should be held accountable to his constituents, have failed to do: make him answer for himself...
Coach Joe Restic had White go to the air just six times all afternoon, and though the junior hit on four of those, the Crimson serial attack remains, for the most part, untested...