A rare Trump misstep, but a big one
During a school safety roundtable he held within days of the Stoneman Douglas shootings, President Trump speculated some blame for youth violence might belong to popular media, specifically films and online video games.
We have to look at the internet, because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds and their minds are being formed. And we have to do something about maybe what they're seeing and how they're seeing it.
And also video games. I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts. And you go one step further, and that's the movies. You see these movies and they're so violent. Maybe they have to put a rating system for that.
Trump specified youth. But the idea he voiced is an invalid one, no matter the age group at which it is directed.
If the notion that art (even of the spectacularly crude variety) is responsible for any consumer's wrongdoing sounds familiar, it should. Politicians, religious figures, and leaders of popular pressure crusades have long exploited it in attention-seizing variations.
Globally, there have for centuries been voices decrying paintings, sculptures, and works of music. Focusing on post-WWII America, remember 1950s agitations against rock and roll and girlie magazines? Or the 1980s song lyrics-decrying, record-labeling PMRC and Reagan-era Meese Commission on Pornography?
A contemporary iteration holds the rap genre blameworthy for criminal phenomena.
The undergirding 'causal link' supposition can be easily put away by reflecting that the overwhelming majority of us can enjoy creativity without misbehavior resulting. We are not robots, incapable of exercising autonomous judgement.
Artistic conceptions and vogues certainly can impact attitudes (advertising does work, after all), but they cannot compel healthy consumers to act out in ways that conflict with their fundamental characters and senses of right and wrong.
If someone does perpetrate horrible violence after playing an online game, watching a film, hearing a song, or reading a book, they had a predisposition toward it, or at least a weakness that cannot reasonably be assigned to art.
Besides, no creative person should be expected to fashion only works so elementary and flavorless as to be appropriate for even the psychologically troubled, or persons so obtuse as to not understand what might appear before them.
President Trump is usually correct. But not in this.
During a school safety roundtable he held within days of the Stoneman Douglas shootings, President Trump speculated some blame for youth violence might belong to popular media, specifically films and online video games.
We have to look at the internet, because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds and their minds are being formed. And we have to do something about maybe what they're seeing and how they're seeing it.
And also video games. I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts. And you go one step further, and that's the movies. You see these movies and they're so violent. Maybe they have to put a rating system for that.
Trump specified youth. But the idea he voiced is an invalid one, no matter the age group at which it is directed.
If the notion that art (even of the spectacularly crude variety) is responsible for any consumer's wrongdoing sounds familiar, it should. Politicians, religious figures, and leaders of popular pressure crusades have long exploited it in attention-seizing variations.
Globally, there have for centuries been voices decrying paintings, sculptures, and works of music. Focusing on post-WWII America, remember 1950s agitations against rock and roll and girlie magazines? Or the 1980s song lyrics-decrying, record-labeling PMRC and Reagan-era Meese Commission on Pornography?
A contemporary iteration holds the rap genre blameworthy for criminal phenomena.
The undergirding 'causal link' supposition can be easily put away by reflecting that the overwhelming majority of us can enjoy creativity without misbehavior resulting. We are not robots, incapable of exercising autonomous judgement.
Artistic conceptions and vogues certainly can impact attitudes (advertising does work, after all), but they cannot compel healthy consumers to act out in ways that conflict with their fundamental characters and senses of right and wrong.
If someone does perpetrate horrible violence after playing an online game, watching a film, hearing a song, or reading a book, they had a predisposition toward it, or at least a weakness that cannot reasonably be assigned to art.
Besides, no creative person should be expected to fashion only works so elementary and flavorless as to be appropriate for even the psychologically troubled, or persons so obtuse as to not understand what might appear before them.
President Trump is usually correct. But not in this.
posted by DC Larson at
February 23, 2018
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