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The day they killed the Easter Bunny, By Mark Morford
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/arts/television/doomsday-preppers-and-doomsday-bunkers-tv-reality-shows.html" target="blank">Doomsday Bunkers." You could hand it a rifle and tell it to blast a wild animal to death, have it attend an anti-gay rally at a Colorado Springs megachurch or Mormon temple, or plop it down at a One Direction concert. That would certainly do it.But let's say you really want to mess it up, forever and true, tattoo it down deep with adulthood's most vile energy, a poison that's hugely common in the culture but is just shy of being actually physically abusive or illegal. Can you name it?
Before we answer completely, shall we attempt to define our terms? Innocence: Noun. That furtive phase of childhood and/or perhaps utopian small-town, nonexistent, country-girl, sepia-toned BS Americana wherein the being in question has not yet been made fully aware of the pains and vagaries of the adult world, the filth and the branding and the white noise, the corruption and the road rage and the flabby newts named Newt.
Innocence: a lack of guile or manipulation; a space free of those decidedly ugly forces -- war, racism, sexism, gangsta rap, disease, Santorum, celebrities -- that torment, contort and lead you to garbage food and organize religion and fistfuls of antidepressants that don't really work. Innocence, we can safely say, is as much defined by absence as by presence. Sound about right? ...
(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/04/04/notes040412.DTL&nl=fix)
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Because if there's one message you want to deliver to kids, it's that life is a frantic struggle, a fierce battle against creepy forces of darkness that have British accents and lots of reverb. Armor up, kid! Life is gonna suck. British accents are scary! Santa is an Eastern European pro wrestler with lots of tattoos and the tooth fairy is a bit of a bitch. Neat!
That's the best we got. That's the best overpaid creative adults can come up with at this point in the frazzled zeitgeist. And this, to me, is the single-most shameful way to defile innocence: Introduce violence.
Not only violence, but violence framed by dumbass polarity, a bogus, Bush-grade, good-versus-evil sort of jingoism, not mere as mangy plot device but as integral to the nature of innocence itself. Get it? Innocence contains violence. Kids are always preyed upon. Freedom isn't free. U-S-A!
That's the best we got. That's the best overpaid creative adults can come up with at this point in the frazzled zeitgeist. And this, to me, is the single-most shameful way to defile innocence: Introduce violence.
Not only violence, but violence framed by dumbass polarity, a bogus, Bush-grade, good-versus-evil sort of jingoism, not mere as mangy plot device but as integral to the nature of innocence itself. Get it? Innocence contains violence. Kids are always preyed upon. Freedom isn't free. U-S-A!
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/04/04/notes040412.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1r4t40Yh9
