- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following Salon Premium Member:
Published Letters: 163
Editor's Choice: 46
could someone point out where I could score enough Paxil to do so without plunging into deeper depression regarding the state of the Earth?
No? Damn.
"Lastly, speaking of (self-)righteous, isn't Stephanie the same "thinking adult who cares even remotely about the vast artistic possibilities of moviemaking" who nominated Pride & Prejudice for EVERY category in Salon's last Oscar poll?"
-- wrenhunter
That made me smile.
Honestly though, folks, no one is taking into account the real issues of exposing children and younger adolescents to so much sensationized gore:
They aren't miniature adults. Their brains simply lack the filters which develop in late adolescence when the reorganization of the forebrain is consolidated. These images go directly to immature brains which truly cannot make value judgements about real vs. simulated because their brains don't have the neural mechanisms to do so.
It isn't about some idealized and artificially inculcated state of innocence. Earlier societies could not wrap their children in cotton wool to protect them from the realities of life and death as we perversely attempt to do and then subject these same kids to hundreds of hours of pretend violence. Children saw famine, plague and war 'up close and personal' and not as 'entertainment'.
They still do elsewhere in the world every day.
These earlier societies did teach coded messages about these facts in 'folk' and 'fairy' tales - see Bruno Bettleheim, 'The Uses of Enchantment' - but Disney & Co. (in search of material they didn't have to pay copyright for) has, for vast profit, turned these tales into pastel consumerist fantasies.
