i agree wholeheartedly with dennis, and would add that the significant variable in this is not computer games or even bomb-making lessons on the internet, but a really crap society, especially for young people, in which the desire for retribution and revenge has no other outlet than that of arbitrariness and scapegoating - as the guy disenfranchised and dispossessed in The Grapes of Wrath keeps asking, 'who do i kill?'.
ps. dennis, when do we meet up for a round of quake?
Angela ----------------
I've been looking for some thread on Littleton to use as a way to get at what I think was going on there and the question of 'who do I kill?" is a great one. Yes, exactly who do you kill if you're pissed off?
As a kid, my entire political journey started with that question. Of course my stepfather was first on the list. At fifteen, my plan was simple. Bludgeon the son of bitch in his sleep with a 2x4. But then the list grew first to encompass the high schools I went to, and grew with each year until sometime six or seven years later it included the entire federal and state governments, major corporations, all university administrators, and naturally all police everywhere--by then a list of millions. How do you kill them all?
At UCB in Paul Feyerabend's Phil 101 course, one of the TA's ask the study section, 'who are your heros?' With that question, I got up and walked out of the session, mumbling "that's not the problem you fucking idiot, we don't want any." I obviously have a problem with authority.
A week or two ago Doug H posted an essay by Slavoj Ziezk, _A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism'_:
"Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of the political, postmodern postpolitics, which no longer merely represses the political, trying to contain it and to pacify the returns of the repressed, but much more effectively forecloses it, so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their irrational, excessive character, are no longer simple returns of the repressed but, rather, present the case of the foreclosed (from the Symbolic), which, as we know from Lacan, returns in the Real. In postpolitics, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties who compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists and public opinion specialists, for example) and liberal multiculturalists; via the process of negotiation of interests a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. The political (the space of litigation in which the excluded can protest the wrong or injustice done to them) foreclosed from the Symbolic then returns in the Real in the guise of new forms of racism. It is crucial to perceive how postmodern racism emerges as the ultimate consequence of the postpolitical suspension of the political, of the reduction of the state to a mere police agent servicing the (consensually established) needs of market forces and multiculturalist, tolerant humanitarianism."
Although the above is dense and heavily nuanced, it doesn't really explain how a repression and obliteration of political awareness is achieved.
I propose it is through the re-casting of political issues and material interests into the terms of humanitarian moral dilemmas that are the means used to achieve depoliticialization. Another way to put it is, you can cloud a political arena with confusion, by making moral arguments instead of political arguments. This process of substituting moral rectitude for political articulation is the tactic of the US rightwing and that tactic has been very successful in obscuring class based material interest. It is particularly targeted at the lower middle/working class who should be downright politically militant at this point in history over their complete exploitation in every dimension from their denigrated labor to the media appropriation of their numerous sub-cultures--yet they are not.
Let's return to the question of who do you kill? Notice this isn't a political question, but a moral question. The question is a way of asking who is evil and the cause of all our problems? This assumes we are good, they are evil, we need to kill them to make things better.
The political question to ask is why are the conditions under which we live intolerable and what can we do about it? The answer to that question can lead either to the moral solution of killing the evil perpetrators or toward the political solution of developing the means to change conditions, increase political awareness and intensify the struggles. I propose the kids in Littleton pursued the moral solution to their problems, just I might have at one time. I would also propose that the connection between Littleton, Clinton, Blair and NATO follows a similar line--the pursuit of moral rectitude, rather than the political articulation of material interest.
I have no doubt the primary means of propagating the process of depoliticalization is mass media. The media interest is not to depoliticalize per se, but to sell air time. The media role in this process is a mere by-product of pursuing their own interest. In order to get and maintain a large audience which is their paramount material interest, media dramatizes their presentations by heightened moral conflicts and contours, which is a classical dramatic technique. Drama sells through its emotive engagement, thus the news isn't ready for prime time unless it can be given a dramatic presentation and that means a high profile moral dilemma. Thus depoliticalization of every event follows as a consequence of its dramatization as a moral conflict.
But the political spectrum is fully toned to this same staging of the dramatic over the political since that is what grabs and holds the attention of most people. Hence, everyone from the humanitarian neo-liberal to the fanatical rightwing proceeds along similar lines. Thus our public lives and its representation in a media envelop is a wash of moral dilemmas with no political articulation, ill defined material interests, and poorly conceptualized critiques and solutions.
Chuck Grimes