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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (36668)	5/2/1999 8:47:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Okay, let's reiterate here. Most of those other 25 countries have very tight gun control laws, and far fewer deaths from guns. So are you saying this is not because there are fewer guns owned by individuals, but simply because America celebrates violence? Your logic fails to impress me. And everything you say about love of violence is even more true of Japanese media than ours.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (36668)	5/2/1999 10:53:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

On the Marx Brothers and Violence in America. Christopher: Are you saying that the Marx Brothers did not produce "intelligent comedy"?!? Them's fighting words, my lad! There's a lot more to the Hilarious Threesome than "hitting people on the head": are you possibly thinking of the Three Stooges??!! Quite seriously, however, your point about the violence in American culture in general is well taken. Who remembers the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, appointed by President Johnson after (and in response to) the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy? One of the things that came out of that was a report submitted to the Commission, published in a mass market Bantam edition under the title of: Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Naturally, it is now out of print. How quickly we forget! And how frequently we go back to the same old questions, as if no one had ever asked them before! In any event, the report (over 800 pages long) was produced by a "task force" of scholars and lawyers, and provided an historical overview of everything from revolutionary violence in Europe and America to the Frontier Tradition and vigilantism to racial aggression to criminal violence. People who like to point to the "good old days" and deplore our supposedly sudden embrace of violence will take little comfort in this report, however. One relevant quotation from one of the authors: Americans have always been given to a kind of historical amnesia that masks much of their turbulent past. Probably all nations share this tendency to sweeten memories of the past through collective repression, but Americans have probably magnified this process of selective recollection, owing to our historic vision of ourselves as a latter-day chosen people, a New Jerusalem. According to the introduction to the book, this amnesia was so pervasive that when the task force began its work, the members were unable to find "any significant work on violence in America, much less any that would relate it to that in other countries..." And they found, further, that "many writers of history, the schools and the disciplines of the overall society have denied or de-emphasized the role of violence from the Colonial period to the present." Now, of course, there are zillions of books with the title of "Violence in America". (Check it out.) Yet the general perception seems to be that the violence is new, dating from the sixties -- which was when the first historical survey of the phenomenon made the general public aware that the problem was not new. Such are the ironies of history. Joan