“Whether it is a public hanging, a war, or a televised glorification of violence, a culture’s righteous violence will fascinate its onlookers. It will be a spectacle. Regardless of the rhetoric and details of its justification, if a society can heighten that fascination and bring it to a cathartic sacrificial conclusion, then the sacrificial violence …
Which Is Like Calling Grape Kool Aid A Fine Merlot
“. . . crudity is equated with sophistication, just as pornography made for immature minds is labeled ‘adult’ material” (Robert Knight, The Age of Consent, p. 91.).
Taught or Entertained?
“This means work on the part of the pupil. The entertainment model goes in the opposite direction. When the student is entertained rather than taught, he is in an oxymoronic way being aroused to passivity. Good teaching awakens in the student a desire to learn” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 193).
Hostility As Distraction
“One is that the ‘us versus them’ motif can be manipulated to revive a group’s esprit de corps and to ‘divert attention from internal problems.’ That is to say, communal violence is an antidote for internal strife and the ‘civil’ or domestic violence to which it might otherwise lead. Campaigns against outsiders or evildoers revive …
Not to Mention the Coyote’s Explosives
“Many studies are flawed because they make little distinction between Elmer Fudd getting bopped on the head with a carrot and the Terminator graphically blowing away human beings” (Robert Knight, The Age of Consent, p. 82.).
Eschew Prolixity
“The teacher must stoop in order to teach. She has to step into the language known by the students in order to expand the power and extent of that language . . . Nothing is accomplished if big words whistle over the children’s heads” (The Case for Classical and Christian Education, p. 192).
Autonomy in Modernity
“Since modernity is practically defined by its reluctance to recognize the degree to which we humans are imitative, Girard’s insistence on the central role of mimesis in human affairs goes against the grain of much of today’s popular cultural discourse” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 51).
911 Stumpers Both Ways
If you haven’t already checked them out, here are some places where you can go to satisfy whatever itch it is that web sites like this satisfy. Debunking the “inside job” take would be the task of the folks here, here, and here. Oh, and another one here. And here. And some sites that question …
Yeah
“If television has no impact, then why would the bisexual writer care how homosexuals are portrayed?” (Robert Knight, The Age of Consent, p. 63.).
Staying Power
“What is distinctive about the contest between myth and gospel, therefore, is that myth is fragile and survives only when its premises are accepted uncritically, while the gospel can be trashed and betrayed and corrupted almost beyond recognition without fatally compromising its inherent demythologizing power. Time and again, the gospel has been turned into a …