Lord of the Flies

When I was in second grade, we sang this song to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school,

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule,

We are going to hang the principal tomorrow at the school,

We brats keep marching on.

It was funny (to a second grader) because it was so unthinkable. Well, now it's not so unthinkable. I refer, of course, to the Georgia third graders who hatched a plot to bind and murder their teacher -- and who brought implements to school to do it. Police say they were angry at her for disciplining one of them for standing on a chair.

According to the AP account, experts say that the kids probably wouldn't have gone through with it. That must be so comforting to the teacher. And to the parents of other children in that classroom, or school.

One must be careful drawing conclusions about The Meaning Of It All without more information, but it's not hard to figure out where kids get these ideas. Violence and permissiveness is everywhere in our popular culture -- and many parents are too lazy and/or stupid to do their jobs. I've said before how undone I would routinely get as a film critic, when I would leave screenings of intensely, graphically violent films, and see parents exiting the theater with very small children in tow. You want to slap these people. I guarantee that an investigation of this Georgia incident will turn up parents who allowed their kids to watch anything they want to on TV, listen to whatever crap music they want to, and who generally have forfeited their responsibilities to be adults in their children's lives.

Why? Because it's hard to do, for one. Really hard. The culture is so degraded, and so all-enveloping, that it's easier to minimize the threat -- especially if you don't have the resources, financial or otherwise, to get your kid out of a school that has a destructive peer culture. Remember Caitlin Flanagan's line? "The 'it takes a village' philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it."

She went on to say in that Atlantic Monthly piece:

One of the most astonishing things to happen during the 1990s was that rap music that included some of the most violent, sexually explicit, and misogynistic lyrics ever recorded slipped seamlessly and virtually unnoticed into the households of so many apparently responsible American families. Boomer parents, remembering their own struggles with their square parents over rock-and-roll, were lenient about their kids' music. Tipper Gore's heroic campaign to get explicit music rated and labeled was born after she decided to do something few parents had even attempted: actually listen to the albums her kids had bought. She was ridiculed by many factions, including those forces on the American left who cry censorship whenever anyone attempts to protect the public, including children, from smut (and in the case of rap, smut emanating from a source the left valorizes: black urban America). In the summer of 2004 Bill Cosby brought down a hail of criticism when he lambasted the hip-hop culture as a shameful squandering of the civil-rights gains that his generation had fought for and won.

But the protests of white senators' wives and African-American senior citizens have not had much effect on music sales, and have not prevented a large number of poor and middle-class kids alike from becoming saturated by the world of spoken-word, hard-core pornography that is rap music. Add to this the countless other products of our increasingly sexualized teen culture, in which male sexual fantasy of the type once reserved for prison-yard posturing has been adopted and championed by very young girls who stand only to be brutalized by it—emotionally, if not physically.

Ironically, many of the objectives stated in rap lyrics are the same as those of contemporary American feminism: to encourage girls not to be shackled by the double standard and to abandon modesty as a goal, to erode patriarchal notions of how men ought to treat women, and to champion aggressiveness in girls. It was very possible for a girl in the nineties to have her well-intentioned parents buy her a CD in which she was urged to s**k d**k and get f***ed, and to have a well-intentioned teacher (I was one such) tell her to be as intellectually and verbally aggressive as she could—that aggression for its own sake was a good thing, because it leveled the playing field in a male-dominated world.

Secondly, to keep a strict watch on the kind of popular culture you child consumes implies, or ought to, that you as an adult should be more discerning about your own habits. How many adults want to do that? Soak your brain in the toxic brew for long enough and you lose your own sensitivity to the threat.

The late Neil Postman's point in "The Disappearance of Childhood" cannot be made often enough: When you have an electronic media culture in which there are no natural boundaries to prohibit children from accessing information previously available only to adults, childhood disappears. From a old piece on the Postman book in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Writing a new preface three years ago for the re-released version of the book, Postman, who teaches media and political culture at New York University, confessed that, "sad to say," he saw little to change in his 1982 text. "What was happening then is happening now. Only worse."

In Postman's view, the postmodern culture is propelling us back to a time not altogether different from the Middle Ages, a time before literacy, a time before childhood had taken hold as an idea. Obviously, there were children in medieval times, but no real childhood, he says, because there was no distinction between what adults and children knew.

Postman's book recalls the coarse village festivals depicted in medieval paintings - men and women besotted with drink, groping one another with children all around them. It describes the feculent conditions and manners drawn from the writings of Erasmus and others in which adults and children shared open lives of lust and squalor.

"The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame - these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world," Postman writes.

In the book itself -- which I have here on my desk -- Postman makes the critical point that "childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category." We have invented childhood as a special period of innocence and character formation. For centuries, we progressed toward emancipating children from the pain, labor and suffering of adulthood, as we recognized to be truly civilized, one ought to create walls of protection around the youngest of our species, to give them room to mature and develop intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. To not brutalize them, basically.

That's gone now. We brutalize them, or rather, allow the inner barbarian to emerge through out positive action or benign neglect. No one who has read "Lord of the Flies," or who has spent any time on a playground -- and I have been both Jack and Piggy -- can possibly believe in the original innocence of children. Children can be unspeakably cruel. They are taught -- they must be taught -- to be civil by the authority figures in their lives, starting first with their parents, their families, their social groupings, and ultimately their society. We are, on the whole, failing our children, for complicated reasons. Postman confessed that he did not know how to stop it.

Neither do I. In fact, I don't think it can be stopped, though God knows we've got to do what we can with what we have to work with. The prohibitions ("remissions" in Rieff's terminology), both internal and external in our culture, that used to guide us and help us form the character of the next generation, are mostly gone. The culture, as Flanagan observes, is the enemy. The disorders of the age are spreading with the relentless efficiency of a killer virus. As a friend of mine put it to me wisely just now, you can't fully protect your kids, not in this culture. You can only inoculate them, and hope it takes. There is enough goodness in this country, and in its people, and enough liberty and imagination, to provide for those who resist. Somehow, we've got to keep working to find each other, and to help each other to redeem the time. We can't despair -- not as long as we still have freedom to act.

The first line of Postman's book: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." And what is the content of the message our culture is sending to the future?

This.