October 28, 2007
Black is white, up is down
And murderers are heroes.
Moral equivalence is in the crosshairs at Classical Values, where Eric takes aim at those who blame the NRA for school massacres while failing to note that many adults and fellow students appear to lionize unrepentant homicidal maniacs and mass murderers.
He begins with reports that another teen was preparing to slaughter the bullies who were tormenting him; the would-be killer said that his gun was named for one of the Columbine killers. But more disturbing than the teen's tribute to the maniac is his attorney's claim that the two gunmen who stlked their fellow students through the halls of Columbine High are heroes to bullied kids throughout the nation.
I'm hoping the claim that Harris and Klebold are "heroes" to bullied kids is overwrought hype by the kid's attorney, because if they are developing a cultlike status, it's a disturbing development.
That's because, if you think about it, on what basis is this Columbine hero cult to be condemned? Because they were murderers? And murder is bad?Well, what about the Cult of Che Guevara? Klebold and Harris killed twelve people, while Guevara killed nearly 2000, including the witnessed killing of a14 year old boy. And how about the Cult of Mumia?
I'm having trouble understanding how Che and Mumia can be heroes, but not Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.
Not that everybody considers Che and Mumia to be heroes. Far from it. Fortunately, these are fringe cults.
But don't they have a certain legitimacy? Put yourself in the position of a school principal, and suppose some admirer of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (yes there are groups like these) decided to wear a t-shirt with one of their pictures. Everyone would be horrified, right? The school would ban the t-shirts, right? But would they ban the Che t-shirts and the Cult of Che?
One commenter says the answer is home-schooling.
Unfortunately, home-schooling isn't enough; the societal rot is everywhere.
Heroes are so passe; it's murderers who capture the imagination of the young (and not so young) in our morally inverted world.
And the more the killers identified with the "workers," the better.
Communism -- directly responsible for the murder of unimaginably more people than the National Socialist German Workers' Party slaughtered in its 20-year existence -- is still chic, hip and viable in a way Naziism is not.
From mainstream, major retailers like Barnes & Noble, to the streets of small-to-medium size American towns, teens to thirty-somethings sip lattes while sporting t-shirts emblazoned with the faces of communist thugs and mass murderers, and the symbols of the regime that fomented oppression and human rights abuses like the world hadn't seen since the Dark Ages.
The pierced, tattooed and soul-patched moron who took my credit card had a hammer and sickle lapel-pin on his coat -- just the kind of flair his managers wanted, I'm sure.
Oddly, neither he nor his coworkers sported a swastika.
Strange, huh?
I'm not surprised that cop-killers and rage-filled thugs stalking their fellow students through blood-spattered halls; it's the logical end to our fourty-year journey on the moral relativism express.
"If it feels good, do it!" the rallying cry of the '60s and '70s, morphed by the '80s and '90s into, "Who am I to judge?"
And when there is no "right" -- and therefore, no "wrong" -- then we've pulled into the station, where up is down, good is bad, dark is light, and Che and Mumia are heroes.
Listen carefully! Can you hear that? Nero is fiddling.
We're doomed.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 28, 2007 10:34 AM
| TrackBack
Comments
It's insane the way popular culture has elevated the most notorious characters of the last century into "sainthood". These ignats don't even know what these figures from a Faustian nightmare really did, because history has been dumb-downed and twisted into something entirely unrecognizable.
I see only two paths for the future; either we'll wake up and reverse it (though things may get ugly), or we'll be doomed, as you say.
Posted by: sonarman at October 28, 2007 12:40 PM