Oh please spare us the puerile macho fantasies right now
by digby
I said this the other day, but I’m going to repeat it. Yes, we do need to censor Hollywood. Not because it’s influencing mass murderers to go out and kill, but because watching war movies and cop shows on a loop has made the right wing believe that bullets never hit the good guys and that all real men are like Rambo and can handle every situation with his super-duper martial arts and bow and arrow skills.
There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K–6 school), all the personnel — the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the “reading specialist” — were female. There didn’t even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza’s knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school’s public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.
Seeing as the gunman was determined to mow down anyone who got in his way I’m fairly sure we’d see a Sandy Hook with a couple of dead ex football players and some husky 12 year olds along with the 26 other victims. If there were any 12 years old, but since Sandy Hook only went up to the 4th grade, we’d have to depend on macho 9 year olds to rush the gunman.
I’m not even to get into that moronic trope about a “feminized” culture. I’m fairly sure that women have been caring for and educating small children oh — since time began. Even when the big strong macho Rambos of the tribe went off to hunt, they were usually left without even one janitor with a bucket to save them. Up until the time that we put semi-automatic weapons in the hands of madmen, they were quite able to protect kids this age.
I’m supposed to be the namby-pamby gun hater, but I’m fairly sure that I have more respect for their power than these dizzy wingnuts with their hero fantasies. Expecting people to run toward a hail of bullets and almost certain death is sick. We don’t even expect trained soldiers to run headlong, unarmed toward someone with a gun. When they do it anyway it’s so extraordinary that they get medals for it.
People do it anyway some times,to be sure. They instinctively try to protect the weak or those they love. But this notion of “training” people to commit suicide as a way to protect others from madmen with ridiculous amounts of firepower is more than stupid. It’s dangerous.
oy.
