The Progressive Community
Thursday, 29th April 1999Des Moines, Iowa [NotS]
Interestingly, though I’m writing this News of the Stoopid in Des Moines, it relates to the Denver Metro Area–a town I can’t avoid in terms of stoopidity.
Littleton, Colorado. A Denverian suburb known hitherto for little more than the 1993 discovery of one of Colorado’s only Tyrannosaurus rex. And now known more globally as a town of scary carnage, or something. Because a couple of kids built a pipebomb or two. My immediate reaction: who cares.
Seriously: this isn’t news. Granted, it’s always tragic whenever something like this happens in a high school, but, to me, it’s really no more egregious or less ubiquitous than an English teacher responding, thanks to conditioned response, to a question with ‘do what’. School has never been for students; school serves two notable purposes: giving parents a place to stash their kids, and giving those kids a captive audience to whom to sell drugs and weapons. Cynical, perhaps, but not entirely inaccurate.
See, in my experience, school is merely another hurdle in civilised society. Those who are willing to learn, or even capable of learning, are branded as pariahs by the teachers, who can’t handle the subordinate position of inferior intellect to those whom they’re supposed to be teaching. And those who are neither interested in nor capable of assimilating the curriculum learn not to respect authority, but to circumvent it. The modern educational system. What a joke.
Of course, everyone seems to have some idiotic solution to the problems. Here’s mine: shut down the schools, and reroute the funding into a programme to get a modern computer and an ISP account [and please god not AOHell] into every physical address in America; that way, those kids who wish to rebel and actually learn something can hop online and access information on whatever subject interests them. Those who don’t want to learn wouldn’t have to, and could, instead, just hit timewaster sites like gremlin.net…or, um…something like that.
As dumb as that may sound, there are worse ideas. Staffing schools with everything from mallcops to green berets is a worse idea. Sending in state-issued narcs who, at best, will almost fit in with the geeks is a worse idea. Offering gift certificates to the Gap as bribes to kids who could effectively shoplift in the Library of Congress is a worse idea. And, without a doubt, blaming third parties for the kids’ behaviour is a worse idea.
But one of the more popular worse ideas.
It hasn’t really been that long since I was in school. Granted, back in 1985, the little subliminal codes involved less critical accessories. An earring in your starboard ear meant that you were gay; an earring in your portside ear meant that you were just like everyone else with an earring in his portside ear; an earring in each ear meant that you were either symmetrical, or named Boy George. If your watch was a Casio or a Swatch, you were cool; if it was an Armitron, you weren’t; if it was a Rolex or Cartier, you probably stole it from someone older than you. Izods and Nikes made you cool; Arrows and Pumas made you a loser; those shirts with the penguins and those shoes with the big Ns on them made you a gym teacher.
Those days, it would appear, are over.
These days, kids are both insidious terrorists and pawns to more influential insidious terrorists, according to the idiots that be. Somehow, when no one was looking, Marilyn Manson seems to have gotten every American between the ages of thirteen and eighteen to start wearing black trenchcoats and conspiring to blow up schools. Who knew. Personally, I’ve been wearing black trenchcoats for years–even in 1985–back when Brian Warner was also still in high school. What an influential guy.
So, suddenly, anyone with a black trenchcoat and/or a Marilyn Manson CD is some sort of subversive criminal, just waiting for the opportunity to blow something up. Possibly. But then again, maybe not. It’s just so hard to tell with kids these days. Let’s look at the enigmatic Joey here: is he a harmless, gregarious, if slightly distracted Phishhead, or the Charles Manson of the twenty-first century? Better to be safe than sorry. Get ‘im.
All because some idiot kid happened to be wearing black when he killed a few people in a school. And because, for once, a kid or two getting shot in a Denverian high school managed to get national attention. Or is it somehow more nationally tragic when it happens in a semi-affluent suburb like Littleton than when it happens in Denver itself, or Aurora, or Arvada, or some other less-than-fashionable part of town. Is that relevant to this? Possibly?
And of all the places I could have been when this happened, I happened to be in Des Moines, Iowa–one of the most logically backward cities on Earth. Yup: this is the same town in which the infamous Progressive Community apparently started a suicide ring a few years ago. In case anyone remembers that, you might find it amusing to note that, while the coiner of the Progressive Community was a social worker from Spectrum–a low-octane mental ward here in Des Moines–who I happened to know, the alleged leader of the PC, based merely on a snapshot from the archives of Valley High’s newspaper in which he was holding a cigarette in front of the building, happened to be someone else I know–specifically ShadowCat, one of my best friends. You should have been there the day I introduced ShadowCat to Anna the Social Worker; funny as hell.
The Progressive Community was, it turned out, nothing more than a publicity stunt. The story was that teens throughout Des Moines were so disparaged by the lack of anything to do in the 515 area code that they were jumping to their deaths from the top storey of a three-level parking garage at Fourth and Grand. Not that anyone ever seems to have actually jumped, but that was the story. The solution to the fictional problem was to herd everyone under twenty into Spectrum for a few weeks at four hundred bucks a day. Just to be safe.
Just to be safe, it’s now become illegal to wear a black trenchcoat into a public school in a number of American towns, including Des Moines. Surprise.
It’s also frowned upon to wear a Marilyn Manson shirt into a school. Or a mall. Or anywhere. Since Manson is obviously directly involved in the Littleton thing.
Following that logic, there may be a few other things we can get rid of, just to be safe.
For instance, let’s not just get rid of all the black trenchcoats, but anything made by London Fog. Let’s not just outlaw Marilyn Manson, but anything on their label. Let’s not just ban them from playing in concert, but shut down all the auditoriums, just to be safe.
Let’s get rid of people like Alice Cooper, for motivating people like Marilyn Manson.
In fact, let’s get rid of the problem completely by getting rid of plastic–a material used to make compact discs.
We should also look into shutting down MusicLand, DiscJockey, MediaPlay, and any other place where CDs can be purchased. And amazon.com. Just to be safe.
Let’s get rid of all the computers which helped create the final cuts of those discs–IBM, Mac, and, yes, even Amiga. Wipe them out. We can figure things out with an abacus. We could use a pencil, but a pencil has a sharp point, which suggests ‘weapon’, and therefore can’t be allowed in schools, malls, or anywhere in America.
Since songs, which might inspire this sort of thing, are written in various keys, we should probably get rid of the letters A through G; the alphabet can consist of H through Z from now on. Just to be safe.
The point? Simple: people are people. Dumb people do dumb things, like blowing up schools or blaming unrelated rock stars for making it happen. Smart people don’t necessarily do either. Smart people think before they go for the torches and pitchforks.
Let’s give that a try. Just to be safe.
If a kid kills someone, whose fault is it? Is it the fault of Marilyn Manson, or Alice Cooper, or Ozzy Osborne, or Gene Simmons? Nope. Is it the fault of Thomas Edison, for inventing the phonograph on which these records could be played? Nope. Is it the fault of the parents, for not teaching the kids not to blow people up? Not really. You know whose fault it is? It’s the damned kid’s fault. He blew someone up. And he killed himself. That about wraps it all up, I think.
See, Americans have this neat little trait. Anytime something bad happens, they like to blame whatever it happens to be that they don’t especially like, whether that thing can be logically associated or not. So, instead of blaming the people who made the materials needed for the bombs, or blaming the school for being open, or blaming the victims for not running fast enough, or blaming any other more blameable party, these idiots are blaming Marilyn Manson for the actions of someone who, apparently, never even met the guy. Ironically, the same people who blame Manson for the bombing tend to use Ockham’s Razor to prove that the universe was created by a god in whom, incidentally, Manson doesn’t even believe. I wonder how relevant that might be to this.
And here’s a question: does anyone really think that Manson gives a damn about being accused of inspiring this? If anything, I’d think he’d find it amusing. Some idiots decide that his music might lead to a massacre, and he’s headlining the news. There’s no such thing as bad publicity–especially to someone who thrives on chaos. In the words of Manson, ‘how does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?’
Does it feel safe?
Or does it feel stoopid.
That’s just my opinion; and I have no one but myself to blame for it.
–Gremlin