In the News 04/98
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Toward The Root of The Evil
Excerpt from: Time Magazine April 6/98
Everyone
knows that late 20th century America, where no-parent households,
Marilyn Manson and the National Rifle Association all converge, is
not for the faint of heart. But how did it become a place where kids
gun down other kids?
"Television and the movies have never, in my experience, turned
a responsible youngster into a criminal," says Stanton Samenow,
author of Before It's Too Late: Why Some Kids Get into Trouble and
What Parents Can Do About It. "But a youngster who is already
inclined toward antisocial behavior hears of a particular crime, and
it feeds an already fertile mind."
When the grownups are out, or even when one is there but not mindful,
children are left to the mercies of a peer culture shaped by the
media, the ultimate in crazed nannies. Armed
with video-game joysticks and TV remotes--a funny world, with its
false promise that it keeps you at a distance from whatever
excitements it bounces you through--kids are whiplashed from one bit
of blood sport to another, from South Park and Jerry Springer to
Mortal Kombat on Nintendo. Ordinary kids may be a bit desensitized to
violence. More susceptible kids are pushed toward a dangerous mental precipice.
As for media violence, the debate there is fast approaching the same
point that discussions about the health impact of tobacco reached
some time ago --it's over. Few researchers bother any longer to
dispute that bloodshed on TV and in the movies has an effect on the
kids who witness it. Added to the mix now are video games, at least
the ones built around the model of hunt and kill. Captivated by effects
that are ever more graphic, game boys learn to associate gusts of
"blood" with the primal gratifications of scoring. In
Golden Eye, a big seller, the player spends nearly all his time
drawing a bead on his victims down the barrel of a gun.
"Many boys have impulse-control problems," says Gil Noam, a
professor of education and medicine at Harvard. "They don't
think, What are going to be the consequences for the rest of my
life?" Bringing them through the treacherous pathways of mass
culture takes a watchful adult. Things that merely amuse a grownup
can injure a child, whose brain undergoes a powerful development
surge before age 14. "Parents don't understand that taking a
four-year-old to True Lies--a fun movie for adults but excessively
violent--is poison to their brain," says Michael Gurian, author
of The Wonder of Boys.
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can
understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9) Keep your heart with all diligence,
for out of it spring the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23) The
righteousness of the upright delivers them, but the unfaithful are
trapped by evil desires. (Proverbs 11:6)
How to Die Young...
Excerpts: various pop/rocker's obituaries. April 1998
Died. Rob Pilatus, 33, half of lip-synching pop duo Milli Vanilli; of
a suspected alcohol and drug overdose. This artist's career crashed
when an audio tape snapped in 1989, at a live concert, exposing the
duo as fakes.
Died. Wendy O. Williams, 48, raunchy queen of shock rock, whose on-stage
excesses included blowing up a car, pulverizing guitars with a
chainsaw and pelting amplifiers with bullets. Lead singer of the punk
band The Plasmatics -- dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature
will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from
the Spirit will reap eternal life. (Galatians 6:8)
In God and Gun We Trust
Reuters: April 14, 1998
Kentucky
clergy fearful of armed robbers stealing the collection money will
be able to carry concealed guns in church...
If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your
tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what
belongs to you, do not demand it back. (Luke 6:29b-30) Let your
gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand. (Philippians 4:5)
Gross and Grosser
Time Magazine: March 23, 1998
To
understand South Park, it is necessary to understand Mr. Hankey, the
Christmas Poo; and to understand Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, it is
necessary to understand his origins as recently described by Trey
Parker, one of the show's creators. Now, it may not be immediately
obvious why anyone would want to understand a series that features a
stool specimen wearing a sailor hat and speaking with the voice of a
castrato ventriloquist. But
South Park, a cartoon about four profane third-graders, is the
latest giant asteroid to slam into American pop culture, and so it
requires our attention. Fortunately, it is also very funny, and
Parker, 28, and his partner Matt Stone, 26, are the most genial
purveyors of poo imaginable.
The show concerns four friends--Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny--who
live in the small town of South Park, Colo. Obsessed
by bodily functions, sometimes cruel but with a core of innocence,
Kyle and Stan are modeled on Parker and Stone, while Cartman, the
greedy fat kid, is a deranged fantasy figure and Kenny, who talks in
meaningless muffled squeaks, dies violently in each episode (except
the Christmas one). Kyle's exclamation, "Oh, my God, they've
killed Kenny!," has become a catchphrase. The only sympathetic
adult is Chef, the cook at the school, who drifts into a racy
R.-and-B. number whenever he tries to give the boys a wholesome
lesson in song. As for the plots, in one episode aliens send a huge
anal probe into Cartman; in another, "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat
Ride," Stan follows his dog to a sort of amusement park for
homosexual pets. "Stan's dog's a homo!" is a typical line
from that show. While the series is now created on a computer, Parker
and Stone first used construction paper in their animation, which
retains a flat, crude look with leaps into the fantastic. Altogether,
the effect is Peanuts by way of Tim Burton (of Nightmare before
Christmas fame).
South Park mania began almost as soon as the show debuted on Comedy
Central last summer (and on Canadian TV as well), and it has
become the top-rated series on cable, seen by some 5 million people
every week. While that is less than a third of the audience for the
other animated adult hits, The Simpsons and King of the Hill, it is
an impressive number, since Comedy Central is available in only about
half the nation's homes.
Not surprisingly, South Park is particularly strong among the
18-to-24-year-olds so coveted by advertisers. Viewing parties are the
rage on many college campuses, where activities grind to a halt at
showtime. Five percent of the audience is under 11 years old. It is
the only regular series on TV to carry a Mature or MA rating, the
harshest, and it can be blocked by the V chip. The best-selling T
shirt last year was based on South Park; a movie deal is all but set;
a sound-track album is being produced--can a theme-park ride be far behind?
This cartoon show makes Bart Simpson look tame (and he's not!).
With vulgar language and profanity as the main feature, show topics
regularly mock all types of authority and often go after
"shock" topics regarding sex, violence and even religion.
Of the three shows I've personally seen, two mocked Jesus directly.
Another article, entitled The Spirit of South Park (Feb 3/98), shows
a typical plot(?) illustrating this type of theme...
A variation on the Spirit theme starts a new batch of South Park
episodes this Friday at midnight on Global. In Damien, Satan's son is
the new boy in school and he's a mean one. After he turns Kenny into
a duck-billed platypus, the kids call upon Jesus to go savior-a-mano
against Satan in a pay-per-view battle.
"Turn away my eyes from looking at worthless things, and
revive me in Your way." (Psalms 119:37)
Emily's Little Experiment
Time Magazine: April 13, 1998; plus Baltimore Sun: April 1/98
It sounds like the plot of a made-for-TV movie: an inquisitive
nine-year-old Colorado schoolgirl single-handedly cooks up a
science-fair experiment that ends up debunking a flaky but widely
practiced medical treatment. And she does such a professional job of
it that the study gets published in a prestigious medical journal,
landing her on just about every front page and news broadcast in the nation.
Preposterous though it seems, that's pretty much what happened last
week when Emily Rosa's experiment was written up in the Journal of
the American Medical Association. Rosa's target was a practice known
as therapeutic touch (TT for short), whose proponents manipulate
patients' "energy fields" to make them feel better and
even, say some, to cure them of various ills. Yet Emily's test shows
that these energy fields can't be detected, even by trained TT
practitioners. Obviously mindful of the publicity value of the
situation, Journal editor George Lundberg appeared on TV to declare,
"Age doesn't matter. It's good science that matters, and this is
good science."
Emily's mother, Linda Rosa first got exercised about TT in the
late '80s, when she learned it was on the approved list for
continuing nursing education in Colorado, along with everything from
acupressure to "nurse-assisted near-death experience." TT
bugged her more than most. Its 100,000 trained practitioners (48,000
in the U.S.) don't even touch their patients. Instead, they wave
their hands a few inches from the patient's body, pushing energy
fields around until they're in "balance." TT advocates say
these manipulations can help heal wounds, relieve pain and reduce
fever. The claims are taken seriously enough that TT therapists are
frequently hired by leading hospitals, at up to $70 an hour, to
smooth patients' energy, sometimes during surgery. Your insurance
company may cover TT.
Yet Rosa couldn't find any objective evidence that it works or that
these so-called energy fields even exist. To provide such proof, TT
therapists would have to sit down for independent testing--something
they haven't been eager to do, even though the
magician-turned-debunker James Randi has offered more than $1 million
to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a human energy field.
(He's had one taker so far. She failed.) A
skeptic might conclude that TT practitioners are afraid to lay their
beliefs on the line. But who could turn down an innocent fourth-grader?
Says Emily: "I think they didn't take me very seriously because
I'm a kid." Bad move, as it turned out.
The experiment was straightforward: 21 TT therapists stuck their
hands, palms up, through a screen (-- a cardboard partition with
cutout armholes). Emily held her own hand over one of
theirs--left or right, decided by the flip of a coin--and the
practitioners had to say which hand it was. When the results were
tallied, they'd done no better than they would have by simply
guessing. If there was an energy field, they couldn't feel it.
New Age alternative medicine routinely claims great success.
Numerous techniques profess to manipulate "invisible"
energies flowing through (or around) the body. Regardless of the
pseudo-scientific language used (and sometimes even pseudo-Christian
terms), all these techniques are directly derived from eastern
mysticism. The "but it works" claim is often held up by
many. Employing this logic, praying to the devil, or going to a witch-doctor,
would be acceptable, "if it works." Fact is, a majority of
these techniques have been found to be fraudulent -- when tested in a
truly scientific way. Regardless, Christians should be careful of
putting their faith into religious techniques based on pagan belief
systems. (See James 5:14-15, Psalms 30:2, Exodus 23:13)
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