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	Tuesday, February 24, 2004

SO SAYETH THE KING One of the perks of being the King of the Blogs is that you have the right to issue a Royal Edict, which is a post of your choosing that all the KotB judges must link to (commentary optional). Good King Bill of WalloWorld picked an excellent topic to play with - the left's hypocrisy regarding the effects of imagery on people's minds: Countless hours spent playing violent video games of course have no impact on kids (nor could they ever contribute to an environment where kids shoot their classmates), but The Lord of the Rings can reinforce racial sterotypes or The Passion is likely to lead to anti-Semitic violence? After raising the question Bill sums it up in a quick point: images have power. They may affect different people in different ways, but every image has an impact. Dang. After all the times I've harangued Bill for prattling on and on and on, he picks THIS occasion to say his piece & shut up. I wanted to see this issue get chewed & tasted instead of being swallowed whole. I hope he chases this down in the future and talks about which images have what impact, and what, if anything, should be done about the effects of negative images. For my part, I'm of the belief that images don't matter nearly as much as the message surrounding the image. Take, for example, the often maligned violent Bugs Bunny cartoons of my youth. People were getting beat up & hurt left and right. But the moral was always the same: Bugs was just minding his own business, trying to lead his happy little bunny life, and some jerk started messing with him. Well, Mr. Jerk got what was coming to him. He deserved the trouble he got. Justice was served. Same thing with Popeye. I don't recall him ever throwing the first punch. He was a peaceable sort of fella. And even my VERY maligned violent video games (especially the first-person shooters I love like Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Jedi Knight, Soldier of Fortune, etc.) have a message. Evil people need to be killed by good people to protect the innocent. My point being that, while I recall the cartoon punches or the splattery image in the game, I more strongly recall the message - sometimes good men must fight. I think it's a distraction to argue over whether the image is good or bad. Argue the principle that image supports. posted by Harvey at 7:04:59 PM  permalink    Crappy Broken Radio Comments (do not use) [] trackback []  HOME

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