Adam Lanza: America’s crisis of masculinity personified

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 22:30:00 +0000

Start here. Adam Lanza can’t be accused or convicted of “unconscionable evil,” not in the court of public opinion and not by the criteria of moral philosophy. He wasn’t making a moral choice when he shot his mother in the face with her own gun, and then killed 20 defenseless children. So individual responsibility and culpability aren’t at issue, as they have not been and cannot be since Columbine.

It follows that the NRA’s slogan, to the effect that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” is moot at best—the killers in every case were sentient beings, but not one was a person at the law or anywhere else in the landscape of possibility most of us can take for granted. Not one was an individual who came to the scene of the crime equipped with a conscience, thus able to make moral choices.

The argument against thrift

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

We’re the most affluent people on the planet, us Americans — our choices among foods, ideas, clothes, schools, and destinations are almost without limit — and we love to shop. But we also know that consumer culture is bad for us. How come? In a word: excess. We’re afraid that we consume too many resources, that we save too little of our incomes, and that meanwhile we produce almost nothing of real value. We’re afraid that we can’t observe any limits on our consumption of goods, so that every substance, even food, begins to feel addictive, and every urge, even sex, begins to feel compulsive. When armed with credit cards, it seems, we’re unwilling to defer the immediate gratification of our desires, and we’re thus unable to “save for a rainy day.” We’re also afraid that we’re mere cattle — herded by corporations and “branded” by their admen. We’re especially afraid that consumer culture is making us fat.

Salon.com > James Livingston

Adam Lanza: America’s crisis of masculinity personified

The argument against thrift