40
Popular Culture Review
After the initial grief over the Paducah shooting, the parents of the three httle
girls murdered began to look for someone to blame, fiUng lawsuits against not
only the media, film industry and Internet pom sites, but also against 44 other
people, mostly students, teachers, and administrators who allegedly might have
prevented the tragedy if they had read the signals properly. Predictably such an “us
vs. them” mentality has tom the town apart. Even after the judge removed 35 of
the 45 names from the list of people to be sued, the parents appealed the mhng and
added three more teachers and five more students. Among those added was Ben
Strong, the heroic student who had actually persuaded Cameal to stop firing. He
had been told by Cameal five days before the shooting that something big was
going to happen (Pederson 35).
I do not want to generahze this into an argument suggesting that Boomers are
all hypocritical and Bridgers are all noble spirited; there are many Boomer parents
who truly want to find healing, and there are Bridgers who will certainly go on
isolating those who are different from themselves. What I do beUeve is that Bridgers
as a generation are cautious when they hear rhetoric from other generations - about
race, sex and a host of other issues—which ends up substituting for action.
Perhaps the best writer to understand this contradiction in American hfe was
Mark Twain, who hved during another major paradigm shift around the Second
Industrial Revolution. His writings suggest that our world is not a binary existence
- that people who simply want easy answers or simple solutions without considering
their vahdity only contribute to the problems they claim to want to solve. This
philosophy is evident in the war on terrorism, where the enemy may have the
backing of a state government, but the U.S. stresses that its war is only with the
government, not the people. We feed the people while trying to overthrow their
government. The binary world of ally/enemy is insufficient. In the 1990s, movies
like Crimson Tide, Saving Private Ryan, and American History Xieficctcd a different
philosophy whereby characters are given not simple choices or roles but complex
situations throug h which to respond. In the 1890s Mark Twain was suggesting the
same thing; encouraging writers such as Toni Morrison to proclaim that Bridgers
should read Twain as soon as they are able to read anything:
That was a watershed event in my life. Nearly everything I had read
before that time was a work produced and marketed in the category of
“children’s books,” which meant that the stories were sanitized, simple in
concept and vocabulary and of very little interest to anyone over the age
of twelve. Huckleberry Finn was something else. In the literature I was
famihar with, fathers had always been shown as patient, honest and decent.
Huck’s father was none of those things. Basically, old man Finn was pond
scum. In the books I had previously encountered, it did sometimes happen