MAGAZINE COLUMN
Surviving America's killing fields
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Sept. 27, 1997) -- Walk down the street of a typical American city -- Pittsfield, say -- and the odds are that you are more likely to bump into a murderer -- and, by inference, a relative of a murder victim -- than you are likely to brush by a doctor, a college professor or a police officer.
Atlantic Monthly
In the time it takes you to read through this newspaper this morning, two people will have been murdered somewhere in America. While the overall murder rate has declined slightly since the beginning of the decade, Americans are still killed at a staggeringly higher rate than Europeans: 11 times higher than Germans, 20 times higher than Irishmen. Murders once considered rare, including mass murders, serial killings and stranger-murders, have now grown relatively commonplace.We are a nation at war with itself. And while our legal system is set up to deal with the killers in the name of the victims, there is little or no consideration given to the victims' survivors -- the spouses, children or parents of those slain.
In "A Grief Like No Other," the cover story of the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly, author Eric Schlosser illuminates the sorry plight of these survivors. Treated like pests by the courts and pariahs by society, they are increasingly turning to each other in support groups like Parents of Murdered Children.
While by adulthood most everyone has to learn to deal with the loss of a loved one, survivors of murder victims are faced with a host of unique issues surrounding their loss. What is appalling is, given our pop culture's obsession with murder, how woefully unprepared we are to help people deal with the horrifying aftermath of real-life murder.
Z Magazine
How do we decide what makes good parenting? According to an article in the September Z magazine, we have pretty much ceded this territory to the savvy marketing geniuses in the toy industry and baby product business who work overtime convincing us that the secret of good parenting lies in the wise purchasing of their latest innovations.In "It Takes a Whole Baby Product and Toy Industry to Raise a Child," Cynthia Peters deconstructs the way the marketplace preys on parents' insecurities in order to sell them products containing subliminal messages to help them raise good consumers.
"[W]e pass consumption values onto our children, training them in the ways of a throwaway society and readying them to be little shoppers who believe that products determine our identities and are capable of solving our problems," writes Peters, who gives examples of the myriad products parents have come to believe are necessary for quality parenting. These include so-called feeding systems, video mobiles, toy shopping malls and "time-out timers" with clock faces that start out frowning and turn into a smile by the end of the discipline session.
Peters even argues a convincing case that cribs, which nearly everyone takes for granted as required furniture, are totally unnecessary, and were in fact introduced to "teach certain behaviors that are important in an industrial society dominated by the clock and inane rules that enforce hierarchies."
"To resist the commodification of parenting," writes Peters, "[w]e have to give our children the stimulating enriching experience of the presence and support of their families and their communities, not the presents brought to you by Mattel and licensed by Disney."
Spin
Benefiting from an overhaul at Spin magazine -- which formerly stuck to reporting on rock music but which has expanded its coverage to include "life-style" stories -- is Tripod, the Williamstown-based, online magazine/web site, which gets feature treatment in the October issue of Spin.In "Invasion of the Pod People," author David S. Bennahum visits the cutting-edge Internet company in its unlikely location in a wire factory on Water Street in this sleepy college town.
Bennahum informs us that Tripod is the 19th most visited site on the World Wide Web. Tripod's practical, informative guide for the sort of post-college "Gen-Xers" who read Spin boasts more than 400,000 registered users, of which 180,000 have created their own web pages.
The secret of its success, suggests Bennahum, is the manner in which Tripod has organically balanced the needs and desires of its users with the steady, professional direction of its own staff.
Bennahum likens the relationship between Tripod and its users to that of the Grateful Dead and its loyal following of Deadheads. If ever there was a model that held out promise for long-lasting profit and allegiance, that's the one.
New Yorker
Speaking of perverse doings at the New Yorker, after she devoted the bulk of an entire issue to mourning Princess Diana (Sept. 15) -- including a shameless, self-penned piece based on a lunch she shared with her last June -- editor Tina Brown turned around the next week (Sept. 22) and placed a piece by rock impresario Malcolm McLaren about how he "fashioned" the punk-rock group the Sex Pistols into existence.Then again, maybe the juxtaposition was apt. After all, the tongue- lashing Earl Spencer gave the royals at his sister's funeral was merely a polite version of Johnny Rotten's venomous "God Save the Queen," which went something like this, "God save the queen/Fascist regime/The queen is a moron/Potential H-bomb....No future in England's dreaming."
Now there's a likely epitaph for Diana.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Sept. 27, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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