Stephen King has pitched into the war of words steadily growing around the Massachussets legislature's hearing of House Bill 1432 (HB1432), which seeks to curb the sale of "violent" video games to "minors". The whole process has been covered extremely thoroughly in the excellent GamePolitics.com ("Where Politics and Video Games Collide): "HB1423 is a “games-as-porn” bill which would seek to restrict minors from buying violent video games under the same rationale used to block them from buying sexually explicit materials... "
In a column for Entertainment Weekly, for whom he writes as culture correspondent, King argues that the bill is both wrong and pretty much bound to fail. His arguments are liberal standard procedure and most of the way I agree with them: video games are just a convenient target for politicians and allow them to ignore the true causes of ultra-violence in American society: the gap between the rich and poor and the easy availability of firearms.
It's the last point where I start to diverge from King, not because I think that the US gun laws aren't a bit fucked, but because we've heard the arguments from both sides over and over and seldom get any observations with any subtlety, originality or recognition of the historical and social complexities at work. Jesus, even Michael Moore (not exactly the most subtle of polemicists) pointed out in Bowling for Columbine that Canada's gun laws aren't that different to the US's, despite dramatically lower murder rates.
Anyway, it wasn't that which caught my eye. It was his insistence that bringing up children is a parent's job and not the state's which chimed - though, er, problematically. "Parents need to have the guts to forbid material they find objectionable...and then explain why it's being forbidden. They also need to monitor their children's lives in the pop culture — which means a lot more than seeing what games they're renting down the street."
I completely agree with King on this, but writing as the father of three teenagers, I have to say, it's quite a challenge. As a teenager myself I had, in retrospect, astonishingly liberal parents, but there were still some - effectively - "banned" things in the house (Derek and Clive for one; if memory serves my mother unfortunately heard their cancer sketch while her beloved uncle was dying... of cancer. Excerpt: "Without [cancer] we wouldn't have a way to die, would we? Fucking good of [God]! Not to torment us with being eternally young and being able to fuck everyone. No! He gave us this great gift of fucking cancer, that's very kind. I wouldn't have thought of that if I'd been creating the universe, would you? Bung in cancer? No, I'd have left that out." Quite.) I didn't necessarily agree with them, and I'm not sure I do now (that D&C sketch makes me laugh out loud every time I'm afraid), but I developed, at least, a sense of acceptability - and a means of discourse about it.
I stress that because King's insistence that parents "explain why it's being forbidden" is the key here, as is his notion of keeping up with your kids' "lives in the pop culture". What's implicit in his demands of parents is that they have some kind of intellectual relationship with their kids - especially as they become teens. Of course, it's impossible to know exactly what's going on in your kids' lives - indeed, it would be a little creepy to do so. And, modern comms tech being what it is, it's all but impossible to ban something from the house in the way my parents could. But to engage with them, to at least try to understand them and their culture is surely vital.
Also, if I'm frank, it's more often than not a lot of fun. Isn't shooting the shit about, say, Plan B's visceral dissection of honour killing in "Tough Love", or just why the Coke GTA piss-take is both hysterical and sinister (random recent Hopkins household examples, I grant) just a tad more interesting than discussing Nigel Slater recipes or Habitat wish lists or fuck knows what else constitutes an "adult" life?
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