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The phrase "moral panic" seems to indicate an awesome riot. I imagine priests carrying books out of libraries to be burnt, and indignant old ladies smashing the spoilers off suped-up Civics with hardwood canes. Children are dragged, weeping, away from their video-matronic machines and forced into the parks where they are assailed by woodland performances of Carmen and The Merchant of Venice. High culture swoops down from the heavens to rescue new generations from the fiery morasses of Music Television and Vin Diesel.

Moral panic is the established order bringing the iron fist of tradition down upon the upstart newfangledry of an insubordinate youth. It is a sensationalist mouthpiece media screaming for blood and, when blood is found, it is the finger which points to whichever knife is the most confusing and new. Once it was the printing press, and then it was cinema, and then radio, and then television, and now video games. Soon it will be virtual reality. There is a cycle of prejudicial censorship and unreasonable barbarism which follows the adoption of any significant new technology.

If the cycle persists, what kind of fucked-up thing could possibly bring us - us who are so open-minded - into the Panic? Will it be the Infant Rape-O-Matic that finally drives our well-weathered generation over the edge, inciting us to converge on the hideous apparatus with pitchforks while our children and children's children say, "Oh you old codgers, it's not that bad. C'mon. C'mon! Just try a rape." And then we will moralize that raping babies is bad and wrong while they roll their eyes at our antiquated ethics. We won't come around to the new generation's progressive point of view, but we'll have to accept it because we will be old and unable to walk without robot butlers which only the youth know how to program. In the end we'll sit around and grumble about how in 'The Good Old Days' people just used to decapitate ninjas in video games, none of this newfangled crazy-ass baby rape shit.

And the cycle begins anew.

Posted by Chris at 08:35 PM >> Commentations (3)