Wednesday, September 18, 19.85
Daily Nebraskan
Page 5
ITT ' JTJ 1
ius oom .t .Know now to oiusn anymore
ere is a question that might
cause you to blush: What causes
you to blush?
When considering the campaign
against- ,fporn rock" vulgar and
obscene lyrics in rock music con
sider 'that -question, and this one:
Would you want to live in a world in
which no one, hot even the ' young,
blushed? '
jQW George
1-V1 Will
Various parents' groups are putting
wholesome pressure on recording
companies, radio stations and the
makers of rock videos to exercise dis
cretion and self-restraint. Approximately
one-third of the nation's radio stations
have rock formats, and many are behav
ing responsibly. But the sort of people
who profit from aggressively marketing
porn rock have the morals of the mar
ketplace, and the marketplace is the
place to get their attention. In addi
tion, putting labels on records with
vulgar lyrics is going to help parents
exercise supervision.
Rock music has become a plague of
messages about sexual promiscuity,
bisexuality, incest, sado-masochism,
satanism, drug use, alcohol abuse and,
constantly, misogyny. The lyrics regard
ing these things are celebratory,
encouraging or at least desensitizing.
By making these subjects the common
TT
11
Many reasons fail as
justifications for violence
ROGERS from Page 4
This rule is no different for the state
than for the individual. Morally, the
state is little more than a congregation
of individuals. However, this claim
does not deny that congregations act
differently than individuals and, thus,
are justly permitted to act differently.
Consequently, civil government must
obey constraints upon just action sim
ilar to those upon the individual or
small institutions.
Emory law professor Roger Pilon dis
tinguished between reasons and war
rants for actions as they affect civil
policy: "(T)o have a reason for want
ing to control someone or something is
.. not the same as having a warrant or
justification for doing so ... . A
gunman surely has reasons for taking
his victim's wallet, but no justification
for doing so.
"But to have a justification for doing
something, especially when others are
affected by that action, is ordinarily to
have more than a mere reason for doing
it. It is to have a warrant or a right to
undertake the action. And this warrant
or right is not simply an evaluative but
a normative notion, rooted not in con
notation alone but in the faculty of
reason and hence in the theory of
justification."
The moral basis of conservatism
does not lie in some simplistic vision of
static governmental size for where
justified, the conservative's viewpoint
leads to the embracing of a more than
minimal state. However, rightful state
action is justly employed only in
response to threats. In contrast the
liberal employs the intrinsic violence
of the state for any one of a veritable
plethora of mere reasons from mat
A . MEL7
tisit t isn Lsttcrrasa's Club
currency of popular entertainment, the
lyrics drain the subjects of their power
to shock their power to make people
blush. The concern is less that children
.will emulate the frenzied behavior des
cribed in porn rock than that they will
succumb to the lassitude of the demor
alized literally, the' de-moralized.
As people become older they become
' less given to blushing. This is, in part,
because they lose that sweet softness
of youthful character, that is called
innocence and makes one's sensibili-
ties subject to shock. People blush for
various reasons. Sometimes it is because
we suddenly have embarrassing atten
tion called to ourselves. Sometimes we
blush when utterly alone, when we
think of something about ourselves
that is shaming such as the fact that
almost nothing causes us to blush.
Often people blush because they are
exposed to something that should be
private or is shameful. This may be an
endangered species of blushing, thanks
to omnipresent vulgarities like porn
rock making even the vilest things
.somehow banal.
Walter Berns, the political philo
. sopher, asks: What if, contrary to Freud
and such conventional wisdom, shame
is natural to man and shamelessness is
acquired? If so, the acquisition of
shamelessness through the shedding of
"hang ups" is an important political
event. There is a connection between
self-restraint and shame. An individual
incapable of shame and embarrassment
is probably incapable of the gover
nance of the self. A public incapable of
shame and embarrassment about pub-
, lie vulgarity is unsuited to self-govern
ters of taste to the supposed civil
claims of altruism (although it can be
readily doubted that any altruism exists
when violence is employed to prod the
activity of "charity").
The liberal state is the dehumaniz
ing state: Human beings are treated as
resources to be used for some greater
human good. This vision of humanity
stands in sharp contrast to the conser
vative vision, which holds that unless
the individual engages in criminal vio
lence, society is not justified in aggres
sing against him for any reason.
Only upon this conservative vision
can a truly just and human culture be
reconstructed. The alienation and de
humanization of "modern" and secular
Western states are a cruel joke played
upon the human spirit by minds con
vinced of their own brilliance, minds
which that culture cannot progress
without their "enlightened" meddling.
Editorial policy
Unsigned editorials represent offi
cial policy of the fall 1985 Daily Ne
braskan. Policy is set by the Daily
Nebraskan Editorial Board. Its members
are Vicki Ruhga, editor in chief; Jona
than Taylor, editorial page editor; Ad
Hudler, news editor, Suzanne Teten,
campus editor and Lauri Hopple, copy
desk chief.
Editorials do not necessarily reflect
the views of the university, its em
ployees, the students or the NU Board
of Regents.
The Daily Nebraskan's publishers
are the regents, who established the
UNL Publications Board to supervise
the daily production of the paper.
if yr:r
H, U
ment.
There is an upward ratchet effect in
the coarsening of populations. Today's
12-year-olds can not enjoy can hardly
sit still for the kind of 1950s West
erns that enthralled their fathers.
Today's 12-year-olds are so addicted
(that is not too strong a word) to the
slam-bang nonstop roar of Steven
Spieiberg movies, their attention is not
held by, say, John Wayne in "She Wore a
Yellow Ribbon."
The social atmosphere is heavily
dosed with sexuality, from the selling
of blue jeans to the entertaining of
prime-time television audiences. Thus
it is perhaps reasonable to have feel
ings of fatalism. Perhaps societies, like
rivers, run naturally downhill. Perhaps
the coarsening of a public is irreversible,
especially when the coarsening con
cerns a powerful and pleasurable appe
tite such as sex. But is is demonstrably
not true that societies can not move
away from coarseness toward delicacy
of feeling.
In the first half of he 18th century,
the dawn of the Age of Reason, a form of
English merriment on Guy Fawkes
nights was to burn an effigy of the
Pope. The belly of the effigy was filled
with cats whose howls of agony in the
flames were supposed to represent the
voice of the devil emanating from the
Catholic Church.
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That kind of cr nelty to animals is, by
today's standards, obscene. Sensibili
ties can change for the better. So fatal
ism is wrong and the porn rock fight is
worth fighting.
Mass culture, and especially music,
matters. Nothing is more striking to a
young parent than the pull of popular
culture on even 3- and 4-year-olds. And
perhaps good music can make good
values more adhesive to children.
People can reasonably argue about
what is the second finest work of music
a Mozart concerto, a Beethoven
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symphony, this or that Bach tune. But
everyone knows that the acme of the
art of music is the currently popular
song that says, "Put me in coach, I'm
ready to play. . . . Look at me, I can be
centerfield." The Republic has a fight
ing chance as long as the popularity of
porn rock can be rivaled by the popu
larity of its moral opposite, baseball
rock.
1985, Waslngton Post Writers Group
Will is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist
and contributing editor for Newsweek
magazine
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