Why Kids Are Ruining America
Teens are running roughshod over this country -- murdering, raping, gambling away the nation's future -- and we have the bills for counseling and prison to prove it. Sure, not all kids are bad -- but collectively, they're getting worse. Why should we blame ourselves? by Bret Easton Ellis
Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark
George Magazine
June/July, 1996
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This being an election year, politicians will feel compelled to demonstrate their sympathy with the electorate by trotting out the usual standby diagnoses of what is plaguing the country: a collapsing middle class, rising crime, a poor educational system, welfare, prurient entertainment, the budget deficit. But there's something far more insidious infecting America: Kids are ruining all of our lives. Their predilection for violent crime is at an all-time high, which has, in turn, inspired a multitude of new laws and regulations that threaten to dismantle the concept of civil liberties in the U.S. Add to this the fact that kids control the entertainment industry with their buying power, not to mention that they lie and cheat more than ever, and it's not surprising that a fair amount of hand-wringing (a nice euphemism for freaking out) is going on.
I have been responsible for demonizing the kids of my generation in four consecutive books (with a fifth on the way), though it was Less Than Zero -- set in L.A., the city where I grew up -- that brought the first taste of notoriety to both me and them. A jaundiced eye cast, a youthful disgust with American values, parental authority distrusted. But when I was a teeanger, in the early '80s, I felt I was growing up in a fairly sinister period. Exclude the fact that I witnessed a thousand onscreen deaths of my peers in the slasher movies that opened every week, and still it was the seemingly excessive behavior that disturbed me: the obsessive club-hopping, the sexual ambiguity (pre-AIDS), the casual drug use (pre-Just Say No), the studied nihilism; all of this set in an increasingly dangerous city. So when I wrote that book, I truly felt we were all headed for disaster (and for those who stayed in Hollywood and became screenwriters, we were); though now, by comparison, it looks like a relatively innocent era.
There never was really any moment in my own youth when I felt I was on the verge of careening into crime or mayhem -- with the exception of occasional drug use or driving while intoxicated. But class created the boundaries of what was tolerable. The people I knew growing up were for the most part rich (or, in the particulars of L.A. life, nouveau riche), but we had the same concerns and interests as did most kids, rich or poor: status, the desire for things, the cloying need for acceptance, an obsession with the way we looked, sex and junk culture and pop music. We also tended to ape the attitudes of our parents even while parodying them: We drove their cars, we took their pharmaceuticals, we went to their hairdressers, we watched the way they held themselves at parties. It was a put-on in some ways, if an extravagantly sophisticated sone. (Sometimes, though, it was hard to see where the put-on ended.) No matter how flawed or ridiculous our parents seemed, they still held on to a rigid set of values: screwed-up values at times but never explicitly antisocial.
It would be easy to be glib and condescending about the topic of kids in America, but things have changed drastically in the last 20- years, to the point where one can really only chuckle in grim disbelief. Cheating on exams? Smoking cigarettes? Shoplifting? You wish. Murder, rape, robbery, vandalism: the overwhelming majority of these crimes are committed by people under 25, and the rate is escalating rapidly.
Given that the generation who raised this group of kids was so disconnected, so embroiled in its own narcissism, who can blame the kids themselves? We get the kids we deserve. And when your formative years are so sketcy, and you live in a world where drugs are as available as soda and sex will kill you if it's not planned carefully (even though condom sales among kids are stagnant); a world where divorce reigns; where your fear of violence is so paralyzing your classmates carry box cutters and guns to school; and then you pile on top of this world the usual set of adolescent anxieties, is it any wonder that kids either turn into computer geeks alienated from actual experience or retreat into the solidarity of urban gang life? What did we expect the outcome to be? Eddie Haskell?
Should the government decide what's best for kids? Well, it decides what's best for their parents, so, in some cases, I'm inclined to think yes. For example, having lived in Los Angeles, I have no sympathy for gang members who complain about city curfews. Let Louisiana lower the drinking age to 18, as it did in March. Let cyberporn rule the Internet; make gambling more easily available to kids. Why bother baby-proofing society? The way kids are built today, they will surely just resent it. Besides, it's always better to work with kids than against them. They're going to take over anyway. Consider this consolation as you proceed through these scenes of minors in America: The kids of today will have to deal with the kids of tomorrow.
THEY KILL: A KNOCKED-OUT WINDOW, SNIPPED TELEPHONE WIRES. A RANSACKED LIVING ROOM SPLATTERED WITH CANINE BLOOD AND FECES. A BED STRIPPED AND BLOODSTAINED. NEXT TO IT AN OPEN JAR OF VASELINE. POLICE IN NEW PORT RICHEY, FLORIDA, STUMBLED UPON THIS gruesome scene at the home of 71-year-old Mildred Boroski in March 1995. They had come to tell the widow that they'd found her red Ford Tempo abandoned on a street by the Anclote River. But at the modest house, with its pink awnings and palm tree out front, no one was home.
TV crews swarmed into the middle-class neighborhood looking for answers. Johnathan Grimshaw, a tall, wiry 17-year-old, who lived across the street and sang in the school choir, gazed into the cameras as he stroked Boroski's cat, Twinkles. "She was such a nice old lady," he said, adding that he planned to adopt the pet.
Four days later, Boroski's partially clothed corpse was found in a nearby woods. Two months later, police arrested Grimshaw and another neighborhood boy, 17-year-old Nathan Ramirez, for first-degree murder and kidnapping. The teens reportedly confessed to the crime, saying it was a burglary gone awry: They had been lured into the elderly woman's home by the birthday presents stacked in the living room from her celebration the day before. Once the teens were in the house, the widow's poodle started yapping, so they bludgeoned it with a crowbar. They tied up Boroski with telephone cords, and Grimshaw allegedly raped her. They snagged two guns belong to her late husband and $30 in cash. They shoved Boroski into her car and drove to the woods, where Ramirez allegedly shot her twice in the head. Then the boys blew the cash on video games.
The murder was just the latest in a series of brutal acts by local youth against the elderly residents of Florida. Neighbors were still aghast over the so-called pinkie murder in nearby Hudson, in which a trio of teenagers -- the youngest age 14 -- killed a 55-year-old man and his 75-year-old mother, sawing off the man's little finger as a memento. "We're going to find someone to kill," Alvin Morton, the eldest of the three, had told his friends. Before that, another trio of teens had raped an elderly woman and forced her husband to watch. Why was so much evil flourishing in this region, residents wondered.
New Port Richey is a mellow, almost entirely white community where bingo is a big to-do. With affordable housing and lots of golf courses, this Gulf town of 17,000 is filled largely with retirees, many of whom now see the young as the enemy. Sales of guns and security systems have soared. "We're considered the runaway capital of Florida," says Mike Schreck, a local homicide detective. "Most crimes are committed by juveniles."
By Florida standards, the area's juvenile crime rate is low. But both the state's juvenile and overall crime rates rank among the highest in the country. Last year in Florida, more than 102,000 juveniles were charged with criminal offenses; more than 12,000 were arrested for violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and assault with a deadly weapon.
Florida's statistics mirror nationwide trends. And sociologists are troubled by the prediction that the national teen population will swell by more than 20 percent in the next decade, thanks to a mini-baby boom in the last 1980s. "We are facing a potential bloodbath of teenage violence in years ahead that will be so bad, we'll look back at the 1990s and say those were the good old days," says James Alan Fox, dean of criminal justice at Boston's Northeastern University. "Teenagers have higher rates for violent crime than any other age-group. The rate of killing by teenagers has increased 172 percent since 1985."
Fox's dire forecast is underscored by Pulitizer Prize-winning author Edward Humes, whose recent book, No Matter How Loud I Shout, documents a year in the L.A. juvenile court. "We have an army forming on the horizon," says Humes. "It's going to invade in the next 10 to 15 years, and we're not doing anything to defend ourselves."
The typical response of local authorities is to crack down on youth activities that could lead to violence. In Florida, cops enforce curfews in many cities and narcotics squads have set up drug stings in schools. As in other states, Florida's courts often try violent kids as adults; Morton, the pinkie murder ringleader, now sits on death row.
Punishment
It's Friday, the equivalent of open-mike night in Judge Michael Corriero's Manhattan courtroom. There's the ninth-grader who went on a robbery spree, the two girls who wielded a butcher's knife to steal a 12-year-old's knapsack, the 15-year-old accused of fatally shooting a man. Judge Corriero, who could pass for Al Pacino's younger brother, listens intently before deciding who gets jail and who gets probation, who gets youthful-offender status and who gets thrown into the much harsher adult system.
Rehabilitation or punishment? This vexing question, which Corriero weighs dozens of times each day, lies at the heart of a major political and philosophical battle over juvenile crime, which could have the emotional explosiveness of last year's welfare reform debate.
This crackdown on young lawbreakers has been fueled by the rising number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes. After remaining virtually constant between 1972 and the late '80s, the juvenile crime rate nationwide began to spike in 1990 and by 1992 had reached a 20-year high.
From 1988 to 1991, the youth murder-arrest rate climbed 80 percent. A handful of stomach-churning incidents also made teenage offenders seem more impulsive and vicious. Now, Hawaii is the only state that treats all kids under age 16 as juveniles. In Illinois and North Carolina, 13-year-old offenders can be treated as adults; in Vermont, 10 is the cut-off. In New York, only murder suspects under age seven are automatically treated as juveniles, and Governor George Pataki recently vowed to further toughen the state's law.
Both Democrats and Republicans have recognized the political rewards of outraged fist-pounding: 700 legislative proposals to prosecute minors as adults were introduced last year, a trend that President Clinton promised, in his State of the Union address, to pursue.
Meanwhile, 24 states allow kids under the age of 18 to get the death penalty. Although no criminal has been executed while a minor, some sentenced while minors have been put to death. Currently, 42 juveniles sit on death row.
-- Patricia Cohen
THEY NEED MORE LAWS
"HOW COME YOUR PANTS ARE SO SLACK IF YOU'RE NOT GANG-BANGIN'?" DEMANDS DEPUTY SHERIFF DAN BELLAND, TUGGING THE WAISTBAND OF THE 15-YEAR-OLD LATINO LEANING spread-eagled over the hood of his cruiser. The kid pleads absolute innocence, while his friend stays silent. It's 9:45 on a Friday night in Lancaster, California, and Belland has just found a pair of teens hanging out on a dimly lit corner. "Curfew in fifteen," barks Belland. "Don't let me see your faces."
With five minutes to go before ten o'clock, Belland guns his cruiser into a local strip mall multiplex parking lot on the scruffy northern edge of L.A. County and noses it up alongside a half-dozen teens just out from seeing Happy Gilmore. Freezing their attention with a spotlight, Belland rolls down his window and warns: "y'got five minutes to go. I see any of you here past ten, I'm doing the curfew thing on you. Got it?" The kids scatter, some heading for the pay phone to call for a ride home.
In the Antelope Valley desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale, city fathers are intent on preventing the spread of the youth violence that plagues the city of Los Angeles 50 miles to the south -- a place satanized in local parlance as simply "Down Below." If the kids violate curfew, they will be written up, part of Lancaster's three-year-old experiment in strictly enforcing an older municipal ordinance. That will oblige them to appear in juvenile traffic court -- where due process is streamlined -- accompanied by at least one parent. For the first offense, a parent can expect to pay up to $250. For a second violation, the fine can triple, and the teen can be slapped with probation and community-service work, theoretically even jail time.
Apart from the routine nightly patrol, the sheriff's department conducts a Valleywide "curfew sweep" on average once per month, combing the parks, fast-food joints and mall parking lots for minors and writing them up -- as many as 70 per operation. But that's just one of many law enforcement obstacles these teens must navigate. The conservatives who dominate the politics of Antelope Valley have established random high school drug inspections by dope-sniffing dogs. All seven public high schools now have a permanent, armed deputy sheriff on campus. Some kids caught in truancy raids are required to attend morality lectures by a former sheriff's deputy who is also a fundamentalist preacher. And teens are offered rewards of up to $1,000 for turning in peers involved with weapons, drugs, graffiti or other crimes. A new "daytime loitering by minors" ordinance will start fining parents just as the curfew law does.
In the private sector, the local mall prohibits groups of more than four teens from congregating. A dress code bans baseball caps worn backwards or sideways. "This was a quiet area off the beaten path in the '60s and '70s," says conservative mayor George Runner, a moving force behind many of the teen laws. "But with our phenomenal growth in the '80s, things started getting out of hand. Graffiti started appearing and people felt violated, like who's in control out there? So we started attacking the causal factors." Graffiti is down 75 percent since the curfew law started to be aggressively enforced, the mayor claims. Local police say youth crime is "stable" and argue that without this host of special measures, things would get worse.
Across America, some 1,000 cities and towns enforce juvenile curfew laws. Of the nation's largest 200 cities, 160 use curfew ordinances, including Houston, Dallas, San Diego, Miami and New Orleans. In Charleston, South Carolina, police ask parents to sign permission forms allowing officers to bring children home if found on the street after hours. In San Diego, detained kids are routinely handcuffed, fingerprinted, photographed and held, often overnight, until a parent comes calling.
A growing number of communities are also taking measures aimed specifically at gang suppression, including prohibiting young people from wearing certain colors, fraternizing with suspected gang members or displaying hand signals. In Jefferson Parish, near New Orleans, the police compose lists of suspected gang members and contact their parents. In Mentor-on-the-Lake, Ohio, 20 miles outside Cleveland, antigang rules include daytime curfews. Proponents of such laws argue that they are merely responding to a youth crime epidemic. But critics of the curfew laws -- such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which is waging legal battles to stop their implementation -- say these statutes criminalize status as opposed to conduct; do little if anything to address the economic and social roots of teen crime; ratchet up youth resentment; and are designed mainly to placate a frightened and aging electorate.
Many teens complain that their elders would do better to invest resources in activities and jobs. "There's no place to go, nothing to do around here," complains a 17-year-old senior at Lancaster's Quartz Hill High School. "You party at someone's house or hang out at the Taco Bell. Now the cops get you coming from either one."
Meanwhile, in Lancaster, a city rattled by near-tectonic social shifts, the get-tough approach still enjoys wide popularity. Through the '70s and '80s, Lancaster and neighboring Palmdate were among the fastest-growing American towns. A stream of almost entirely white, middle- and working-class families poured out of a declining Los Angeles and took up well-paying jobs in the booming aerospace sector. But defense downsizing hammered the local economy. Today, the two cities continue to grow at slower if still appreciable rates -- 3.5 percent instead of 12 percent -- but attract a poorer, more racially mixed group of settlers. "People used to come here looking for a future," Deputy Belland says as we cruise 30th Street. "Now, about the only future you're gonna find is in law enforcement."
With that we pull into the beach-size parking lot of the Taco Bell, at the corner of 30th West and Avenue L -- notorious as the site of a 1991 youth shooting and as the hangout for the Valley's high school kids. "You could come here on some nights and find 200 kids just hanging out," says Belland. "Our phones down at the station would be ringing off the hook with calls from citizens afraid to use the other stores in the shopping center." But on this Friday night, at 11:30 there are only two or three cars in the lot, and everyone inside them is of age. Belland looks out over the rest of the empty parking lot. The cold desert wind pushes weeds and papers across it, giving the place the feel of a sodium-lit ghost town. "I guess this curfew thing is working," he says. "It's mighty quiet tonight."
-- by Marc Cooper
Florida officials, like their counterparts in other states, are also trying to understand just what makes kids turn to crime. In Tampa, 50 miles south of New Port Richey, a two-story yellow cinder-block building houses the jewel of Florida's recent efforts. The Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC) is the first stop for young lawbreakers in Hillsborough County. Here cops, counselors, juvenile justice officials, human resource groups and substance abuse specialists join to assess juvenile crime from all angles. More than 20,000 cases have passed through here since May 1993. JAC has two sections: one for truants, the other for kids who've been arrested. In the latter, all doors are locked and movements videotaped. Three deputies stand behind computers, pulling records from police and judicial data banks. A restraining chair sits in one corner, awaiting the unruly, who are strapped in and wheeled to a separate room.
On a Wednesday afternoon, nine youths -- some black; some white -- are dropped off at JAC, fingerprinted, photographed and given a drug test. They are asked 139 questions about family, school, drug use, friends, sex and their emotional well-being. Eight of the nine have been there before. Most come from violent backgrounds, and most live with single parents, almost always their mothers. Their crimes are typical: car theft, assault, shoplifting, drug possession and dealing. It's not unusual to see a lengthy rap sheet: A 16-year-old may have more than 20 offenses. "We've had little kids abusing their parents," says Deputy Mary Horne. "We've had eight-year-olds in here for sexual battery. Nothing shocks us anymore. After working here, I don't want to have kids."
Some JAC youths will land in group homes, where they will continue schooling and learn job skills such as woodworking. Some are put into intervention programs, such as Drug Court. Others will be put on probation or house arrest. And all will be assigned a caseworker to recommend them to assorted family and peer counseling groups. Despite the individualized attention, tracking and involvement of families and schools, many kids will be back.
A tremor of anxiety seems to run through the place. How can the community predict which teens will turn murderous and, more important, how can they reverse the tendency? So far, no one has arrived at a surefire tool to identify the seeds of evil behavior -- the search goes on across the country, as it has over the centuries. "You can assess kids from now until doomsday and it still adds up to nothing if you don't have places to send them," says Michael J. Dale, law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Ford Lauderdale and former director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco. "Some kids just need a haven to get them away from their homes. Others need to be locked up for a good long time. And there are lots of in-betweens. Figuring out which kids need what is not the hardest part. The hard part is doing something about it."
Parental Rights
As the government increasingly sets parameters for teens, some parents are fighting to ensure that their child-rearing decisions remain preeminent. In 1995, the Christian Coalition proposed a parental-rights amendment to the Constitution. Sex education, parental consent for abortions and home schooling are among the issues that have spurred this drive.
Teachers' unions, abortion rights advocates and civil liberties groups have called the movement a "stealth campaign" to give Christian conservatives more control over public education. Greg Erken, executive director of the parental-rights group Of the People, claims its own proposed amendment on the state level is an exercise in consciousness-raising. "We want to get a debate going about whether parents really matter. Or can we have teachers, social workers and cops raising children? In a democracy, it's an act of faith that if you give citizens rights, they'll act responsibly. We're saying that we ought to place that same faith in citizens in their capacity as parents." Prince v. Massachusetts (1955), the decision that declared the state's right to enforce school attendance, vaccination and child labor laws and to protect children from abuse, would not be challenged, proponents argue. The amendment has been introduced in 24 states, and an endorsement in January by Governor George Allen of Virginia highlighted the issue. The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on a parental-rights bill co-sponsored by Bob Dole this summer.
-- Joy Press
THEY BLOW MONEYA PILE OF $5 BILLS FLUTTERS ON THE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF CROWN FRIED CHICKEN, A JERSEY CITY HANGOUT RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL. A GROUP OF LINCOLN STUDENTS IS GATHERED AROUND THE CASH, throwing dice. The game is called C-low, and students say it's not uncommon to see $500 riding on a singl eroll. Today, the kids are playing for just five bucks a game, but at this harried, casinolike pace, the stakes and the consequences can add up: Last year, a dispute over a C-low game led to the shooting death of 18-year-old Ricky Bradley, a former student at nearby Snyder High School. As the game continues, the pressure builds on the players not to let down the growing number of spectators -- the guys smoking pot and bobbing to the chaotic rhythms of four competing boom boxes, and the girls inside Crown eating lunch and watching the game through the plate-glass windows. A 17-year-old student blows on the three dice, rubs them against the arch of his sneakers for luck, then casts them toward the pile of cash: double threes and a four.
Doubles and a five or six will beat his roll, as will triples, or the elusive, magical combination known as C-low: four-five-six. A one-two-three combination is an automatic loss -- "aced" -- and the onlookers taunt the next roller with calls of "123rd Street, last stop!" The kid confidently tosses the dice against the concrete wall. The crowd closes in, the young girls inside. Crown press their faces to the window. "C-low, baby!" he shouts. Then, reaching for the money, he says, "That's dough."
C-low, a street variation on craps, has been around for years, but it's showing a strange resurgence among high school students these days. It's part of a nationwide gambling fixation among the young. Studies by Harvard Medical School and Illinois State University have concluded that between 6 and 8 percent of teenagers are compulsive or problem gamblers. Dr. Howard Shaffer, the director of Harvard's Center for Addiction Studies, believes that for kids in the '90s, gambling addiction is becoming as big a problem as drug addiction. And as with drugs, gambling often leads to other crimes. In Newark this year, a 16-year-old boy was charged with pimping his girlfriend to pay off his sports gambling debts. And in suburban Nutley, authorities busted a high school bookmaking ring after one debtor was kidnapped and then abandoned near a housing project in Newark's Central Ward.
To gamble, kids need money, and these days, they have access to plenty. According to Teenage Research Unlimited, youngsters in the U.S. spend $109 billion a year; two-thirds have their own bank accounts, and nearly one in five plays the stock market. By the time they're 19 years old, 37 percent carry credit cards.
If it's not their own money they're spending, kids are telling their parents what to buy. And their power is growing rapidly, says James McNeal, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University, who found that preteens directly influence the spending of $170 billion a year. Indirectly, they influence the spending of hundreds of billions more.
Habits formed in early years often translate into adult problems. Ed Looney, head of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, says that the majority of adult compulsive gamblers who call his hot line say they placed their first bets by age 14. "They start out with pogs or milk tops, then go to C-low, lottery tickets and on to sports, horses and casinos," he says.
Ray, a 28-year-old member of Gamblers Anonymous in New Jersey, says his problem started "at about nine," when he first saw older kids pitching quarters. "One day a fella hit $50 and I thought he was like a millionaire. I played and lost nine bucks to my brother. I stole from my sister to pay for it." The bottom fell out last year, he says, when "my fiancee walked out on me after six years because I was drinking and gambling." Ray joined Gamblers Anonymous -- whose members pledge not to buy even raffle tickets or invest in the stock market -- and says he hasn't wagered a dime in 12 months.
Finding ways for kids to cut down on spending isn't a political priority. In fact, as the bottom falls out of education funding, schools increasingly rely on the support of the private sector, which inevitably comes with strings attached. Advertisements proliferate on the sides of school buses and even in textbooks. To deal with their addiction and debts, kids are lesft to their own devices. In New Jersey, a proposal before the assembly to include one hour a year on compulsive gambling in the high-school health curriculum is opposed by Governor Christine Todd Whitman's Department of Education. And of the state's nearly $1 billion annual gambling-related revenue, $130,000 has been allotted for gambling-treatment programs. When asked what he would do if C-low got him into the red, a 16-year-old boy lingering outside the Crown in Jersey City didn't hesitate before answering: "I'd hold somebody up and get the money."
Under Surveillance
At Seminole Middle School, in Plantation, Florida, an intricate web of cameras provides sweeping coverage of hallways, doorways, the cafeteria and a bicycle rack. A supervisor armed with a Handycam at Dana Hills High School, in Dana Point, California, zeroes in on a student skipping class. At Hazen High School, in Renton, Washington, students watch one another on a 19-inch video monitor located in a lounge. While the mode of surveillance varies, a rapidly increasing number of schools -- some 3,000 to date, according to the National School Safety Center -- are succumbing to the allure of electronic-age security.
Dr. Roger Damerow, superintendent of schools for Waterbury, Connecticut, says that the roughly $22,000 from the Federal Safe and Drug Free Schools Program invested on surveillance cameras was money well-spent. "Our goal is to deter bad behavior, such as making an obscene gesture at a passing car or consciously creating trouble. Our intent isn't evil; it's simply to ensure the safety of our children and create a record of who did what to whom. We're occupying the moral high ground here."
Don Sadler, director of operations for the Huntsville, Alabama, school system, where an elaborate Integrated Services Digital Network was recently installed, agrees. The nearly $2 million spent in the past ten years to monitor all of its 44 schools has saved Huntsville $700,000 in insurance premiums alone. Adds Sadler, "Regardless of financial concerns, any measures to create a safe environment can't be justly criticized."
Students at Middleton High School, in Middleton, Wisconsin, might feel differently. In a case of life imitates art or, more specifically, life imitates the film Sliver, a reporter for the school newspaper discovered a hidden video camera whose scope covered the entire boy's locker room. The principal, Charlene Gearing, had it removed. She told the press that although the camera, installed by her predecessor, was meant to prevent crime, it was still an invasion of privacy.
Loren Siegel, director of public education for the American Civil Liberties Union, sees the enormous increase in the use of video surveillance across the United States as cause for concern. "The availability of new technologies makes it easier. But just because it's easier doesn't make it wiser."
-- Chris Nutter
THEY CONTROL THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRYTHE TWINS CAN'T SING. THEY CAN'T DANCE. THEY CAN'T ACT AND THEY'RE NOT FUNNY. MULTI-TALENTLESS THEY MAY BE, BUT THE NINE-YEAR-OLD OLSEN SISTERS, MARY-KATE AND ASHLEY, ARE PERCHED PRETTILY ATOP A SHOW BUSINESS EMPIRE whose tentacles reach deep into many media. At the tender age of nine months, the girls made their small-screen double-duty debut as the gurgling, chimplike Michelle on Full House, a sitcom so squishy it should have been preceded by a parental guidance notice warning off any diabetics in the audience. Nonetheless, it consistently ranked among the 15 highest-rated shows during its seven-season run.
The elusive charm of the blond, blue-eyed Olsens led to popular demand for more entertainment products in which the two sibs could be seen in their unremarkably identical glory. Top-rated TV movies begat CDs, feature films and their own upcoming sitcom. A series of home videos -- some featuring the Olsen girls as the crime-solving Trenchcoat Twins, others with them in their jammies inviting watchers to a sleep-over -- propelled their company, DualStar, into second place in home video income, behind only the colossus Disney.
If the above information causes you to scratch your head and mutter, "Olsens? Trenchcoat? Sleep-over? Huh?" chances are you're clawing at a bald spot that first felt the pressure back in 1977, when Star Wars changed the face of entertainment. Star Wars was a B movie given A treatment. It was also a lunch pail, a video game, a comic book, a pillowcase and a hamburger wrapper -- in other words, all about kids. And since then, since that moment of epiphany when it became evident that a bunch of clueless, pockmarked, metal-mouthed 12-year-olds could not only open a movie but also supply the repeat business to push it into the stratosphere, everything's been all about kids.
Star Wars was an explicit warning to the over-30s that it was time to head home and microwave their own popcorn, because the national multiplex was about to be cordoned off by a velvet rope that they stood no hope of squeezing past. Of the top 20 grossers of all time, only two predate Star Wars: the kid-sedating Gone With the Wind and Jaws, which pretty much wrote the summer-movie-as-thrill-ride rule book. And only four -- Forrest Gump, Beverly Hills Cop, Ghost and Terminator 2: Judgment Day -- could be described as containing even vaguely adult themes. If the '80s was an extended exercise in adolescent wish fulfillment, the current decade has seen movie screens crammed with fresh-faced, moist-nosed preteens, not a goatee or a track mark among them. Eighties teen tycoon John Hughes became the kind of kindergarten with Home Alone as he ransacked the creche for younger and younger talent. Family-aimed features have swelled the bank accounts of actors Elijah Wood, Tina Majorino, Christina Ricci, Gaby Hoffman, Jesse Bradford, Brian Bonsall, Jason James Richter and Brad Renfro. Even Jim Carrey and Saturday Night Live spawn Adam Sandler and Chris Farley can attribute a substantial part of their success to the prepubescent audience that wets its pants every time one of these cut-ups wets his pants.
It's the tots who went and went and went, and made their parents take them and take them and take them, to The Lion King, Beauty & the Beast, Pocahontas and The Little Mermaid, which in turn funded Disney's attempts to pursue legitimacy with Oliver Stone's Nixon and Martin Scorsese's forthcoming Dalai Lama biopic (I'm already planning not to go see it).
It's the tykes, transfixed by the purple dinosaur Barney and taught to talk by Sesame Street, that have kept PBS in the anesthetic business. Nielsen ratings -- toppers Seinfeld and Friends may be too packed with overgrown kids to allow for any genuine anklebiters among the cast but the nightly listings are otherwise awash in precocity, training bras and prom traumas. A full three cable networks -- Nickelodeon, Disney and MTV -- are devoted entirely to teen tastes. ABC and the laughingstock netlets WB and UPN all set aside entire nights of programming for kids under age 14. CBS has its yenta Mary Poppins in The Nanncy. Even NBC, with its massed ranks of the adorable twentysomething audiences, still makes room for its Fresh Prince and for Brotherly Love -- the vehicle for Blossom veteran Joey Lawrence and his two brothers. Hoping to slice off a little of the Olsen action for themselves are two other sets of twins: Tia and Tamera Mowry, the scary, synchronized scenery-chewers from Sister Sister; and the va-va-voomy future centerfolds Cynthia and Brittany Danile from Sweet Valley High.
The adolescent dollar has always oiled the pop chart wheels, but in 1991, when Billboard introduced the SoundScan method of sales tabulation (whereby pop charts reflect actual record sales rather than the number of records shipped out to stores), previously marginalized genres swept into prominence. Suddenly, the collective appetite for grunge and gangsta rap, hitherto regarded as the province of stubbly, academic rockpress scribblers, caused hernias and heart murmurs among radio programmers and record executives caught on the hop once again by the mercurial nature of ... the kids! Meanwhile, the younger brothers and sisters of the pierced constituency began buying releases by their own contemporaries, sending such product skyrocketing up the charts. Queen of the pack is the sloe-eyed, platinum-selling Brandy, who is positioned to take over preeminence from that granny Whitney Houston. Nipping at Brandy's heels are the similarly single-monikered Monica, 3T (the sons of the much-maligned Tito Jackson) and the excellently named Immature.
Does anyone these days launch a big-budget movie, album, television show or software without factoring teen appeal into the equation? Doubtful. The kids have the disposable income, they've got the free time, and they've got the obsessive nature.
You might have thought that, rather than receiving the V-chip without complaint, craven network executives and communications paymasters could have mustered the defense that, far from brutalizing and desensitizing the nation's youth with shows pitched over their heads, the networks were actually coddling and pampering kids with everything they could ever hope to see. Because everything's about kids. You want to know why you get bored so fast watching television? Why you can't pay attention to anything for more than two minutes? Why you covet your friends' possessions and why you burst into frustrated tears at the slightest provocation? Because you're immersed in a world of kid-aimed entertainment, and it's having an adverse affect on your emotional growth. The first pol who proposes compulsory installation of a K-chip will win by a landslide.
TEN THINGS KIDS HAVE WRECKED FOR ADULTS:
1. CIGARETTE MACHINES
2. ASPIRIN BOTTLES
3. CYBERSEX
4. SEX IN GENERAL
5. BROADWAY
6. BACKSEAT CAR WINDOWS
7. SCENIC OVERLOOKS
8. WOODSTOCK
9. GUNS
10. DINOSAURS