Stage Four Breakdown- pornography, gun violence and social death

"The society and its institutions are no longer comprehensible and are increasingly out of control. Social consensus and a shared sense of social purpose have all but vanished. … Leaders govern virtually without support. The regulatory apparatus … [is] unable to cope with the overwhelming complexity, the loss of social legitimacy. … The situation has become intolerable and untenable. The need for fundamental change is inescapable.”

-- Duane Elgin


A trip to my local grocery store reveals a magazine rack with dozens of covers showing beautiful models selling a lifestyle that requires what the advertisers manufacture and market. Also on the rack are a half-dozen very slick magazines selling gun culture. There’s no other way to describe it; you never see a critical or analytic article. The photography is eye-catching and slick, the models manly and masculine — except for the hotties holding machine guns, a much loved image. There’s a strong focus on the latest versions of the now classic AR-15. The “look” of these magazines can be described only as gun porn. Instead of luscious, naked women spread across a centerfold, the usual cultural understanding of “pornography,” in these magazines its images of lethal weapons that trigger the erotic charge.

-- John Grant

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