[UA] UA this one!

[Royal Minister of Stuff]

--- Timothy Toner <thanatos at interaccess.com> wrote:
> Cripes, this is a weird one...
> 
> 
> Boy Scouts Destroy Dinosaur Tracks
> 

THE BAD PART
I think the boy scouts themselves are a symbol of the
corruption or perversion of human relationships with
nature and, perhaps, even the society around them.

This is not just because what little I remember of my
entire two years of scout experience consisted of
watching Scott Flores get slam-dunked by old,
hyper-aryan eagle scouts while I hid behind the
drunken scout master's divan.

The Hitler Youth and the Young Pioneers work along the
same lines as scouting and even based some of their
customs off Robert Lord Baden Powell's ideas.  Of
course, Powell was a "naturalist" in the same sense
that land developers are conservationists.

I think movies like "Tea and Sympathy" point out an
inherently problematic element in scouting: the
tendancy to emphasize negative or macho-stupid group
interaction.

In that way, the boy scouts can be a powerful symbol
for the corruption of youth by overzealous
indoctrination, peer pressure and a sort of
self-destructive nostalgic naivete.  Boy scouts show
up in my stories as examples of the "sleeping tiger,"
usually belittling the "innocence of youth" idea and
the idea that kids would respond better to magic than
adults.

THE GOOD PART
On the other hand, my sister was in the Brownies and
loved it.  She made friends that she keeps in touch
with to this day and learned to recognize and utilize
her own assets as a woman, or, she says, at least laid
the groundwork for it.  She's now a lot more
successful in life than I am, financially, anyway, and
seems to be able to take the hard blows life can
sometimes deal a hell of a lot better than I do. She's
also found religion while I sorta flounder around
wondering if there aren't other options after you die
besides paradise or pergatory and how the hell will I
spot them?  

So scouting groups can also be used to show the human
need for formal groups.  Characters in the scouts can
be molding youth or act as a kind of initiation
ceremony for greater secrets.  They can represent the
positive side of indoctrination: a process that makes
it easier to get along in society.

Personally, I used the scouts in a sort of Village of
the Damned fashion or as a kind of sullen brigade of
ballistic little punks.

=====
-- Rp Bowman, Royal Minister of Stuff
The Electronic Nation of Yokeltania:
http://www.geocities.com/yokeltania/

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