When I have the means to buy new books again, I plan on reading The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.

We are all too familiar with the old song about how video games, or movies, or rap lyrics or whatever are all hurting the children or destroying America or what have you.  How sad that, in the 1950s, we were singing the same song except about comic books.  Yes, comic books, the great destroyers of civilization.  The Senate actually held hearings on “the effect of comic books on the crime rate,” which you can hear more about in this segment of On The Media.

I used to do a regular bit on the podcast called “Look how far we’ve come,” the purpose of which was to imply that, in fact, we haven’t come very far at all.  Instead of learning from our own history, we are simply repeating it over and over again like a bunch of mindless neanderthals.  Fifty years ago it was comic books and communists, today it’s video games and terrorists.  Same program, different station.

I wonder who or what we’ll be blaming for the downfall of civilization fifty years from now?