Oh dear. The news out of Washington is that Congress is going to investigate the state of our tastes and morals and specifically, according to Mark Preston in Roll Call, “the decline of America’s culture” as evidenced by “the recent acts of violence that have engulfed the nation.” In case you, like me, have been living quietly in “the nation” without any awareness of having been “engulfed” by violence, allow me to interpret. A couple of teenagers from well-to-do homes outside Denver shot up their high school last April, killing a dozen other teenagers, a teacher, and themselves. You may have heard about it. The media thought it a much bigger story than other recent incidents of the kind partly because more than the usual number were killed and partly because the outrage was committed by the issue not of some trailer park in Arkansas but of good middle-class, gym-enhanced loins like those belonging to the media elite. Suddenly, evidence that school shootings were on the decline notwithstanding, we were “engulfed”—by the coverage if not by murderous teenagers.

Naturally enough, if the media think so, Congress thinks so too. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, said to be “the driving force” behind the proposed special committee, told Preston that “What we want to do is take the long view and the deep view of how did we get a culture the way it is today that has got so much violence and so much hatred, destruction, and mayhem