Our self-appointed betters have always deplored the corrupting influences of popular entertainment. For example, penny dreadfuls "were alleged to have encouraged anti-social attitudes and criminal behavior in the young during the last quarter of the nineteenth century." In his 1936 encyclical "On the Motion Picture," Pope Pius XI warned that the more popular the motion picture had become, "the more pernicious and deadly has it shown itself to morality and to religion and even to the very decencies of human society." In 1954, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on the the influence of comics on rising teenage crime. And let's not forget FCC chairman Newton Minow's 1961 critique of television as a "vast wasteland" where viewers are subjected to a "procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons." The claque of moralizing scolds now wants to ban violent video games.
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