In Defense of Goth

As I said here yesterday the link between the Goth subculture and the murders in Medicine Hat are coincidental not causal.

Goth culture defended in wake of triple murder

Elaine Foster, who has been involved in Vancouver's goth culture for 20 years, said goths make convenient targets. Foster said instead of blaming goth culture or the internet for the Medicine Hat deaths, people should be looking at why a 12-year-old girl was involved with a 23-year-old man and surfing on adult websites.

The blaming of subcultures, especially such an outre and dark one is too easy, the real question of the emotional plague affecting the individuals gets shoved aside in favour of scapegoating kulture. Such as occured after the Columbine massacre.

This is not the first time that the Goth Subculture in Canada has been associated with mysterious deaths. Such was the case two years ago in Vancouver with Mark Rempel and Rachel Adams who disappeared, and later were found hung in mysterious circumstances.

Much was made in the media of their flirtation with tattoos, S&M and piercings led the media to claim they were part of the Goth scene. But as one member of the Vancouver Goth Scene wrote on the Goth B.C. listserve;

Apparently, although I didn't see it myself, Global Television used a picture
that was uploaded to Gothic BC (not a picture I took myself so, unfortunately,
by the terms of the upload agreement I don't control the copyright) in order
to play up the "freaks get ratings" card in the disappearance of Mark Rempel
and Rachel Adams. The Vancouver Province (both GlobalTV and the Province are
owned by CanWest Global Communications, BTW) also played up the tenuous "Goth" connection.

While I have a general human concern for their well-being and sympathize with
my friends that do know them through work and other associations I don't know
either of these people. I've never met either of these people. I'm a decade
older than Mark and a decade and a half older than Rachel. It was only through
a friend who happens to work with Rachel that I learned about this in the
first place.

The last place they were seen in public was at the Infected Mushroom concert -
a psytrance event - yet there is no rave scene connection being made. Is it
perhaps a little too close to Hallowe'en and someone in Global Media thinks
that they will sell more seasonal ad space with an old-fashioned witch hunt?

I'm tired of this. I'm tired of being called "goth" and having a whole raft
of assumptions come along with it. I'm a painter, a designer, a programmer, a
writer... another creative intellectual coming out of a tradition that over
the years has been called Romanticism, Bohemianism, Avant Garde, Beat, and
what-have-you. Twenty-five years ago it picked up the moniker "Gothic" and it
stuck for a while, but there has been more and more divergence lately.

In fact the goth subculture like the occult subculture in general has been a target of the Christian Revivalists who also attacked public daycare, same sex marriage, rock & roll, etc. as part of an incidious international satanic conspiracy.

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, from 1996, and its sequel from four years later, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. These Southern-Gothic documentaries, from Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, cover in detail the bizarre case of three Arkansas teenagers dubiously charged with satanic murders during the last outburst of Christian apocalypticism, in the late Reagan era.

This is the site that both accused visited, it is definitely adult in nature which is why it is full of personals by 14 and 15 year olds. Yes that was sarcasm.

Of course that is why the 12 year old accused listed herself as 15. Everyone else does too. There is a tragic irony in all this, since the current Conservative government wants to raise the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16 and drop the age that teenagers can face criminal charges for murder as adults to 14.

You are old enough to know better in one case and not the other. Typical muddled conservative christian moralist thinking. Which results in furthering the emotional plague of mixed value messages teenagers get from their surrounding culture.

For more on Goth see:An Early History of Goth

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