"Kids are like rookie literary critics, always on the hunt for sentimentality. The camera becomes a worrying signifier to them..."

"... that tells them that they are engaged in something that is good for them or Meaningful. They don’t want to be engaged in any activity that is worthy of being photographed."

John Dickerson applies himself assiduously to the task of analyzing why his children, once so unselfconsciously vulnerable to the camera's inspection, became impossible to photograph as they turned adolescent.

Interesting quote — isn't it? — the way he takes himself out of the vignette. The "worrying signifier" — the camera— is in the hand of a human being, the father. And the meaning of the camera isn't merely that they are doing something "Meaningful," but that the father sees meaning in what they are doing. When they were younger, they lacked the ability to think about the father's mind, and now that they have acquired the great power to imagine things from the perspective of another, they object. Is it that "they don’t want to be engaged in any activity that is worthy of being photographed" or that they demand control over what their now-conscious selves mean?

"This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns."

"Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here."

Wrote Bobby Jindal in a post titled "We fill Our Culture With Garbage, And We Reap The Result," which I read because Talking Points Memo was trashing it. Josh Marshall said: "Bobby Jindal appears to be a seriously disturbed, morally degenerate individual."