In-Your-Face Behavior

* Re “Growing Rage on Sidelines Takes Life of Hockey Dad,” July 11: The article discussing the killing of one father by another, apparently resulting from their respective sons’ altercation at the kids’ hockey game, states it is evidence of a growing sports rage. Sports rage, like road rage and air rage, is prompted by an excessively self-indulgent attitude affecting many people in our society. They, as David Brooks in his book “Bobos in Paradise” states, see self-actualization and unencumbered choices as paramount. Consequently, they resent authority being imposed upon themselves or their children, be it by an airline stewardess, traffic regulations or a coach or umpire at a sports event.

I personally experience a somewhat frightening reflection of this phenomenon in the West San Fernando Valley, where I live, though I’m sure it is not unique to that area, namely in the driving of SUVs, often by women, and many of such drivers’ disdain for traffic signs and driving courtesies in general. The operation of such dominant machines must give them the feeling that they are “kings” and “queens” of the road.

JOHN F. HAGGERTY

Woodland Hills

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There is a basic conflict between two July 12 editorials. The first one refers to Barry McCaffrey’s “harebrained” attempt to encourage the movie industry to downplay drug use in movies. The second deplores the “in-your-face epoch” in Boston in which one parent killed another during a hockey game argument and laments the “increasing prevalence of uncontrolled anger” in society among “ordinary people.”

It is now obvious that the increasing exploitation of violence in today’s movies (“The Fight Club” and countless others come to mind) glamorizes and thus encourages the same “creeping disrespect and incivility” and “asocial behavior” you deplore. So why don’t we call the blissfully irresponsible portrayal of drug use in movies what it is: Another attempt by Hollywood to glamorize another destructive, asocial behavior? We are victims today of a “tyranny of the visual,” and as Father Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of Notre Dame warns, we are losing our ability to be outraged.

JUNE MAGUIRE

Mission Viejo