It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

We've all heard about the stereotypical artist/university professor who assumes that it is his or her role to shock students out of their middle class innocence and complacency. But, as University Diaries notes, that was then. Now, the would-be shockers often find an audience that is way ahead of the curve:

Truth be told, though, rather than a confrontation between a liberated aesthete (creative writing professor) and a repressed bourgeois (student), this sort of classroom interaction is a marriage made in heaven -- an already sadistically oriented American kid links up with a 'sixties type who thinks Bertolucci's Dreamers is high art, and who assigns novels, poems, and plays that have precisely the same content as the video games he's been playing but are gussied up as high culture and taken seriously by adults. This is a dream come true for the kid - a glossy legitimation of his darkest drives.

There is a sort of poetic justice to this but the underlying reality is a bit troubling to me.