Last week, on this page, freshman Kevin Grooms performed a public service by strongly reprimanding serial piercers. His condemnations, wonderfully witty and sharply concise, were aimed at those who rearrange various contours of their bodies to decorate themselves like tacky Christmas trees.

To refresh your memory, and because good writing should be enjoyed like free food-as much as possible-I here provide a particularly masterful part of his column:

“Perhaps some have a need to express themselves through piercings and tattoos, calling it all `body art.’ Whatever happened to keeping a diary?”

Today, in honor of Grooms, I’d like to draw attention to, and pour my scorn upon, another gauche display of our society’s puerility, more about which anon.

A few weeks ago, David McCullough, Pulitzer-prize winning biographer, spoke to a Washington audience about his latest work, a biography of John Adams. While offering a few observations about Adams and the founding generation, McCullough mentioned what he called an “inexcusable” fact. The fact is this: The literacy rate in Massachusetts was higher during the days of Adams than it is now.

Of course it is. How could it not be? America, producer of much that has helped mankind, produces the X-Box, Sony Play-Station, Sega-something, Nintendo, a contraption called Dreamcast, and other like distractions (e.g., the College Television Network), which serve primarily to atrophy the mind.

Today, every computer can carry dozens of different games, from those that simulate war to those that simulate poker. Before the end of the first quarter of this century, almost everything with an “on” switch may come equipped with some permutation of entertainment. As it is, teachers have to expel calculators from non math classes because most of the calculators come wired with games, and the youth of America cannot deny for a mere 50 minutes their addiction to pretending to race cars or play basketball.

Now, the diminished literacy rate is not the result solely of video games, or television, or the Internet-but there has been a cumulative, corrosive effect on the country’s collective mind. Liberals will blame it on the evil Republicans, especially Ronald Reagan, who wanted to dumb everyone down to take all their money to go yachting in the Caribbean.

I will admit that, upon returning home from a day’s toil in the early years of grade school, I sacrificed some of my after-school time at the altar of Mario and Luigi. And still today, courtesy of a splendid person who is generous with her Gameboy, I enjoy an almost biweekly game of Tetris.

But courtesy of Aristotle, I know this: In everything one does, feels, or believes, one must find the mean. For example, one must not eat too much or too little, but just the right amount. However, Aristotle also says that some actions do not admit of the mean. There is, for example, no “right amount” of committing adultery, stealing from the poor or watching “The Sound of Music.” Some actions are inherently wrong.

Regarding video games, TV and the Internet, they are not inherently wrong, but much of America has lost sight of the mean. Come nightfall, kids should be preparing to immerse themselves in great literature, not the blood flowing from detached limbs of a make-believe war.

Where are their parents, you say? Probably wielding the other controller. A Time magazine article recently noted that, according to Microsoft executives, the most popular games for the X-Box might be its “adult-oriented fare.” With the supernatural success of the Harry Potter series, which, as one commentator noted, has probably done more than anything in the past half-century to turn kids into readers, maybe more kids and parents will engage in the temptation to read more books. Unlikely, but a pleasant thought, is it not?

When John Quincy Adams left his father in France to attend Harvard, he could write and read in Greek and Latin. He knew Shakespeare, Byron and Shelley. He was 16.

Surely John Quincy was exceptional, but what do many 16-year-olds read and write now? “LOL”? “BRB”?

Matt Emerson is a sophomore studying political science.