I will tender an observation or two.
First, it is difficult to watch TV on nearly any channel for more than ten minutes without seeing someone shot, and/or handcuffed to a chair in some form, and interrogated. You see it in ads for TV, with this show “The Alienist” making plain appeals to those fascinated by the horrific. You see violence during the day, on substantially all networks, and with no honest or serious concern for viewers under 18, 15, 10, or even 5.
And of course most parents don’t care. Family friends of ours were letting their kids watch “300” when they were under age 10.
There is a part of our brains which is unable to fully and completely separate fantasy rendered realistically from reality. It is in fact our emotional involvement with the actors portraying fantastic scenes which makes watching TV, watching movies, an emotional experience, which pulls us out of mundane homes, while sitting on large couches, eating fatty highly processed food, drinking alcohol, and makes us feel–SOMETHING.
And this violence, of course, is interspersed with clever ads telling us that things and experiences will complete our lives, that everyone else is happy, and we alone something else, but that buying and buying and buying, sooner or later, will fulfill us.
Most Americans are being indoctrinated/acculturated by this medium up to 10 hours a day. Many wake up to TV, eat to TV, and go to sleep to TV.
Now, obviously many commentators have pointed out how ludicrous, stupid, and complacent this feature of our culture makes us. It makes us afraid, manifestly, as well. But is it not worth asking how we can change this again? TV is not satisfying. It can’t be.
And one particular recurring theme I would mention that I think is directly relevant to mass shootings, is that of the Man Wounded Seeking Revenge. I can’t recall the first movie which used this theme. Some innocent guy–who just happens to be a total badass–is hurt by some group. They kill his family. They betray him. They hijack his ship. And from this flows the rationalization of an hour or two of violence, of people being killed in as many creative ways as the writers can concoct. Pencil through the eyeball? Fantastic.
This pattern, of reacting to wrong with massive violence, is in fact the logic of the mass shooting. Some group called on Leftists to shoot Republicans in the wake of the shooting in Florida. Same logic.
Always your enemies are somehow different in kind from you. They lose their humanity.
I can’t emphasize enough how much I think the REPEATED, continual reinforcement of this theme must be affecting our collective psyche.
Ponder, just for a moment, how our nation would change IMMEDIATELY, if all TV programming on all channels ended today. Or even if we only broadcast actual history (rather than “Ancient Alien theorists believe the use of the circle in antiquity must imply alien visitation”), nature channels, and socially and emotionally complex dramas where most of the violence was psychological.
Small wonder, now that I think about it, that we are a nation of morons.
But what do we do about it? This is the question, is it not? How do we turn away from making things worse by making an already damaging system exponentially more harmful by making it fully immersive, via VR?
Who is still talking about this? The Left talked about violence in the 1960’s (perhaps), 1970’s, and I’m pretty sure 1980’s, as I recall. The Alan Alda’s and Sally Struthers condemned it, because politically much of it was unabashedly patriotic, and unabashedly in the service of black and white moral causes.
But all that has stopped. We have famous actors like Alec Baldwin and directors like Martin Scorsese calling for the movie based on Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” to be made readily available because of its “artistic value”. This is where we live. More or less pure cruelty and violence counts as art, because violence is somehow seen as profound. Nothing could be further from the truth. Violence is only profound to the walking dead.
I ask again, though: how can or could we start talking about this again? How could we put a mirror to ourselves, and try to learn something? This would have been the job of intellectuals and academics and political activists, but it seems that, across the spectrum, EVERYONE seems to like the status quo? Why? Can I ask that question?