What Violent Mentality?

It was mentioned by someone recently that the solution to the massacre at Newtown, CT is to "change the mentality." Evidently such hope for change rests largely with another push to emulate failed gun control bills of days gone by, so let's examine the national "mentality," which one can only assume involves the social acceptance of violent acts.

Since everyone else is focused on guns, I'd like to offer some other items for consideration that make up that "mentality."

Let's start with the number of TV shows focused solely on mayhem of various kinds, but most generally, week in and week out, with murders, either singly, serially, or en masse. Just some examples, by no means exhaustive, would include everything in the "CSI" franchise, everything in the "Law and Order" franchise, Bones, Rizzoli and Isles, Criminal Minds. The Mentalist deals with the recurring theme of a serial killer, nemesis of the protagonist, who has now killed, singly or in groups, and with evident impunity, throughout every season of the show. But the crowning glory of contemporary TV has to be Dexter, now renewed for a SEVENTH season, billed by Showtime as "America's Favorite Serial Killer," in which the protagonist of the show, with whom we putatively identify, is both a law enforcement agent and a murderer. Res ipse loquitur.


I don't go to the movies a lot, but there's enough of a Grand Guignol there, too. Violence is as alive and well in the cinema as on the tube. Since I don't watch a whole lot of movies, I'll leave it at that, because I know that the First Rule of Fight Club is "Don't talk about Fight Club."

Shifting (only slightly) from entertainment billed as such to the increasingly entertaining "news" and "weather," we find not a complete preoccupation with all things violent, but a quite deliberate attempt to portray them in the most lurid and distressing possible light, by the use of the most extreme adjectives in Webster's. Everything is "devastating" now, my friends. And things most people have never heard of, and which are often unproven, are damned as threats to health and safety. Last year it was high fructose corn syrup, before that it was thimerosol and the whole vaccination hysteria, now it's the evils of gluten. How does this tie into the culture of violence? Because it is most often portrayed as the (assumed) intent of someone else to put this stuff into our bodies. Back in the 1950's it was shadowy forces trying to fluoridate our precious bodily fluids, but what was put down to the lunatic fringe then sixty years later has become a neverending series of assumptions: accusation is proof of guilt.

A large theme in that portion of television devoted to the weather and "reality" is the various sorts of catastrophes that, however remote the possibility, still could occur. And we're always left with the impression that these things are just around the corner. Mega-this-and-that, from hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, another ice age, large-scale desertification. And the recent trend is to move the paranoia off Earth entirely, and go on about all the things coming to get us from elsewhere in the cosmos: asteroids, comets, rogue planets, gamma and cosmic ray bursts, objects moving through the solar system at close to light speed, and, of course, the perennial favorite of some type of alien invasion.

Video games have been under scrutiny before, largely to no effect. But there is no denying that  many thousands of copies are sold of any number of video games devoted solely to killing or being killed by an amazing variety of anthropomorphic figures, ranging from the completely human through zombies, monsters, etc....but it's just nonstop mayhem, and it's not supposed to have anything to do with "reality," so the assumption is that it has no effect on people's behavior.

Well, if nothing has pissed anyone off yet, let's move on to.....SPORTS. How about sports that, completely within the rules and with the sanction of law and society, result in the absolutely unavoidable debilitating injury of the participants, often at a young age. I suppose the most extreme trend is in "ultimate fighting," but boxing has been controversial for years, with not much ever having been done about it. Then there's football, a pastime where Isaac Newton's laws of motion produce a neverending litany of injury. There hasn't been much serious talk about the consequences of playing football since it was up for being banned in 1906, but facts have finally accumulated that are difficult to ignore, and current lawsuits by former players against the NFL mean they aren't likely to go away. And because these sports may be the worst don't mean there aren't others.

When it comes to violence, we can hardly omit the increasingly questionable world of America since September 11, 2001. Even the question of someone  wishing the U.S. ill is now likely to provoke the most drastic sort of response, and the  dismantling of the Bill of Rights, unthinkable before, is now under way. The Fourth Amendment is falling by the wayside, and the Fifth is threatened. We are now told by some people that the Second must go, based up on the acts of a madman. How long before the First Amendment, however important, can no longer be tolerated- in the name of public safety, of course. It has become "necessary." As William Pitt remarked, "'Necessity' is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

I submit, based upon what I have stated in this brief essay, that there is a mentality in this society that transcends whatever may be employed to commit the violence. I would think any reasonable approach to change this state of mind would be welcome.