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It was a student of mine who showed me the magazine ad for Gameboy's video game, Turok, which urges, "Blow off arms, legs, even heads! Enemies built with soft skin technology!" On the opposite page was Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda, which intoned, "Use thy head or lose thy head. 'Tis Carnage for the thinking man!" To my amazement, these ads were in a magazine called What! which has for years been given out free to students in our school library and guidance office. What! Magazine is distributed to Canadian high schools coast to coast. The magazine headlines celebrities while offering what editors argue is "teen perspective" of various popular topics. The most recent issue of What! featured a cover-photo of Marilyn Manson (whose repertoire of songs includes "Irresponsible Hate Anthem"), a much documented hero to the teen killers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. My high school principal pulled this latest edition of What! and complained to the publishers. He is considering banning the magazine from our school.
Gratuitous violent imagery too often finds a resting place within our own schools. Should teachers show horror films such as Scream depicting teens killing teens, even when the film is justified within a "horror genre" film unit? Should physical education classes play "war games," in which they carry around paint-ball guns and hunt each other in abandoned warehouses in the name of physical activity? Should intramural programs stage WWF wrestling? "It's just a movie," we shrug, or, "We're just having fun. Anyone who actually does these things is just crazy."
This is what astounds me. Despite the horrific news images, we still vehemently deny any suggestion media plays a role cultivating violence into our culture. In fact, we celebrate technology that makes violence and killing more real-looking each year; we are impressed when movie and video-game makers can bring us directly into the world of violence, the latter of which invites us to kill. Gameboy's Turok advertises openly that the game "allows players to target specific areas of an enemy's body."
The line separating representation and reality blurs with each new game or movie release. Yet popular opinion holds that people who "kill" during these games or people who enjoy "killing" as entertainment are normal but people who cross over and actually do it are crazy. Actual killers are deemed social misfits. If the killers were normalized, of course, we'd be forced to take responsibility, wouldn't we?
Author and army psychologist Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, in his book On Killing (Little Brown & Co., 1995), makes a profoundly troubling observation. Through extensive clinical studies, he has found that the desensitizing techniques used to train soldiers are now found in mass media-films, telelvision, and video arcades-and are conditioning our children. His figures on youthful homicides suggest a breeding of teenage Rambos. When Grossman's book was first published, everyone thought he was crazy, but since then, we've witnessed annual mass shootings in schools in multiple states and now one province. Yes, there are other social reasons why these teen killers murdered their classmates; but why are they doing it with such ease?
In the aftermath of the senseless deaths in Colorado and Alberta, we shake our heads and fists and are dismayed by youth violence. The media assembles panels of professionals who discuss how morals need to be taught to children and how parents need to shape up in regards to rearing kids. Enough talk. It's time to walk the walk.
Let's start by taking inventory of the content within our own homes and schools and stop convincing ourselves that our youth will be just fine in front of a violent landscape we ourselves often willingly-perhaps ignorantly-foster.
create a collage of violent images using video game ads, movie posters, video game packaging and display these prominently in your classroom or school halls
show a cartoon and count the number of violent acts that are committed during a ten minute span; write a journal response about how these conflicts could have been solved through communication or other non-violent means
tape movie trailors and consider how many use violence as a marketing tool and how much content of the trailor used violence as a main motivator to buy the product
bring in some statistics about violence against women (rapes, domestic abuse, etc); show video clips of Gerry Springer, WWF Wrestling and other media examples where violence against and between women is encouraged as a selling point for the media product; this might be a good time to talk about ratings and how each one of us "supports" these violent images by watching, thus sending the message to the networks that these images should remain on TV and sending a message to the advertisers to continue spending big money advertising on these shows
show other ways that violence sells--news footage, nature programs (footage of animals killing other animals), sports highlights where fights are showcased and glorified
Media circus around disasters like Littleton just contribute to these violent dramas
On the day that thirteen people were shot dead in a Littleton, Colorado high school, some of my media students were debating which would come first, the made-for-TV movie or Hollywood film.
Such brash cynicism indicates that our children have internalized the first commandment of media literacy - that most media products are constructions created for commercial profit.
Today we pray for the victims of Kosovo, Littleton and Taber. Where will the blood from next week's carnage flow? Who will be the fresh, unsuspecting victims? Regretably, many of us will, once again, get sucked into the maelstrom of morbid media coverage.
Even as the blood-stained memories from the Littleton shootout begin to fade, you can almost hear media conglomerate CEO's salivating over the sordid boon of juicy profits. Glossy images of contorted, grief-wracked faces and dollar signs from mega-newspaper, magazine and movie-of-the-week deals must be dancing in their heads.
Today's journalists are dispatched at sonic speeds to the gory grounds of the latest war zone - be it a bullet-riddled school cafeteria or a charred village in the Balkans.
No expense is spared as miles of cable is uncoiled and convoys of microwave trucks compete for precious space and satellite uplinks. Exorbitantly-paid network anchors primp and preen as average 'citizens-to-be-celebrities' pine for live, exclusive interviews.
We indulge in a ritualistic form of emotional masturbation whenever the camera lens records each sickening horror. Yet, we also can't avoid the inevitable guilt as we voluntarily gawk at the human 'road kill' and share the macabre media sideshow with the neighbors in our global village.
Many people have expressed outrage and indigination at the gratuitous media coverage of the Littleton tragedy and the resultant copy-cat events it has spawned. But make no mistake. We delude ourselves when we think that our hands are not also splattered with innocent blood.
It's time we pull back and realize that we are all accomplices in these violent outbursts. Every time we turn on the nightly news or purchase the daily paper, we fuel the carnivorous mass- consumption of such bloody deeds.
Anyone who buys or rents violent video games, CD's or movies contributes to the rampant 'cult of violence' in our permissive society. Although there is little hard evidence linking make-believe violence with real violence, some studies do indicate a clear link between a steady diet of violent entertainment fare and desensitization in its consumers.
The Chicago Sun Times took the admirable step of not splashing the Littleton massacre on its front page. This is a relatively small, though, positive sign that media producers respond to public opinion. But sensitive, responsible journalism is just one piece of a more convoluted puzzle.
Whenever we are too busy or tired, at the end of the day, to engage in meaningful dialogue with our children, we sow the seeds of resentment and alienation which, if unchecked, can lead to senseless acts of violence.
As education and health care budgets are slashed, less money is available for youth care workers and social programs which may help prevent another angry teenager from self-destructing.
Each time a teacher or student turns a blind eye to the daily verbal taunts directed at the less popular kids, the nightmare of a Littleton or Taber becomes more of a reality.
Given the glut of media coverage of horrific incidents like the one in Littleton and the proliferation of deadly, accessible weapons in our society, it's amazing that more disaffected youth don't go beserk.
But the implosion of a human being, much like the moral decline of an entire culture, is incremental by nature and often difficult to discern. Ultimately, unless we acknowledge and accept responsibility for our own complicity in these violent dramas - we can never hope to free our own children from the dark, sinister forces that lurk deep beneath the surface of every human heart.
For more back-up material, check out the Spring 1999 issue of Adbusters Magazine, which features an article on Grossman's book On Killing(referred to in DeBoer's article).
