Socialist Action /May 1999
How the U.S. Media and Popular Culture Promote Violence
Among Children
By TOM SANDERS
The recent killings of 14 students and one teacher at Columbine High
School in Littleton, Col., is a deed that should not surprise anyone who
has made a thorough study of capitalism from a Marxist viewpoint. The mass
media and other elements of popular culture under capitalism have systematically
conditioned young people to accept and participate in anti-social violence.
Crime reporting-when it comes to common crime, not that of the big corporations-is
often based on confusing data. This is partly due to the fact that two,
sometimes conflicting, government crime reports are produced each year.
One is published by the FBI, based on crimes reported by law enforcement
agencies. The other is an annual report based on a national survey of crime
victims that bases its findings according to the number of crimes per household.
In 1994 the FBI report showed a 0.4 percent decrease in the per capita
aggravated assault rate. This was the first decrease in a decade. But the
same report also showed a 2.2 percent increase in the per capita murder
rate. The other government report reflected a steady increase in all
violent crime-a rise of 5.6 percent.
There is also much evidence that in many high-crime areas, assaults that
would have received great attention 30 years ago (for example, drive-by
shootings in which no one is hit and beatings in which no one is killed)
are routinely ignored today.
"The aggravated assault rate indicates the incidence of Americans
trying to kill one another, and it is going up at an astounding rate,"
states Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his book, "On Killing" (Little,
Brown & Co., Boston, 1995).
"Between 1985 and 1991, the homicide rate for males 15 to 19 increased
154 percent. Despite the continued application of an ever-increasing quantity
and quality of medical technology, homicide is the number two cause of death
among males ages 15 to 19. Among Black males it is number one."
Knowing the above facts is important, but neither the government nor
the mass media has offered sensible reasons for the increase in violent
crime-especially that committed by young people.
P. Watson's book "War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses
of Psychology" (Basic Books, New York, 1978), reports on the techniques
used by the U.S. government to train assassins. In the book, Dr. Narut,
a U.S. Navy psychiatrist with the rank of commander, tells about the techniques
he was developing in which conditioning and social learning methodology
were being used to help military assassins to overcome their resistance
to killing.
The method used was to expose the subjects to "symbolic modeling"
involving "films specially designed to show people being killed or
injured in violent ways.
By being acclimatized through these films, the men were supposed to eventually
become able to disassociate their emotions from such a situation."
The trainee was forced to watch the films by having his head bolted in
a clamp so he could not turn away, and a special device to keep him from
closing his eyes. Some of these films were of actual incidents that had
been caught on film and others were realistic high quality special effects.
Movie and TV cartoons
If most of us are horrified to find out about these terrible methods
used on our young military teenagers (age 17 through 19) and young men,
then why do we permit the same process to occur to millions of children
throughout the nation?
It begins with cartoons depicting violence and then goes on to the countless
thousands of acts of violence shown on TV as the child grows up and the
competition for ratings steadily raises the threshold of violence on TV.
Then, when children reach a certain age they begin to watch movies in
theaters with enough violence to receive a PG-13 rating due to brief scenes
of spurting blood from bullet wounds or chopped off limbs.
Then within a year or so most parents permit their children to watch
movies rated R because of even more spurting blood, bullets exploding out
the back of bodies in showers of blood and brains, etc.
Finally, at the age of 17, children can legally watch R-rated movies,
and at 18 they can watch movies rated even higher than R. These movies sometimes
show eyes being gouged out, along with a part of the brain, as some military
and police special forces are trained to do.
Thus, at the malleable ages of 17 and 18, the age at which armies have
long traditionally begun to indoctrinate their soldiers into the speciality
of killing, our children are receiving an inhuman form of military training.
Movie characters Hannibal the Cannibal, Jason, and Freddy are sick, unquestionably
evil, and criminally sociopathic. They have nothing in common with the exotic
and misunderstood Frankenstein monster and Wolf Man villains of an earlier
generation.
The horror movies of today are very well made in life-like color as well
as terribly violent, and then simultaneously provide the (usually) adolescent
viewers with candy, soft drinks, group companionship, and the intimate physical
contact of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Thus, these viewers learn to associate
these rewards with what they are watching.
Powerful group processes often work to humiliate and belittle viewers
who avert their gaze during the most gruesome scenes. Thus, many of them
have their heads bolted in a psychological clamp so they cannot turn away,
and social pressure keeps their eyelids open.
The child as a "blank slate"
B.F. Skinner, who conducted experiments in operant conditioning, rejected
the Freudian and humanist theories of personality development and held that
all behavior is a result of past rewards and punishments.
To Skinner the child is a "blank slate," who can be turned
into anything provided sufficient control of the child's environment is
instituted at an early enough age.
The military is aware of Skinner's studies, and so, instead of firing
at the old-fashioned bull's-eye target, modern soldiers, usually age 17
through early 20s, fire at man-shaped silhouettes that pop up briefly inside
a designated firing line. They have only a brief second to fire, and if
they do it properly and knock down enough targets they receive a special
badge and usually a three-day pass.
This training method is believed to be one of the main reasons the firing
rate rose from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam.
In video arcades today children of nearly all ages stand behind plastic
machine guns and other weapons and shoot at electronic targets that pop
up on the video screen. When they squeeze the trigger the weapon vibrates
realistically, shots ring out, and if they hit the "enemy" it
drops to the ground, often with limbs or chunks of flesh flying in the air.
The important distinction between the killing-enabling process that occurs
in video arcades and that of the military is that the military's is focused
on the enemy soldier, with particular emphasis on insuring the soldier acts
only under military authority. Yet, the video games that our children conduct
their combat training on have no real sanction for firing at the wrong target.
There is no drill sergeant present in the arcade to supervise our children
in their learning to kill, as there is in the military. And while the drill
sergeant has a profound one-time impact and is often a role model for the
young soldier, the aggregate effect of a lifetime of movies, TV, etc. may
very well be even greater than that of the drill sergeant.
"Birth of a Nation"
It has long been understood that movies can have a negative effect on
a society through this role-modeling process. For example, the 1917 movie
"Birth of a Nation" (which was premiered first in the White House
for Virginia-born-and-raised President Woodrow Wilson) has been widely credited
with the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
I remember that when "Birth of a Nation" was shown in 1950
in Lubbock, Texas, several large crosses were burned the following nights
in various places throughout the city, other than just in the African American
community.
In general, Grossman points out, "in the war movies, westerns, and
detective movies of the past, heroes only killed under the authority of
the law. If not, they were punished. In the end the villain was never rewarded
for his violence, and he always received justice for his crimes.
"The message was simple: No man is above the law, crime does not
pay, and for violence to be acceptable it must be guided by the constraints
of the law. The hero was rewarded for obeying the law and channeling his
desire for vengeance through the authority of the law.
"The viewer identified with the hero and was vicariously reinforced
whenever the hero was. And the audience members left the theater feeling
good about themselves and sensing the existence of a just, lawful world.
"But today there is a new kind of hero in movies, a hero who operates
outside the law. Vengeance is a much older, darker, more atavistic, and
more primitive concept than law, and these new antiheroes are depicted as
being motivated and rewarded for their obedience to the gods of vengeance
rather than those of law....
"And if America has a police force that seems unable to constrain
its violence, and a population that (having seen the video tape of Rodney
King and the LAPD) has learned to fear its police forces, then the reason
can be found in the entertainment industry...."
Violence is the law of the land
The United States has been governed by a war economy since 1941 and has
been involved in "police actions" or wars of one kind or another,
all of them related to making the U.S. an empire dominating the world economically
(commonly known as imperialism).
General violence and mass murder is not only the law of the land in the
United States, but in those parts of the world that U.S. capitalism is trying
to conquer, as we see reported daily in the media. In a way, life in the
U.S. today is summed up in the bumper sticker: "Whoever has the most
things when he dies, wins."
Every capitalist society is based on greed and therefore can continue
to exist and expand only through the threat of violence or through actual
violence.
For the U.S. empire to continue to expand, its rulers know they must
militarize its young people, regardless of the consequences (and pass more
laws, increase the size of its police forces, throw more people in prison,
etc.).
When U.S. society begins to unravel, as it is now doing, it is only natural
that violence on the part of all groups will increase. I think that the
average American wants a society he or she can be proud of. This can come
about only through a workers' socialist government.
Socialist Action /May 1999 |