Marching to the beat of the wrong drum
Written by Mark Osborne
Published on 04/21/2007
Originally from Binary Culture / [the-lowdown.net]
http://www.binaryculture.net

I honestly don't want my blogging hijacked by the mess that was the VTech massacre, it just feels somehow disengenouous to keep coming back to it when I'm trying to engineer a re-invigoration of the site and expand our readership, but the swirling media vortex around it is just becoming more absurd with every passing day.

To wit, Doctor Phil of all people has jumped on the violent media scapegoat bandwagon, an individual who above most of us, should know better. Here's an excerpt of what he told Larry King:

Well, Larry, every situation is different… The question really is can we spot them. And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me - common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high.

And we’re going to have to start dealing with that. We’re going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.

That's not common sense, that a messy divorce between cause and effect that'll be in litigation from now until Bill O'Reilly votes Democrat. The one thing that Doctor Phil seems to have over the rest of that ridiculous line of thought is that he's bothered to mention psychopathy.

Just like Thompson, McGraw wades well out of his area of expertise to deliver this judgement while completely sidestepping it's immediate relevance to what his expertise actually is. Anyone who's seen his show at least once and even many people who avoid it like Moby would a hot dog stand knows that his stock and trade is confronting and ostensibly helping irresponsible and unengaged parents. He goddamn well knows the part that parenting plays in this mess and he sidesteps it. I hate to be cynical, but unless he had a six martini lunch that day, he's doing his damndest to make sure he doesn't bite the hand that feeds enough to draw blood. Clearly he doesn't listen to enough Nine Inch Nails.

One of the major problems here is the same one that plagued all the useless noise and spin that followed in the wake of Columbine; there's never any serious attempt at discussing the context of violence in any of the media being scapegoated and there's never a serious attempt to open dialogue, just spout drivel. That's common fucking sense, and I don't need to be a doctor of anything more than Gonzo fucking Journalism to figure that one out, which is a title I just bestowed upon myself right now. Challenge me on it, I dare you.

Anyway, in very stark contrast to Doctor Phil's shennanigans, Salon is doing exactly that. The article by Sarah Elizabeth Richards actually dares to discuss the specific content and context of the violence in Cho's writing and the thorny issues involved in reconciling an author with their work. As she says in the article, there are no set rules for determining whether a story is the product of a febrile artistic imagination or a potentially violent criminal. Or both.

Some great examples surface out of the comic book world. In one webcomic, Tim Burton asks Neil Gaiman about the frequency of severed heads showing up in his work (second only to transsexuals for reoccuring content) to which Neil replies that Tim should know not to confuse the artist with the art. The punchline is the panel showing Neil sneaking off to admire his severed head collection.

In the forward to the first volume of Transmetropolitan fellow writer Garth Ennis (whose own work routinely pushes the envelope on extreme content) assures the reader that despite the content and attitude of Warren Ellis' body of work, he's a really nice guy. Of course since then Ellis has earned the title of Internet Jesus and has said that much of the Old Testament is about him. Despite all that, everything I've ever heard about what he's like in person would corroborate Ennis.

The whole thing is astonishingly frightening and relevant for me as I'm (finally) beginning college this fall as an English major with the intention of going on to teach either high school or university level English, and a decent amount of what I write involves violence. I like to think that I couch my work in a sound context that justifies the level of violence I use (one of the comics I'm currently producing with Karla is essentially a "blood opera" that revolves around the psychological damage that follows participating in the level of violence and death being "glorified" by Hollywood), but no one can really fool themselves into thinking that no matter how intelligent or topical your use of violence is that you're actually insulating yourself against sensationalism.

Look what happened to Fight Club and Battle Royale in the wake of Columbine. Both were attacked by people too numb and stupid to be able to tell the forest from the trees, leaving one tainted and the other almost completely suppressed. Not just that but Transmetropolitan was embroiled in that idiotic Denver library controversy for specifically parodying what it was accused of. Any society/nation/industry that gives a pass to Scream and shuts out Battle Royale is the victim of an incredible and undeniable sickness, say nothing about everyone's favorite drunken anti-semetic purveyor of Aramaic snuff films.

If Japan can get away with letting fifteen year olds into a movie about children (portrayed to be) their age shipped to a deserted island and forced to murder each other under the threat of death unaccompanied and somehow miraculously avoid violence to the degree of Cho's rampage or even Klebold and Harris', it's time to re-evaluate the entire fucking situation.

But we seem to be gearing up for a re-evaluation of the very wrong kind, putting limits on the amount of violence self expression is allowed, expecting teachers to be discovering and weeding out mass murderers based on their homework, and how much more responsibility can be taken off the shoulders of parents and placed elsewhere. Clearly we're still paying teachers too much to educate our children, we ought to burden them some more. It's not like they're one of the most underappreciated and overworked professions in the continent.

Perhaps we should be worried about this year's San Diego Comic Con, the biggest comic book convention in the world. Thousands of children and adults bursting at the seams with so called violent content, parading about dressed up as the very perpetrators of said violence. I heard that last year some guy dressed up as a character that had a gun that made people shit themselves when hit, assaulted the President, shot several people, and beat several people severely in the name of journalism.

To make matters worse, one of the creators of the character, who goes by the thoroughly unwholesome monkier of Internet Jesus who advocates punching people and making them explode if they disagree with him, will be attending for the first time in several years. It's common sense that the suggestability of the situation can only result in an absolute bloodbath. The entire city will fall to hordes of violence saturated individuals under the sway of merciless and irresponsible creators.

At least no one in California has ever rioted because of something they saw on television. Because then it might be construed as encouraging disturbed individuals like Cho to make a multimedia manifesto when every media outlet on the face of the planet publishes the contents and pictures of him posing with the guns he would go on to use to murder his fellow students with grace the front pages of countless newspapers. Because our peerless, unquestionably ethical newsmedia would never behave in such a manner that would make them the knowing and indulgent accessories to every murder committed by him.

That would choke me with rage to the point of wanting to cry tears of pure rage and likely vomit out of complete disgust at a world that could possibly stoop so low as to scapegoat a narrow scope of popular entertainment and encourage the kind of pidgeonholing that serves only to further alienate disenfranchised, ostracized youth in order to increase circulation and do everything they can to avoid handing out even a miniscule amount of the blame to their most coveted demographic. That would be madness. That would be blasphemy.
This would be Sparta. I would be dining in Hell.