Gun Violence as Entertainment

The United States will not take action to curb gun violence until such violence ceases to be viewed as entertainment.

No one with any sense believes the government is out to take away guns from ordinary people, the folks who hunt, enjoy target shooting, and so on. Nor would even the most cursory reading of the Constitution lead anyone of good sense to believe that effective gun control somehow violates the Second Amendment. These are anti-gun-law arguments promulgated by the self-serving NRA and radical rightists bent on deluding the public for political gain. None of this blather would make any difference if the American public were sufficiently enraged by gun violence to take action. The sad fact is that the American public is not enraged by gun violence; it is entertained.

The term ammosexual should be a clue. Ammosexuals are those with an affection for firearms, those who see guns as sexy, those who wear guns a fashion accessories. But for every ammosexual there are ten or a hundred individuals who view, whether consciously or subconsciously, gun violence as entertainment.

Murder and mayhem as entertainment have a long history. Romans flocked to the coliseum to see prisoners torn apart by wild animals. Public executions across the centuries have drawn crowds in many nations eager to see people hanged, shot, beheaded, or worse. The lynching of black people was a popular U.S. pastime, particularly between 1880 and 1920, when nearly 3,500 African Americans were killed by mob violence.

The postmodern era has moved spectacle violence to the evening news, where it nightly entertains the population in reports mainly of gun violence. Mass shootings this year in the United States have become a near daily experience.

Digitized gun violence—television reports, newspaper stories, government statistics, and other sources of information, usually accessed by digital means—dampens the revulsion factor. Viewers are distanced from actual events. The violence becomes fictionalized, just another shoot ’em up at the OK Corral.

Twenty-seven killed in a Connecticut elementary school. Thirteen shot in a New York immigrant community center. Twelve killed in the Washington Navy Yard. Twelve killed in a Colorado movie theater. Nine killed in a South Carolina church. It’s all schadenfreude for the masses, rubbing their hands and tsk-tsking in front of screens.

Gun violence is real. When one’s children or parents or siblings or friends are injured or killed in gun violence, it is all too real. It’s not entertainment. It’s murder. When we finally come to our senses as a nation, no objections, no fake excuses, no hyperbole will be allowed to stand in the way of sensible gun laws.

But we’re not there yet. In the meantime, we will continue to allow the slaughter of the innocents—for the fun of it.

Professor Media*

From the broadsheets and banned theater of America’s founding era to TV news, Twitter, and sitcoms today, media have been our professors, teaching us about our world and shaping how we think about and respond to important issues. Mass media are more directly educative for most adults than any type of formal schooling. Increasingly, as the current mania for standardized testing narrows the school curriculum, media also are surpassing classroom teachers as our children’s most influential educators.

This media-education interconnection is complex and often problematic. While media have helped to shape progress on some issues of importance to American democracy, they also have contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression, but it does not ensure truth. Societally reflective sitcoms, for example, have paved the way for progress on social issues, from civil rights to marriage equality. But biased political advertising and propagandistic “news” have contributed to political stagnation and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Media are seductive. We spend hours on “screen time.” Those who control the media well understand that what is portrayed and how it is framed shapes socially shared knowledge. The rise of corporate oligarchy in the United States has been achieved, in part, through concerted propaganda passed off as truth. What this means is that, if we are to reclaim American democracy, greater attention needs to be paid to the educative power of media—and not merely to the traditional forms (movies, radio, television) but to new media that we carry with us in our mobile phones and tablet computers. According to a Pew study last year, one in three Americans gets news through Facebook.** And two-thirds of adult Americans use Facebook.

For media consumers—which means everyone, children and adults—it has never been more important to exercise effective credibility strategies, such as critically examining claims of “truth.” A quote attributed to American economist Thomas Sowell is apt: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” However, such understanding must be taught, not just in schools but through the media themselves.

Principles of journalism must cross all platforms, from sitcoms to news reports. Are “facts” accurate, credible, verifiable, contextually appropriate, and unbiased? Whether the purveyor is a talking head or a comic character, how is “truth” situated? If we subscribe to the biblical admonition that the “truth will set you free,” then we also must invoke the first part of that quotation about “knowing the truth,” which is the real challenge, regardless of the context.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

** http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/

Sitcom Politics

Back in the day when media guru Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he wasn’t kidding. The medium not only is the message, it also shapes the mind. Our expectations have been molded so thoroughly by the solve-it-in-thirty-minutes sitcom storyline (or an hour if you’re into TV dramas) that we’ve translated that mentality into real life.

Fact is, life isn’t a sitcom or an hour-long drama. Families with kids aren’t nearly as funny as those on “The Middle” or “Modern Family,” show choirs never look like the ones on “Glee,” and modern crime-fighters—no matter how high-tech—have nothing remotely as cool as the scientific and technological gadgetry on “Bones” and “NCIS.”

Yet here we are, coming up on midterm elections, with many voters expecting the multiple crises that took years to create during the two-term presidency of George W. Bush to have been solved within the first two years of the Obama presidency. The Bush presidency took the economic surplus that was the Clinton legacy and converted it into massive debt and an American-led global recession, helped along by two ill-conceived wars and lack of proper oversight of the financial and housing markets—and a lot of other things that ought to have be been seen to.

The fiction of wishful thinking so glibly purveyed by rightwing pundits and their puppets won’t change reality. But with sitcom mentality firmly in place, it doesn’t have to. Conservative politicians who have sat on their hands for two years, parroting Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” to any collaborative strategies to solve the nation’s problems, are now waving their hands in the air and, like Chicken Little, squawking that the sky is falling. Their solution: Elect politicians from the party that made the mess in the first place.

Mess? What mess? Oh, that’s right. The Bush presidency was over half an hour ago. All has been forgotten now—never mind the men and women still out of work and still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan published The Medium is the Massage, a word play on his famous saying. But it was a well-considered pun. McLuhan used the word massage to describe the effects media have on human senses. He wrote:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. (p. 26)

In some ways the media have positively reshaped human awareness, but in other ways we have been diminished. If we expect the impossible because we have seen the impossible realized so often in fiction that we now confuse it with real life, then we have arrived at a truly sorry state.