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.

The Dalai Lama and the Future of Tibet

As Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, celebrates his eightieth birthday this week, there is again speculation in the world’s press about the future of Tibet—and, more precisely, the future of the Tibetan government in exile. A portion of that speculation naturally concerns the future of the role itself. Will there be a 15th Dalai Lama?

As one commentator noted, when the Chinese government, which claims Tibet as its own and opposes the Dalai Lama, ramps up its opposition to the current Dalai Lama, his influence only grows stronger. Indeed, his holiness is the central, encompassing presence of Tibet in exile.

Tibetan history has always been fraught, no less so over the course of the 20th century and extending into the 21st. Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, was born in 1876 and suffered exile various times before issuing a declaration of independence in 1912. No other state recognized Tibetan independence, however. Consequently the status of Tibet was still in flux when he died in 1933.

The current Dalai Lama was formally enthroned in November 1950 at the age of fifteen. Tibet at the time was engaged in a prolonged struggle with the People’s Republic of China, which then forced on Tibet an “agreement” for “liberation,” by which Tibet became essentially a Chinese province. Subsequently, in the wake of a revolt in Tibet, the Dalai Lama fled to India where he formed a government in exile that continues today.

Some years ago I wrote a brief history of Tibetan governance titled “Patrimonialist Rulership in Tibet: Four Historical Periods,” which appears in a collection edited by William H. Swatos, Jr., Time, Place, and Circumstance: Neo-Weberian Studies in Comparative Religious History, published by Greenwood Press in 1990.

I find it interesting to note that a number of today’s commentators are saying much the same thing that I posited some twenty-five years ago:

The Chinese may well choose to preserve (in appearance at least) Tibet’s traditional political-religious system by doing what the Tibetans themselves did in their dealings with the Mongols in the late sixteenth century. That is, when the exiled Dalai Lama dies, the Chinese may arrange for the discovery of his reincarnation among those more favorable to their rule.

Meanwhile, the current Dalai Lama continues to work for an autonomous Tibet and to foster peace. Tenzin Gyatso received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, a recognition that has been upheld by his continuing efforts on the world stage. Some years ago, when he visited Indiana University, where his brother was a professor for many years, I was able to attend a lecture he gave. My enduring impression is of a man devoted to peace.

Remembering Bobby Short

One of my favorite channels on Pandora is “Bobby Short,” which also segues to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and others singers drawing from the “Great American Songbook.” But it’s Bobby Short whose voice and jazz piano stylings I listen for.

Robert Waltrip “Bobby” Short, born September 15, 1924, died in 2005 at age 80. Self-taught, Short played the vaudeville circuit in the Midwest before he was a teenager. By age 12 he was headlining in Manhattan nightclubs and playing regular engagements at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

In various clubs during the 1940s he made his name as a cabaret singer and pianist and that, more than anything else, was his claim to fame. In 1968 he took a two-week gig at New York City’s Café Carlyle and remained a featured performer there until near the end of his life. He was in his element performing music by Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and the Gershwins. In 2000 the Library of Congress named him a Living Legend.

Short embodied smooth sophistication. His suave musical performances were matched by his elegant, impeccable wardrobe. His voice had a characteristic warble reminiscent of the heartfelt tremble of Sidney Bechet’s soprano sax. He played the White House for Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.

I never had the pleasure of seeing Bobby Short perform. But to hear him is to fall in love with the “Great American Songbook” all over again. Check out “Live from the Café Carlyle” on YouTube at https://youtu.be/PzWrXDzjA7Y.

Sitcom Marriage

The so-called traditional marriage that rightwingers thump their bibles over is largely absent in biblical text. Man-woman marriage is there certainly, but so are man and brother’s widow, rapist and victim, man and multiple wives (with a few concubines thrown in), and so on. The “Christian” right traditional marriage actually is a sitcom staple from mid-20th century, the same era that gave us the corporate ad-gimmick God of “In God We Trust” (see the previous post, “God, Inc.”).

Some readers will be old enough to remember early television sitcoms that helped embed the “traditional marriage” notion in our collective consciousness: “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and others. The sitcom family consisted of a working father (often the comic foil), a non-working but wise mother, and usually one or two children, good kids with a streak of mischief.

The traditional family sitcoms of the Fifties and Sixties idealized a dominant, though hardly universal, reality. According to Pew Research, the percentage of children living with two married parents in their first marriage in 1960 was 73%. As of 2013, that figure had dropped to 46%. Today a majority of children live in other, “nontraditional” families: 15% live with two married parents, one or both remarried; 34% live with a single parent; and 5% have no parent at home. So-called traditional marriage has been in decline for the past half century.

In fact, the vast majority of adults simply live together before or instead of marrying. According to a 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, only 23% of “first unions” (couples sharing the same address) were marriages. “Cohabitation is a common part of family formation in the United States, and serves both as a step toward marriage and as an alternative to marriage,” the study said.

While the radical right consistently fails to deal with reality, that should be no excuse for the rest of us when it comes to validating successful family configurations—marriages—of all sorts, including non-marriages, such as single-parent families and couples living together without being legally married. The notion of marriage equality is anathema to the so-called religious right because it does not conform to the sitcom marriage ideal of the past. But it’s a mistake to cite the Bible as the source when “traditional marriage” actually comes from Fifties television.

God, Inc.

It’s hard to call oneself a Christian when so many who flaunt that label behave in such unChrist-like ways. Too often Christian is synonymous today with racist and homophobe, which leaves many who actually attempt to live out the principles attributed to Christ feeling as though they are victims of identity theft. I wonder if God feels the same way.

The public context of God has been almost wholly subsumed in the identity of radical right “Christian” hegemony. Political Christianism is a rightwing gimmick. The God of “In God We Trust” is a “Christian” god for a “Christian” nation—both fictions designed to fool unthinking masses with feel-righteous rhetoric.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“How Business Made Us Christian,” March 15, 2015), Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse traced the formulation of God as an advertising ploy. Kruse attributes the mid-20th-century adoption of a decidedly Christianist God as America’s national trademark to the influence of business interests, particularly as stimulated and articulated by a young charismatic evangelist, Billy Graham.

Kruse quotes Graham as saying in 1952, “If I would run for president of the United States today on a platform of calling people back to God, back to Christ, back to the Bible, I’d be elected.” Republican conservatives have been banking on this ploy ever since.

Imagine a decade-earlier version of AMC’s Sixties advertising agency in Mad Men and one may better understand how corporate America began its drive toward oligarchy with the collusion of rightwing politicians. God got big in the 1950s. Government agencies initiated prayer services. In 1954 Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance, and that was the year “In God We Trust” got added to postage stamps. The next year the phrase was added to U.S. currency. And in 1956 it became the official national motto.

In the current national debate about the character of the United States—a debate that affects education, the arts, the sciences, politics, global affairs, and all the rest—it is useful to remember that the public “God,” like the notion of being a “Christian nation,” is a recent invention—at root merely a crass advertising ploy and propaganda with no actual foundation in faith.

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