The Gawking Dead

After the latest—ongoing now—spate of horrific acts of gun violence, people in power are finally talking about doing something about it. They’ve narrowed the problem down to three components: the Media (an omnibus category apparently composed mostly of Hollywood Job Creators who voted for Barack Obama), mental health and the reigning third rail of American politics, guns.

I’ve already looked at guns in this space and put them at the top of the to-do list.

I don’t know what to do about the mental health aspect of the problem. Fix crazy? Fix crazy and the problem goes away. But everyone has tried to fix crazy at some point, either in their own lives or that of a friend or loved one. How did that work out for you?

Alternatively, are doctors going to be required to report patients who meet a government-determined profile? Will there be anything like due process, a fair question in this, the golden age of unmanned drone strikes? How about camps? And how crazy, exactly, will be too crazy? Wearing tour t-shirts after May?

It’s crazy. The simple fact is, you just cannot crack down on future-crime. Without resorting to a dystopian police state utilizing technology that doesn’t yet exist, future-crime is going to remain darn near impossible to head off at the pass.

I’ve added an additional, separate class to the list of culpable parties: news/entertainment-news. Media outlets from CNN to Entertainment Tonight to NBC Nightly News could exercise responsible editorial restraint and cover that day’s spree killing without doing an entire package on the shooter, his life story and what drove him to do what he did. I can save you the time, ‘news’ people: The guy was nuts and he had access to a tool made for killing. That’s the common thing about all these shooters. Let’s talk about that instead of lionizing these clowns for posterity.

You’ll never see a shooter’s name in one my columns. Ever.

That leaves the entertainment media, and they’re the ones I’ve come to damn today. Because they’re the ones who could start doing something today.

Everybody cries, “Hands off the media! First Amendment, First Amendment!” And by everybody, I mean mostly the same people who are working feverishly to limit the reach of the Second Amendment.

(How come nobody ever complains about the Third Amendment, the one about citizens being required to house troops in times of war? I guess it’s true—everybody does like a man or woman in uniform.)

But all the conservative voices that are wrong on almost everything else—if one judges by recent national elections—are right about the media’s culpability in helping create a society desensitized to violence.

When Night Of The Living Dead came out in 1968, it was rated X. Its scenes of people eating people were considered too repulsive and over-the-top for anybody but adults high enough to want to see that sort of thing. Today, AMC’s wildly popular The Walking Dead equals or bests the worst of its forebear on a weekly basis, on basic cable.

I’ve been watching The Walking Dead since the first episode. It’s a smart TV show. Well-written and acted, thoughtful in its own way. But after Newtown, I really did reconsider the level of gore. I won’t even describe the ways they show human bodies being torn and chomped to offal shreds. Factoring in advances in technology, it’s actually worse than Night Of The Living Dead.

If I had seen that show as a kid, I would have freaked. The Wizard of Oz and the original Star Trek gave me nightmares. Now the Walking Dead’s animated corpses are on the cover of TV Guide and my 7-year-old son sees it and says, “Cool, zombies.”

Not cool with me. I pitched the magazine and then deleted the show from the DVR queue; if you don’t take a stand for something, you’ll stand for anything.

There’s a whole franchise of shows out there that starts with, “Crime Scene: [city name].” All kinds of TV pathologists are seen eviscerating ‘corpses’ on camera, in stomach-churning detail. Quincy did the same TV job in the ’70s, and never showed a single entrail or severed limb.

There’s a show starring Kevin Bacon that just started, with the promise of a new serial killer every week. First-person video games where the player gets to experience the thrill of actually mowing down an enemy in a spray of bullets are wildly popular. Some rap and metal music exists solely to extol the virtues of death and violence. And on and on.

The Right is right. Culturally, we are a cesspool.

And while I’m on a tear, let’s talk about a related beef.

I was at a movie last year, something rated R and loud and violent and dumb, and there was a mom next to me with her maybe 5-year-old kid. Even before the opening credits rolled, I thought it was an irresponsible parenting decision. As the movie unspooled, I observed that mom had no problem with all the death and graphic mutilation playing out in front of her child, but when it looked like a female breast was about to shown on camera, mom quickly covered the kid’s eyes.

Friends, that is a snapshot of a culture which is both upside down and backwards.

We owe it to ourselves, and more importantly to our children, to take a serious look at how we entertain ourselves at this ugly juncture in our history. It isn’t fascism or censorship for an industry to take a look at its impact on society—ie: their customer base—and decide, for the sake of that society, it needs to upgrade its business model.

It’s progress.