Hollywood, Littleton, and Us - violence

National Review, July 26, 1999 by Rob Long

Besides, as Jerry (and Bill) discovered, people like their crappy entertainment culture, it makes a whole lot of money, and with a whole lot of money you can buy a very nice president.

And while one finger points at Hollywood, the other points at Smith & Wesson. Gun control may or may not be a good thing, and it is certainly true, as gun- control advocates rotely and routinely tell us, that if Klebold and Harris hadn't had guns, they would not have been able to shoot their fellow students.

But where do we place the blame for the evil deeds of other scary teens? The girl in New Jersey who secretly gave birth during her senior prom, dumped the baby in the trash, and returned to her salad? The boy who raped and murdered a little girl in a Nevada casino bathroom while his buddy stood by?

You don't need a gun to be a sociopathic monster. It helps, of course, but all that's really necessary is the ability to tune out the suffering of another person. What the recent incidents of evil teen behavior have in common is the easy way these kids did just that. Who knows if the girl in New Jersey played violent video games? Who knows if the boy who raped the girl in the casino had seen Natural Born Killers? The average adolescent watches between three and four hours of television a day. He is responsible, almost single-handedly, for the most financially successful box-office year in Hollywood history. He is the backbone of the cash machine known as AOL. He knows how to tune in almost anything projected on a two-dimensional screen, and tune out almost everything real. The default setting on late-model adolescents is "entertain me."

It doesn't matter so much what, precisely, is on the screen. The very act of watching television encourages a kind of detached, passive, slack-jawed energy.

It's easy to slip into an I-am-watching-myself-on-television trance, to drift away from the here and now, to freeze out the suffering of your schoolmates or the face of your newborn baby, if you've had enough practice flipping the remote control. Lots of violent movies and endless hours of video-game slaughter might help tip the transition into monsterhood, just as a gun within arm's reach offers itself up as a handy score-settler; but it is the day-in-day-out practice of anesthetized viewership that teaches the mind how to flick the "off" switch.

Michael Medved, the author and radio host, often asks his listeners to engage in a little thought experiment. Imagine, he says, that your favorite cultural critic (Bill Bennett, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, insert-favorite-scold-here) has taken control of the nation's televisions. Every single offering has been vetted and sanitized by your hero. Would you still care if your kid watched 20 hours a week?

The traditional "family hour" of television programming, the 7-to-9 p.m. safe haven, fell out of favor years ago. But assuming that family-hour programming returned to all television channels-broadcast and cable-would that be such a good thing? Does the fact that content is free of violence and sex mean it's okay to watch 18 hours of it a week? It is a strange era indeed when the concept of "family hour" refers not to time spent with family but to time spent with television.