Society must curb violence by attacking at its roots - controling violence in the entertainment media - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 1, 1993 | by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

Leading off the evening news one recent night was the shocking report - shocking to ABC News, at least - that the two cops convicted of abusing Rodney King's civil rights had been granted a two-week reprieve before entering jail.

Meanwhile, across America, hundreds of young, inner-city men with long arrest records, many convictions and few stretches in the hoosegow are killing each other along with innocent bystanders. Is that irony for you?

Or how about "Politicians Find NRA a Vulnerable Target As Violence Fears Rise"? Thereupon follows a story on how liberal Democrats are hoping to co-opt the law-and-order vote by diabolizing the National Rifle Association. Apparently the NRA - not the ferocity of the street thugs - is responsible for the violence in the inner cities. Is that enough irony.

Crime in the inner cities is out of control, and the most deplorable of the crimes is cold-blooded murder. In Washington, two sensible commentators whose writings often focus on inner-city problems, Adrienne T. Washington in the Washington Times and William Raspberry in the Washington Post, are calling for troops to be sent in, as we have sent troops into Somalia. Yet one can be sure that the phony pieties of progressive thought will bring to ruin any harsh measures used to deal with the city's harsh realities.

Progressive thought - politically correct thought, liberal thought - is now as corrupt as a fat, 19th century pasha dragging on his hashish pipe. First it was corrupted by money, as armies of social experts made handsome livings off its do-good programs. Now cowardice has rotted out its insides. It is without principle. The social experts cannot face up to the depravity of our cities. They cannot act resolutely against the warfare that goes on there. In fact, they cannot even address the warfare. And so they direct our national indignation against the NRA, occasions of police brutality and what they are pleased to call racism - white racism.

Remember the cynical self-promotion in September when self-appointed experts on civil rights accused Florida's law enforcement agencies of racism for questioning black youths in connection with the slaying of a British tourist, a slaying that witnesses said was committed by black youths? When the troops that columnists Washington and Raspberry envisage begin to arrest a disproportionate number of black youths, how long will it be before the self-promoters vitiate this prudent and urgently needed policy? Soon the issue will not be the deaths of innocent black bystanders or the fear stalking poor black neighborhoods, but government repression of black people.

Ultimately, police power is going to have to be used, whether it be wielded by more police or by soldiers. Order eventually is reimposed wherever it collapses. But I cannot see this happening for a long time. There is the cowardice of our elites. Then, too, there is a tremendous appetite for violence in American society. Our entertainment industry abounds with it, which is another irony: Many of those who make these gorgeously filmed blood-lettings, slow-motion fistfights and instantaneous shouting matches are progressives! Friends of the Earth! Voices of reason! Peace lovers!

In Washington there is one progressive who recognizes the irony. Sen. Paul Simon, an Illinois Democrat, is laying the rhetorical groundwork for limiting violence on television. Sending in the troops is urgently needed. More prisons for the incorrigible are necessary. But in the long run Simon is right: A society entertained by the amount of violence that entertains us is bound to be intolerably violent and a menace to personal freedom.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor-in-chief of the American Spectator.