Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
American culture and politics have glorified violence for years. So why are we surprised when 6-year-olds kill?
Mar 15, 2000 | Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence. A little girl is shot to death after arguing with a little boy who has grown up in a world of drugs and disorder, one in which he could get an illegal firearm and take it to school with him. A fireman goes mad and shoots a couple of people to death. Before that, the country was wringing its hands because a couple of Columbine oddballs felt that they had taken enough criticism from their peers. Then, while walking the yard in the federal "supermax" prison in Florence, Colo., where they both were held until last summer, the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unabomber discovered that, politics aside, they had a lot in common.
What all of these people have in common is a set of ideas that have been pumped into society for quite some time now, from every direction imaginable. When I was living in Los Angeles 30 years ago, gang violence had largely simmered down, until "The Godfather," a masterpiece, arrived in movie houses and did for street gangs the same thing that "Birth of a Nation" did for the Ku Klux Klan five-and-a-half decades earlier. (One of the street gangs that came into existence after the film was called "The Family.") That was far from what Francis Ford Coppola had in mind, but such are the odd twists of a society in which the idea of the metaphor seems to have no weight. Too, too much is taken literally.
This and the many other gangster films that formed a trend helped create the ethos out of which rose the Crips and the Bloods and the many, many drive-by murders that eventually became a national crisis. Kids started joining gangs and parents started trying to move them out of that gang environment if they could. The blaxploitation films that kicked off with "Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song" in 1971 were also important because they glamorized Negro criminal types and elevated the idea that violence was fine and dandy because the rules of the system didn't apply to people who weren't white.
On the other side of the lane, as with the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unabomber, there was consensus. It didn't matter if one got a right- or left-wing reading: The police, the FBI, the CIA and local and federal government were all too corrupt to depend on. In the South, during the civil rights movement years, underground tapes were circulated with titles like "For Segregationists Only"; they depicted those who attempted to bring constitutional rights below the Mason Dixon Line as invaders who had to be dealt with very, very firmly. That firmness took three dimensions in the form of assassinations, bombings, beatings, hosings and the killing, mutilating and bruising of men, women and children. In the North, Malcolm X, always a heckler of the nonviolent movement, was calling for rifle clubs and "busting them redneck crackers in the head."
In the wake of the Negro riots that moved along, almost summer to summer, from 1964 to 1968, the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground picked up on all of that Malcolm X rhetoric. During the anti-war years they put those ideas about self-defense and revolution into some thin Marxist wrappers and went to market calling for "offing the pig" and "bringing the war home." There were plenty of shootouts between the Panthers and the police, as well as between them and rival cultural nationalists who thought African cultural retention and reassertion were more sturdy than alliances with white people and using texts by Europeans like Karl Marx. The Weather Underground attacked people in the street, bombed police stations and robbed banks. The Wild West, Bonnie and Clyde and dreams of overthrowing the government came together.
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