The prophet Muhammad (may Allah's Peace and Blessings be upon him) said that we become like the people we keep company with. One can argue that, similarly, we may become like those who or that which we spend time with in our living rooms via our TV screens. Unless you turn off the tube, the amount and intensity as well as the often pernicious nature of the agony and violence turned spectacle, whether as news or entertainment, either breaks your heart or incases it in layers of ice in order to cope with the overload.

From: Adbusters No. 25, Spring 1999 (adbusters.org)

HEADRUSH
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH US.
IT'S A TORRENT OF VIOLENT CINEMATIC IMAGERY THAT CAN'T BE TURNED OFF.
IT'S CHANGING US IN WAYS WE CAN HARDLY IMAGINE.

Bruce Grierson

 "MY FRIENDS, I AM HERE to tell you that we, as a society, have a problem." Budgie Basi-Reed peered out over the sea of strangers who had gathered for a commemorate service in a little park in Victoria, British Columbia. "Our children, yours and mine, are murdering each other, and what are we doing about it?" Exactly a year earlier, in November of 1997, a 14-year-old local girl named Reena Virk had been beaten unconscious by a bunch of other kids, then drowned in a nearby waterway, apparently for sport. It was one of those crimes that leave people rubbing their knuckles, calling phone-in shows, fishing for answers.

 Basi-Reed, a family friend of the Virks, urged everyone present to conduct their own private experiment: Turn on a television and count the violent acts that flash across the screen in an hour, or to play one of their children's video games and do the same. "Violence has become an acceptable form of entertainment," she said.

 It's easy to imagine that not-too-original line being repeated in Jonesboro, Springfield, Paducah, Pearl, Moses Lake and any number of other towns that have made headlines for the wrong reason. While it may be untrue that North American kids have just generally plunged into a Lord of the Flies-like state of murderous anarchy, a lot of school janitors have been mopping up blood of late, and skeptical academics continue to ignore, in their careful forensic investigations, the shark in the swimming pool.

 What if Budgie Basi-Reed is right? What if we're dealing here with a kind of evil-not the Biblical variety but something more chillingly banal: a cultural scourge we created ourselves? It's scary to contemplate because it implies a lot of recent deaths could have been prevented. On the other hand, it carries some hope, because wherever there's a cause, there's generally a cure.

 The American industrial-entertainment complex has pretty much replaced the church as the maker and enforcer of values on this continent. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but it's a significant thing, with profound implications. The cinematic image-whether issuing from a video screen or a TV screen or a movie screen-occupies more of our attention and ties up more brain RAM than ever before. We hit 18 having spent more time in front of the TV than at school. We can summon the face of Bruce Willis, the stubble and the crooked smile, more readily and vividly than our own father's. Our heads resound with the voices of strangers. We need never be alone with our thoughts because there's always something lively playing on the Holodeck. Movies are stealth tutorials; they underline the distance between who we are and who we would like to become. "Where we had once measured the movies by life, we are learning to measure life itself by how well it satisfies narrative expectations created by the movies," said the social critic Neal Gabler recently, paraphrasing psychologist Kenneth Gergen.

 Last year, Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper - in a story exploring why the national fear of violent crime continues to rise, even as violent crime is down a little overall - noted that "some of the rarest and most frightening types of crime," melodramatic, cinematic crime, is booming. "Police and bank officials pointed this week to what seems to be an increase in Hollywood-style bank raids by heavily-armed, shouting bandits."

Life imitating the movies imitating life.

 Davor Marjanovic, a Croatian filmmaker now living in Vancouver, describes the bizarre sensation of walking the streets of a Hollywoodized Sarajevo during its recent civil war. The young soldiers wore Rambo-style aviator shades and spoke in American movie cliches. They talked in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys." "It was surreal: life as a movie - or a video game," Davor says. He had the strong impression that there was a running clock and a running body count and civilians were among the quarry. "If they killed us, they scored."

 "One day, on the street, I saw a little boy, 10 or 11, playing with a dog," Davor remembers. "The boy had something in his hand. At first I thought it was a toy gun. After some time, the boy just turned and looked at the dog. And then he shot the dog in the head. I said, 'Why did you do that?' He said, 'He was bugging me.'" There was something familiar about the way the boy stood over the dog, sighting the animal down the barrel. Then Davor knew. It was exactly like Clint Eastwood just before he says, immortally, ". . . Make my day."

 Condemning media violence isn't very intellectually fashionable these days. It puts you in the camp of puritans, orthodox pressure groups, censorship advocates, tabloid readers and Shirley Jones. But, increasingly, good conscience forbids any other position. Something profound is happening out there. Every second kid you meet seems to be suffering from a kind of kindling restlessness; he shadow-boxes Coke machines and asks you to repeat what you just said. The schoolyard killing sprees that have taken place since 1996 are of a sort never before seen: they're not gang or race-related, but random, rural and retributive. The attackers are usually tortured outsiders dramatically evening the score; in virtually every case they're obsessed with violent pop culture. It may not be the lone culprit (the availability of guns is a continuing problem), but brutal media imagery is almost certainly helping nudge the whole bell curve of human behavior, producing surprising numbers at the fringe (one kid on a rampage may be a fluke of genetics, but six such kids, unknown to each other and scattered across the continent, are harder to dismiss) that themselves get amplified and spun on the evening news. Thus does what David Grossman, author of On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, calls the "virus of violence" continue to spread, from dish to receiver to cranium.

 In 1998, several Los Angeles TV stations broke away from children's programming to go live to a standoff on the freeway. A motorist was holding the police at bay. Suddenly, he lit his dog on fire. Then he propped the nose of his shotgun under his chin and blew his head off.

 It was as arresting as anything Quentin Tarantino could have cooked up. But it's a safe bet that most of the young viewers, peering over their bowls of Cocoa Puffs, remained unmoved. Life? Fiction? The event hardly distinguished itself. It followed that familiar moral trajectory - a flat line that dips.

 On the big screen, the Tarantinos and Coens have given us bad guys who would just as soon shoot you as buy you lunch. Arguably, these are highly moral films in that they unflinchingly depict a uniquely American amorality. The problem is, not even adults can be counted on to get the point. Dumbed down by a lifetime of images without context, we take away only one message: It's cool to kill indiscriminately and without remorse.

 DAVID GROSSMAN has a unique set of job skills. As a lieutenant-colonel in the US army, he watched a lot of war games; as a media critic, he has watched a lot of bad TV. A former psychology professor at West Point, and author of a Pulitzer-nominated book on the psychology of violence, Grossman has studied the way men learn to kill, and the way kids learn to, at the very least, tolerate killing. His conclusion: some identical psychological processes are at work. In both the simulated theatre of war and the virtual worlds of television and interactive video, programming and de-programming take place. Over time, sensitivity to human suffering is significantly blunted. New value systems and response patterns develop. New behaviors emerge. Here's how.

ONE.  At boot camp, whole platoons of new recruits are dressed down by their drill sergeant, marched to collapse and shorn like lambs to homogenize their identities. Forget everything you once believed about who you are and how the world works, they are told. From now on you will accept destruction, violence and death as a way of life. Psychologists call the process "systematic desensitization."

 Like an electronic drill sergeant, media violence systematically brutalizes and desensitizes its recruits and enforces a new set of values, Grossman says. "But instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality. So when young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a 'splatter' movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child's eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times."

TWO.  During World War II, Japan used what psychologists call "classical conditioning" - the forced association of an emotional state with an action - "to train its soldiers not only to kill but to like it," as Grossman puts it. A few Japanese soldiers were chosen to bayonet a captured and bound Chinese prisoner to death in front of the rest of the Japanese regiment, who were instructed to cheer them on in their violence. Immediately afterward, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and "comfort girls." And so they learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure. "The Japanese found these kinds of techniques to be extraordinarily effective at quickly enabling very large numbers of soldiers to commit atrocities in the years to come."

 In Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange, a sociopathic criminal is "treated" by being forced to watch violent movies while injected with a drug that makes him sick. He's thus conditioned to find violence unpleasant. Actual violent films have precisely the opposite effect, Grossman believes. "Children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume or their boyfriend's touch."

 After the shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, one of the high-school teachers told Grossman how her students reacted when she broke the news about what had happened. They laughed. Not nervous titters: laughs. "The data indicate that the most dangerous of all media is that which teaches the child to laugh. So, once you get beyond the early age where kids are stunned and mesmerized by TV and can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, you find they begin to laugh at the violence. And they continue to laugh all through their teenage years. I call this phenomenon AVIDS: Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Just as AIDS has never killed anybody - it destroys your immune system, and then other diseases that shouldn't kill you become fatal - TV violence by itself does not kill you. It destroys your violence immune system and conditions you to derive pleasure from destruction."

THREE.  Flight simulators and moving-target practice burn in learned behaviors - muscle memories - that soldiers can count on later, in the field, as the adrenaline pumps and the bullets fly. Stimulus, response, stimulus, response, no thinking required. It's called "operant conditioning."

 "The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned response," Grossman says. "Soldiers now learn to fire not at stationary bull's-eyes but at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That's the stimulus. The trainees have only a split-second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops. Later, when soldiers are in battle or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill."

 An identical sort of operant conditioning is at work in interactive point-and-shoot video games, Grossman believes. "Kids who have played lots of video games often demonstrate that they can kill with remarkable accuracy in real life, even if they have never held an actual gun.

 "In 1997, in Paducah, Kentucky, 14-year-old Michael Carneal stole a .22 caliber pistol and ammunition from a neighbor's locked garage, brought it to school and opened fire as a prayer group was breaking up in the school's foyer.

 "He fired eight shots. The FBI says that the average US law enforcement officer, at a distance of seven yards, hits with fewer than one bullet in five. Michael Carneal fired eight shots at a bunch of milling, scrambling, screaming children. He got eight hits. Five of them were head shots. [Many video games, Grossman notes, give bonus points for head shots.] Even more astounding was the kill ratio. Each kid was hit once. Three were killed; one was paralyzed for life. Never, to my knowledge, in the annals of law enforcement or military or even criminal history can we find an equivalent achievement.

 "It turned out that while the kid had never fired a pistol before stealing that gun, he'd been a video-game fanatic. The family was well-to-do - he was the son of a well-respected local attorney - and they had arcade-quality games in the house. In addition to that, he spent a lot of time at the local arcade.

 "The natural inclination [of, for example, a soldier in combat] is to fire a burst of shots at each target until it drops. The video games teach you is that in order to win the game, you have to hurriedly go on to the next target. You can't wait for this one to drop. When Michael Carneal was shooting, he fired one shot at each kid.

 "All the witnesses say he held the gun in two hands. He had a blank look on his face. He never moved his feet. He never fired far to the right or the left or up or down. He simply fired one shot at everything that popped up on his screen."

FOUR.  The recruit learns to emulate his or her drill sergeant and military heroes who personify violence and aggression. Such role models are viewed as both templates to copy and ideals to which to aspire. This is called "modeling."

 Questioning Michael Carneal after his rampage in Peducah, psychiatrists and psychologists didn't think to even ask him if he played video games. "They didn't have the background or training. But the one cop asked the boy if he'd seen any movies that were like what he did. He said, yeah, he'd watched [the Leonardo Di Caprio picture] The Basketball Diaries. In that movie, there's a vivid dream sequence in which a scrawny little white boy who's being tormented by teachers and students brings a gun to school and begins to blow away all of the teachers and students, being cheered on by his friends as he does this.

 "When Michael Carneal was asked if the movie had made him shoot up the schoolyard, he adamantly said it hadn't. He simply said, 'This is the only real adventure I've ever had.' In my experience, that's what happens with combat veterans, too. I've talked to hundreds of them, and if you ask them, was there a movie that inspired you to win your silver star, distinguished service cross, their medal of honor, they'll say, Of course not. They'll be angry you could even propose such a thing. But if you ask, Was there a movie that was like what you did, they'll turn around and say, Yeah. It was just like . . . and they'll start telling you about the movie. Over and over and over again."

 COMPELLING AS IT IS, Grossman's thesis with its simple equation - garbage in (violence), garbage out (violent behavior) - fails to address a few key questions.

Adbusters:  Someone put it to Jack Valenti [who heads the Motion Picture Association of America and helped create the year-old television content ratings system in the US] that violent TV drives up crime. And he shot back with, "Homicide rates and crime generally have been going down for the last three or four years, especially in big cities. Should television get credit for that, too?"

Grossman:  Overall murder has gone down largely because advances in medical technology are saving more lives. Juvenile crime has gone up. Jack Valenti will never win a numbers game (as 200-plus studies prove). But this is the kind of tricky sleight-of-hand TV apologists try to pull off. As Michael Medved observed, TV executives claim (to Congress and other watchdog agencies) that they don't influence people's behavior, and they're certainly not responsible for the way viewers might respond in any emotionally charged, potentially violent circumstance they may find themselves in. And yet at the same time, to their all-important sponsors, they claim that just a few well-placed seconds can control how America will spend its money.

Adbusters:  My friends and I belong to the first cradle-to-grave TV generation. We've watched tens of thousands of violent acts on the tube. Some of us even play Mortal Kombat. And yet we're decent folks who call our moms on Sundays. I doubt one kid in 10 million ever goes postal. Why all the fuss?

Grossman:  When I was a kid, I bounced around with my brothers and sisters in the back of the station wagon and none of us ever buckled up, and we were fine. Millions of other American children grew up for generations and never wore seat belts. And the vast majority of them are just fine. By that logic, there's no reason for anybody to worry about buckling up their kids.

 Obviously, the reality is that we took a horrendous risk by not buckling our kids up. And anyone who fails to do so today is considered to be negligent. If your kid's not buckled up, that's just one factor. If he's not buckled up and you're not paying attention and somebody else isn't paying attention and you're driving at high speed and you get in an accident and the child flies through the windshield, there's a high probability the kid is going to die. A lot of factors had to come together to produce that result. But the one most obviously avoidable variable was buckling that seat belt.

 In the same way, my wife and I took horrendous risks by letting our children grow up consuming TV violence and violent video games, and I'm not about to take the same risk with my grandchildren. I've already set aside the money - I've got two boys in high school and one in college - and they know that I'll pay them $1,000 a year for every year they keep the grandchildren TV-free, and that money will go to the grandchildren's college fund.

Adbusters:  That seems like a pretty extreme position. Sure there's a lot of crap on TV, but there's good stuff, great stuff, as well. Why go cold turkey? Why not just be selective?

Grossman:  You can be selective: you're an adult. Kids can't always be. An adult has to make the decisions, and an adult isn't always there to do it.

Adbusters:  I thought the V-chip was supposed to solve some of this.

Grossman:  There are some real limitations with the V-chip. Number one, we've left it to the networks to rate their own shows, and they are doing a horrendous job of it. Number two, the V-chip assumes that the parent cares and wants to educate and protect the child. Number three, the most vulnerable body of children out there are the ones in the low-income communities - the ghettos and the barrios - and they are going to be the very last ones to get the V-chip.

 Plus, you've got to recognize the ability of children to overcome technical limitations. My son is 14 years old and he's actually being paid, by me in my corporation, to be my computer and technological expert. And then you've got the problem where Big Brother and Big Sister want to watch one thing, and little brother is sitting there exposed to the same thing.

 But I'm not really interested in questions of selection. I don't want my grandchildren to get in the habit of watching TV.

Adbusters:  Why not?

Grossman:  How many reasons do you want? There's the real process of visual and video addiction. Plus, we have powerful data linking TV-viewing with obesity in kids. And a kid camped in front of the TV isn't just being sedentary, he's being bombarded with consumption messages. We have some of the smartest, most creative people in the nation being paid vast sums of money to convince your child to eat sugary cereal.

 A CBS producer spent the day with me at my home in Jonesboro a few years ago. He sat across the living-room table from me and said, 'My own in-house people have advised me not to let my own daughter watch TV at all until she's old enough to read.' The producer and his wife said they planned to send her to a day care centre that has no TV, and vowed to show her only age-appropriate videos.

Adbusters:  You actively campaign to have violent shows yanked from the public airways, and violent video games taken out of the free marketplace. Isn't that unconstitutional?

Grossman:  When the framers of the US Constitution wrote the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms, do you think they ever dreamed that "arms" could someday include weapons of mass destruction? In the same way, until late in this century, no one ever dreamed that the right to free speech could include mechanisms of mass conditioning and desensitization.

 The media have every right and responsibility to tell the story, but they have no right to glorify the killers by presenting their images on TV. Do I think the road to resensitization is through formal censorship? No. I do believe the time has come for our society to censure (not censor) those who exploit violence for profit. As Catherine Itzin [author of Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties] said, "What is conditioned can be deconditioned." We can change. I believe it.

Adbusters:  Are there any precedents for the kind of change you're proposing?

Grossman:  We have managed, despite Americans' constitutionally entrenched right to "bear arms," to restrain our killing technology. We've reduced military technology [nuclear and chemical weaponry, for example] on moral grounds. In the same way, we can move away from the media technology that enables killing.

 If we fail to do it, we'll go the route of the Mongols and the Third Reich, or the route of Lebanon and Yugoslavia. No other result is possible if successive generations continue to grow up with greater and greater desensitization to the suffering of their fellow human beings. We must put the safety catch back on our society.

HOLDING THE IMAGE-MAKERS' FEET TO THE FIRE

 "Never in my experience as a historian and a psychologist have I seen any institution in America so clearly responsible for so very many deaths, and so clearly abusing their publicly licensed authority and power to cover up their guilt, as the TV networks," says Dave Grossman.

 He knows whereof he speaks. In 1997, after a student in his hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, gunned down some schoolmates, Grossman was besieged by media seeking expert analysis. He did many international radio and newspaper interviews, and was contacted by more than a dozen network TV producers. Canadian and Australian TV had him on, but no US TV spots ever ran. (In his one appearance on MSNBC, Grossman was shut down in less than 20 seconds.)

 That has been the pattern with Grossman and the networks. "Every time the story gets to a higher level, it's killed," he says. "Without fail or hesitation, when the networks find out where I'm coming from [that is, ready to implicate TV as a probable culprit in real-world violence], they'll have nothing to do with me. The magnitude of the stonewalling is staggering."

 It's a curious paradox. The most powerful and far-reaching delivery system for a social message like the harmfulness of TV violence is TV itself. But the networks have a protective firewall: they control the medium. If they don't like the message, they simply won't broadcast it.

 What to do? From his home in Jonesboro, Grossman is quietly building a powerful case against the networks. When I first spoke to him last fall, he articulated a long-term strategy involving three points of attack: education, legislation, and litigation.

A. Educate by every means other than TV "until there's a groundswell of outrage," until the conspicuous absence of TV coverage of an enormous national story becomes the obvious story itself.

B. Legislate change by lobbying for major amendments to broadcast regulations, or the wholesale replacement of the FCC.

C. Litigate via class-action suits for damages against the industry, much like the ones that have been brought against the tobacco industry. Grossman clearly believes this can be done. In his new book, working-titled Teaching Kids to Kill: How Violent TV, Movies and Video Games Cause Violent Crime, "we're presenting the case just as an attorney would. We're saying, look, you've heard the media's side of the story for a lifetime. Now here's the rest of the story. Opening arguments are up front. Exhibit A is the body. Exhibit B is the smoking gun - the quality of the research. Exhibit C is a history of network negligence."

 If the TV networks are ultimately vulnerable to class-action suits, Grossman reasons, manufacturers of violent video-games are doubly so. Such folks are a kind of indicator species for all purveyors of violent imagery. If they fall - or adapt by changing the nature of their games, or at least find some way to keep the most violent games away from kids - it's only a matter of time before the networks do, too, Grossman believes.

 "All we've got to do is get a couple of these cases out there, generating news, and then the video arcades aren't going to touch these games. We've already done tests with randomly selected juries, where one guy plays the prosecutor, and one guy plays the defense lawyer in a civil litigation suit. The results have been very interesting. We've found that you can definitely hammer these guys. They [the video-game manufacturers and distributors] are definitely vulnerable to the degree of moral outrage that will make juries give multi-million-dollar decisions. Nobody is ever going to say that the right of a 13-year-old to sit and practice killing human beings at the local arcade is some kind of constitutional right.

 "So, you're going to have out there as defendants the local video arcade owner, the game's distributor, the owner of the store where the game was bought, and the manufacturers. Win just one case and the guy running the local arcade is going to say, Hey, the point-and-shoot games are just a tiny slice of my money. I don't need this. And boom, it's all going to go away.

 "The point-and-shoot games will be the first to go. After you've gotten rid of them, you move on to the punch-and-kick video games, and other games where the child pushes buttons and inflicts pain on other people.

 "Now, with the public already primed and committed to reclaiming its psychic environment, you take on the networks. You bring out all of these data and you lay them on the table. You demonstrate the fact that everybody from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the American Medical Association to the United Nations has plead with the networks to reduce the amount of violence, and instead all they've done is increase it. And then you ask a jury of 12 Americans to pin the tail on the donkey. They're going to hammer the networks every time.

 "The broadcasters may be powerful enough to buy candidates and influence elections, but they can't buy every jury of 12 people in the US. When a jury sees the unassailable evidence, we've won."

 Grossman imagines a group of people who have already been victimized in a high-profile incident like the one in Jonesboro banding together and launching an action that simply cannot be ignored. "Parents of the shooter and the parents of the victims have to both agree that one of the criminals here is the networks. And then we hold the networks' feet to the fire."

 Portions of the preceding articles have been adapted from a lecture Dave Grossman gave at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, in April 1998, and from Grossman's book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill on War and Society.