Love is All You Need

And God saw that the wickedness of man
was great in the earth, and that every imagination
of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually 
--Genesis (6:5) 

 Masks dropped away and real people began to appear:
cranks, imbeciles, the demented,
the vengeful, sadists, killers.
Modern society had created its own kind
and they feasted on each other.
It was a duel to the death...in a cesspool 
--Women, Charles Bukowski

But no matter what happens to the surviving humans,
there will always be the walking dead 
--The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks 

 --Why would people watch a show about nothing? 
--Because it's on t.v. 
--Seinfeld (Hollywood episode)
___________________

For unknown reasons, Ranger viewed the t.v. series, "The Walking Dead" last week, a program about a politically-correct group of survivalists duking it out against the Undead. Think, being stuck in an endless loop of "Zombieland" with Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee, sans Bill Murray, and you get the idea.

It is a series which abides by one principle: killing is the only means to survival, and the killing is ongoing and never-ending; it is an NRA fantasy. But the one noteworthy part of the ordeal was his observation of the juxtaposition between the "Lawman" character whooping up on some slavering Zombie with a very big rock and the commercial which immediately followed.

The gruesome death scene was followed by an advert for Values.com, a group advocating the inculcation of, well, values into the body politic. A 15-30 second spot advocating for, presumably "good" values, versus and hour of relentless bloody-minded fear and violence. On the basis of time allotted, bad values wins.

Broadcasting on another channel in the same time-slot was "Criminal Minds", a program devoted to violence in the form of sadistic serial killers. What would have rated an "X" in Sam Peckinpah's day is just another day in televisionland, 2014.

Is the viewing public becoming more corrupt as reflected by its taste for horrific, spectacular violence, or does the media simply reflect in the micro the behavior of the nation (the macro)? Or is it that people have become so inured to sensory input, that they need shock treatment to register even the slightest blip of awareness?

What are these hyper-violent programs telling us? Do they serve to propagandize us that this is a very violent and unsafe world in which we live, demanding violent reactions? Is the purpose to keep the viewing public in a state of turmoil, and if so, why?

With A Vengeance

 Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century,
anything could happen 
--A Confederacy of Dunces,
John Kennedy 

Your love is like bad medicine
Bad medicine is what I need
Shake it up, just like bad medicine
There ain't no doctor that can
Cure my disease 
--Bad Medicine, Bon Jovi

 You can only kill those who never harmed you 
--Vengeance is Mine (1979)
_____________________

Ranger does not quail at the sight of blood, but he stands in awe of the virtual violence dished out in heaping helpings to a ravenous audience apres the terrorist events of  9-11-01.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (or, "Men Who Hate Women") was published posthumously to much acclaim in 2005; it is now the biggest-selling ebook. The eponymous "girl" exacted vengeance via her computer hacking skills. She was Machiavellian and presented as autistic; she did not understand the more gentle human emotions like "love", mistaking it for opportunistic sex.

Popular television series "Golden Boy" features the youngest homicide detective in NYPD history, who gets there by planting evidence which indicts a "bad guy". He has earned adulation and rank by flouting the law, and each episode follows this template of a supposedly conflicted morality: Good guy does illegal things to get bad guys. The problem is, morality is not the issue in the arena of law, which is quite specific.

The ultra-violent series, "The Following" features an FBI agent who is chasing a nasty serial killer. However, the FBI agent killed a person in revenge before his appointment as a federal agent, so again, vengeance is rewarded. 

Bad characters mete out bad (unconstitutional) police work, and the viewers find this gratifying and/or acceptable as entertainment.The violence being acted out supersedes anything portrayed in X-rated films of the past, the only possible result in the viewer is exhaustion, or faint relief that the incessant violence has ceased. 

Why do we subject ourselves to such visual and aural pain? 

These entertainments suggest a moral lassitude among our law enforcement personnel, and an aggrandizement of the Dirty Harry template. In an easy analogy, Presidents G. W. Bush and B. H. Obama are Golden Boys, and our entertainment inures and acclimates us to accept the supposed ubiquity of the transgressive behavior.

[addendum: We, like everyone else, are long on grievances but short on solutions. A reader sent the following effort from the site, "Free Man's Perspective,  "How to Fix Detroit in Six Easy Steps". ed.]

A Most Peculiar Man, Pt. II

  and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's closing time 
--Closing Time, Leonard Cohen
(lyrics, Jay/Feinstein) 

Solitude is the profoundest fact
of the human condition.
Man is the only being who knows he is alone 
--The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz 

Rumor had it that he was homosexual;
in reality, in recent years, he was simply
a garden-variety alcoholic 
--The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
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Continuation of thoughts on the Kurt R. Myers shooting in upstate New York:

Once the shooting starts it is hard to control emotions -- police, included.

SWAT teams practice every day for such scenarios, kitted out in their black gunfighter rigs, often in public. They often appear in public wearing black T-shirts with images of cross-hairs trained on a person's head, or sporting cutesy captions like, "We still make house calls" under a depiction of a team busting down a door.  These men sit in local restaurants wearing such togs, weapons holstered in plain view.

We have seen these same images thousands of times during the past decade of the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), sometimes over there, sometimes in t.v. or film, now, increasingly in our our towns. This implied terror now walks openly among us, and we assent to tolerate it, guessing that it is being shown for our own good.

However, the citizens of the United States are NOT the ENEMY, and police have no reason to bully us in this show of force.  They are public servants paid for by our tax dollars.  We do not get off by being the passive players in a BDSM fantasy perpetrated by overbearing brutes who are constructed an "us" versus "them" scenario.

Even in the case of shooter Myers, an adversarial relationship between perpetrator and police is not helpful. If we wish to understand the etiology of a spree shooting, the starting point should be the mindset of the shooter, not the type of weaponry chosen to implement his crime.

Why does a 64-year-old man go on a shooting spree? We do not have the answers, but we can observe that the reaction of our police protectors are often just as violent and pathological as that of the perpetrators they encounter, yet we take comfort in this "good violence". We claim to abhor violence unless it is under an official aegis.  We say we are liberal, democratic and humanistic, but we are all of us armed to the teeth, personally and governmentally.

There are times to employ violence correctly, but correct employment demands the ascent on the spectrum of possible responses; lethal force should not be the go-to response.  Rather, it becomes necessary after depleting non-lethal possible reactions.  However, it seems now -- after the inception of the discretionary Wars on Terror -- we have come to accept violence as an acceptable first reaction.

There is a sickness in our society that cannot be cured by palliative gun control legislation.