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In Media Violence Alert (2000), an informative and concise collection of five essays by a variety of insightful contributors that was put together by the Center For Successful Parenting (www.sosparents.org), Dr. Brandon Centerwall, M.D., M.P.H., documents in his essay "Television Comes To South Africa and Mcbride, Canada" that it has been proven in every single society in every single country in the whole wide world---from India to Indiana---that crime rates more than double within ten to fifteen years of the introduction of television to any society.

Wow! Why the fifteen-year delay, you ask? Because crime---rape, murder, assault---is an adult activity, and since television's greatest influence is on children, the time frame is indicative of the gestation period between when violent images are first perceived until when violent action is conceived. Basically, it's the length of time between how long it takes for the brutalization of a three to five year old to reach prime crime age.

It's common knowledge that children learn by mimicking, so it shouldn't be surprising to find out that within two years of introducing television to any group of children, two things will happen: the children's creative capacity will decrease by at least 22 percent and rates of biting, kicking, hitting, etc., will more than double. (Gee, I bet a third thing will happen, too. I bet a new strain of "learning disorder" will evolve out of virtually thin-air. And that a ton of parents will eagerly medicate their children with a chemical compound strikingly similar in make-up and effects to that of cocaine …...)

The most effective essay in Media Violence Alert was Lt. Col. David Grossman's twenty-six page opus entitled "Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill." Grossman, a former army ranger, West Point professor, and the author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost Of Learning To Kill In War And Society , drops the metaphorical bomb in an utterly brilliant presentation of the shared paradigm between the military's conditioning process and that of the media's.

In a nutshell: after the first few major wars the United States military was simply aghast at man's inherent lackthereof ability to just simply kill another man upon command, a "flaw" that was indicated by a scant fifteen-percent firing rate among soldiers and one that prevailed even after informing the troops that they were in fact only shooting at designated "bad guys." Apparently, just as "pesky" environmentalists are destructive to the lumber industry, a respect for life is destructive to the death industry, so since humans aren't born with an innate instinct to murder the military constructed one to install. And instill it they did: the firing rate by the time of Vietnam was well over 90 percent.

Grossman attests that militaries use one of three types of conditioning to train a man to kill: brutalization, or inculcation of values; classical conditioning; or operant conditioning. In brutalization, or the inculcation of values, a person's existing norms and values are broken down so that a new set of values, which embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life, can be accepted. To the young soldier this is more commonly known as boot camp; to the young child, unable to discern between their reality and media reality, this comes in the form of any violent or graphic media footage in scenes from cartoons to "E.R." to video games.

Classical conditioning, once best demonstrated by Pavlov's dogs, who learned to salivate from the sound of a ringing bell, can now be illustrated just as well by the student's reactions at Jonesboro high school upon being told that someone had just shot a bunch of their little brothers, sisters, and cousins in the middle school: they laughed. We have a generation of people who associate violence with pleasure, and no, not because they're parents didn't love them or they listen to Judas Priest: these kids were conditioned ten to fifteen years ago in a culture that propagates it, long before they were old enough to buy albums.

Operant conditioning is a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response that is responsible for 75-80 percent of the shooting on any battlefield. When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they are conditioned to do, hence life-saving procedures such as fire drills and self-defense courses for women featuring simulated attacks. It should be of great interest to know that the United States Military has licensed a slightly modified version of the Super Nintendo game "Doom" and are calling it MACS, Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulators. To train people to kill.

Is it effective? You tell me: Michael Carneal, a fourteen-year-old from Paducah, KY, had never fired a pistol in his life when he stole a .22 pistol from a neighbor, took it to school, and opened fire on a prayer group as they were breaking up. Firing at a group of screaming, running kids, he hit 8 of them with 8 shots---5 in the head, 3 in the upper torso. Grossman, who also not only trained the Texas Rangers, but the Texas State Patrol, the California Highway Patrol Academy, and a battalion of the U.S. Army Green Berets, reported that when he informed the Green Berets of this child's "achievement", they were stunned: nowhere in the annals of military or law enforcement history can an equivalent accomplishment be found. Witnesses testified that Michael stood and shot with a blank look on his face, never moving his feet. He was playing a video game. Michael came not from a "broken" home but rather an affluent family, where "combat simulators" played a common role in his childhood curriculum.

Grossman aptly calls this conditioning and desensitization AVIDS---Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which works a lot like AIDS: it alone does not destroy you, it destroys your defense against otherwise non-fatal situations that come across your path. In fact, he often testifies as an expert witness in cases where kids are facing the death penalty, fighting for mitigation on behalf of that child. To paraphrase, his expert ass can be found trying to convince ignorant you not to sentence a child to death since the culture that you propagate actually conditions kids to kill, but since you consider yourselves to be such "experts" on the matter yourselves---so "morally" convictive about what's "right" and so truly abreast of what is "really" going on with people these days (when you're not glued to your TVs, that is)---that you can't see the forest for the trees.

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Throughout Amused To Death (59k), Waters attacks television news programs as frivolous. The song "What God Wants, Part III," ends with the lyrics:

And the network anchor persons lie
And the soldier's alone
In the video zone
But the monkey's not watching
He's slipped out to the kitchen
To pile the dishes
And answer the phone

The television war can be turned off and forgotten just like any other program. "I think it would be very good if every human being in the world, as their right, had a news channel that was not selling corn flakes," Waters said on Westwood One. "Who's duty was to gather information and disseminate it without caring about whether or not it helped them sell corn flakes. Who didn't care what their ratings were and who were not interested in putting on something that had to compete with a game show or a re-run of Happy Days."

The title of Amused To Death (59k) comes from a book by New York University Professor Neil Postman entitled Amusing Ourselves To Death. In the book, Postman chronicles how information has changed from the typographic age to the television age. "Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe," wrote Postman. "The all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering gray light."

Postman's book, though a bit preachy, does a good job showing the changes in American culture with the advent of television as the major media force. The biggest effect is that images have now replaced thought. Showing somebody thinking does not look good on TV. "The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see," Postman said in his book.

"Television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music."

"It is the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest," Postman said. "That is to say, to accommodate the values of show business."

This one of the main points put forth in both Postman's and Waters' works: All television is entertainment, even the news.

The lyrics in the title song of Waters' album paint a wonderful musical explanation of the culture created by the television set: a culture concerned with Jessica Hahn and Melrose Place; with consumerism (98k); children huddled together staring at the tube (98k); and a need to be constantly entertained. (59k)

"I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien creature seeing the death of this planet and coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around and finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets," Waters told the L.A. Times.

"They come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death . . . television, when it becomes commercialized and profit-based, tends to trivialize and dehumanize our lives. So I became interested in this idea of television as a two-edged sword, that it can be a great medium for spreading information and understanding between peoples, but when it's a tool of our slavish adherence to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is the God that we should all bow down to, it's a very dangerous medium." (59k)

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Copyright 1997 by Ron Kaufman

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