Perhaps our greatest need in the face of such an event is to regain a sense
of control, of explainability; to fit the event into a schema in which we
can declare it anomalous, and already explainable by familiar theories. To
minimize its emotional danger to the stability of our collective belief
systems. We don't want to imagine that such an event points to phenomena we
haven't yet recognized.
And the news media respond very much to this need. Even the rumours and
premature speculations and false information, as they later turn out to be,
fit certain familiar patterns. They were mentally ill. They were neo-Nazis.
They were something we already know, so we don't have to look too deep ...
don't have to risk seeing things, or beginning perhaps to credit hypotheses
that we very much don't want to entertain.
Neither hate nor violence is abnormal or pathological in humans. The
_degree_ to which these responses are promoted or deflected or channeled by
a culture varies. The probability, and the frequency, of violence of
various kinds differs radically, and systematically, among cultures,
subcultures, classes, genders, age groups. The statistics of violence are
fundamental data about sociocultural systems.
Why do we want to insist that this event was extremely unusual? logically
it is not simply the scale that matters so much; once such an event begins,
it is mostly chance how many people die. What disturbs us, I think, in this
incident is the suggestion that normal, typical, relatively privileged
young people in OUR culture could commit these acts with no strong sense of
moral inhibition ... and with no very difficult access to the tools that
mediate the culture of violence.
It is a truism that America is a culture that idolizes the _idea_ of
violence. Our popular culture is dense with extremes of vicarious violence
and has been for some time. Some point to the violence of our frontier
culture, some to the loss of its alternative definitions of masculine
identity, some to the glorification of war needed to recruit cannon-fodder.
I suppose my current pet theory is that masculinity is in crisis in our
culture, that there are fewer and fewer satisfying ways to legimitately 'be
a man' by the standards of our traditions, and that an positive orientation
toward the _idea of violence_ (not necessarily actual violence) is becoming
a default necessity for adolescent and pre-adolescent masculine identities
... and there is not a lot to replace it until quite late (job
responsibility, family responsibility, ... social responsibility??) in
identity development.
I am developing a professional interest in popular video arcade games and
computer games. The most popular standard genre for males from about 12 to
40-something is basically shooting at human (or semiotically human)
targets, with a premium on maximum deaths per unit time. Some games
advertise the realism of the hits. Many games are just elaborate excuses
for more point-and-shoot action. These games are more popular than
television with young males in the US; movies imitate these games, not the
other way around. They are a 'leading' phenomenon in the culture. Any
imagination of what it would be like to make one's way around a high school
compound, and through its corridors, and into its rooms, firing away at
every target ... is precisely the activity type of these games, in a
slightly different setting. I would be surprised if there is no game like
this already; perhaps the gamemakers vetoed the idea for fear of the risk
to profits if people should object. The 'action movie' genre is very much
an animated version of these games; the media are converging. (There are
also other game genres, of course.)
I am not assuming any simplistic relationship between vicarious enjoyment
of the idea of violence in games and committing real violence; most who
play the games do not and would not massacre people they know. I do perhaps
assume that the threshold to get many young males in Western cultures to
the point of being willing to kill en masse is not all that high; war is
not exactly a rare phenomenon. There are still strong visceral inhibitions
that arise from seeing the consequences of such actions; I don't think we
understand very well what it takes to neutralize those, or whether in
extreme stress or killing frenzy people move ahead with massacres and only
feel the visceral consequences too late. Of course most games, and much
high tech warfare, very carefully delete the sounds and images and smells
that trigger these inhibitory reactions.
What I am suggesting is that adults, and particularly parents, at least in
middle-class American culture, are unwilling to feel any real curiosity, or
responsibility, about why their male children idolize the idea of
committing copious lethal violence against people.
The "trenchcoat mafia" adopted the symbolism, at least in part, of the
"Gothic" youth subculture. I happen to have got to know a couple years ago
some participants in this culture and a little about its appeal to
'marginalized' youth. Not necessarily economically marginalized, but pretty
generally alienated from families, rejecting the conformist routes to
success and popularity in school culture (in Colorado one group that _was_
targeted were popular school "jocks"), deeply cynical about the hypocrisy
of a dominant culture of greed that pretends to higher values, and looking
for alternative ways to be 'cool' and attractive to their preferred sex.
Prototypically they play at being vampires. They are very inward-oriented,
preferring to keep to their own groups, and mock-aggressive toward others
only to show their contempt for them. They participate in the general
age-group fascination with violence, and some -- perhaps especially those
who have been physically or emotionally abused -- mix the romantic violence
of vampire clans with fantasies of revenge and mayhem. Consult your local
comic book store racks. Goths are doing identity work (including via
community formation), and most are pretty desperate for outside validation
toward self-esteem.
In the complex and not particularly neat world of teenage identities today
(mostly urban, suburbanites tend to follow urban trends in this), Goth
culture links via its musical preferences (hard rock) to a number of
related, vaguely 'satanic' styles which may also egregiously reject adult
hypocrisy by adopting neo-Nazi symbolism, but with transformed
significance. A swastika can mean totally different things on a biker, a
skinhead, and a Goth. So can celebrating Hitler's birthday. The "trenchcoat
mafia" may have been only a partially Gothic, ad hoc hybrid of available
identity styles, but the kind of desperate identity work it represents is
far from unfamiliar.
Do identities work through oppositions? of course they do in part, and
especially so when there is little or no positive basis for an identity ...
we are a society that denies opportunities to assume serious responsibility
to its younger citizens, and with it opportunity to form independent
positive identities ... most of what is left is identity by what-I'm-not.
President Clinton said we have to teach young people to talk rather than
kill ... but who exactly would they talk to? Even when they talk by
killing, who really wants to hear what they are saying?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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