Jay Lemke escreveu:
> Of course we are all, especially perhaps Americans who feel close to the
> culture of U.S. suburban high schools and their students, trying to puzzle
> out some meaning from the tragedy in Colorado.
>
> 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.
>
> ---------------------------
> 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>
> ---------------------------