About the time of the Columbine shootings, I kept seeing and hearing this comparison between a Bill Clinton speech on the shootings and our “police action” bombing raids of Kosovo.  Clinton said words to the effect of, “we need to teach our kids that violence is the solution to nothing.”  And, of couse, the United States was dropping bombs on Kosovo, signifying that nobody really believes the words “Violence Solves nothing.”

My mind seems to be racing right past the usual debates, and somewhere admist the usual debates that the mass murder at Virginia Tech sparks, I ask a simple question that to answer honestly is to arrive at no answer at all.

Is humanity by nature violent or not?  Take your time in answering.  Throw up two ledgers, and when confronted with contradictory evidence, slide it into both ledgers.

In the spring of 2001, after a school shooting, I sat in a college class with a large number of international students of different cultures.  We discussed the shooting, and it degenerated into a debate between two individuals over the very narrow topic of the supposed sickness of videogames.  So it was that a student from India who looked at “first person shooters” aghast and saw it as contributing to a numbing effect among youth was against someone from remote Alaska who had little else to do during his adolescence but play a whole lot of First Person Shooters.  I cannot say I blame the Indian woman — media undeniably alters our  vision, and witness my continued assertions that the show 24 is Homeland Security propaganda to dessensitize us from the uglier sides of our “War on Terrorism”.  So it is.  First Person shooters are training manuals for mass murder, the effect of which is a visceral thrill from pummeling away anything that blips onto the screen.  The first person shooter was understandably defensive as hell about the insinuations from the attack on his favored activity: witness the same when the discussion goes to guns and somebody laden with guns is confronted with arguments about a persistent Gun Culture, whatever the merits are about its effect in general on the populace and in specificity on the subjects we’re forced to look at. 

BUT… The ratio between the number of people who play “first person shooters”, quite often at rather impressionable ages — meehaps isolating, and the number of people who commit acts of violence in real life is… I don’t know… millions to one.

So, conditioned to kill, — shooting fictional one dimensional character (simulations of real people, right?) at any rate.  AND… Don’t. 

Which reminds me: the percentage of members of any army unit that are something on the order of deadweight and useless– meaning that they are unreliable to fire a shot when needed — is about 33 percent, or thereabouts.  This is a statistic that I’ve kept running into.  After all that
conditioning for this express purpose, the thought of dropping the enemy to death — whatever his threat to the Free World may or may not be — is stalled, the mental process freezing the soldier.  This washes away the bravado that we need to “Why can’t we arm the entire faculty and students at Virginia Tech?”

Thinking about the late, great Kurt Vonnegut and his novel  “Slaughterhouse Five” — which concerns the psychological effect of the bombing of Dresden in what the author himself considers a “Just War”, and the moral agony of killing even for the cause of toppling the Nazis.  Psychologically we cannot rationalize it. 

Except, apparently, we can rationalize… if we are in that culture at that time… well, in any election held during Hitler’s reign in Germany by a Secret Ballot and with the assurance that no retribution will be meted — Adolf Hitler would win it.

So it is.  The famous experiments shows that we obey authority in inflicting pain (screw the dial up further)  The History Channel is the Hitler Channel Hitler supposedly modelling his genocide after American extinguishing of the American Indian and with a nod to the KKK, lest we excuse our nation from the equation.  Serial killers are the topic of
jokes, apt to appear in staylized movies.  We eat ceral based on the murderous Vlad the Impaler in the form of Count Chocola, still my favorite bizarre factoid.

Actually the contradiction comes into play with how we have  administered the Death Penalty, visa vie the Electric Chair.  Three switches are flicked by three different people simultaneously, one of them connected to the chair.  Which leaves a sense of doubt that we might have contributed directly to the death of … well, a murderer.  Indeed, there’s  only a one in three chance.  But even so, he’s a murderer, right?  Who I, myself did not kill.  Right?  Is that a Kafka parable, somewhere next to the “Penal Colony”?  Because
if it isn’t it should be.

Perhaps the answer is that as a species we can rationalize our death and destruction if we can shuffle it onto others — and ignore the unpleasantness.  The effect of the Virginia Tech Shootings (again, multiple by two or three and you have a typical day in Iraq) is… ambiguous again, actually: are we repulsed and numb to the effect, or are we tuning into the 24 Hour News shows (ratings have to be up — a better draw than the Don Imus controversy) for a viscareal thrill and desire to believe “That could be Us!”

I don’t know.  Though I should probably not think about it too much.  It’s draining.  And it probably reads badly as a reflection of myself.

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