WASHINGTON -- Just for laughs, let's
pretend. Say we wanted to create, in a relatively peaceful society, a nation of youthful
killers, or at least just millions of aggressive young jerks.
How could we do it? We would have to start early. Analyzing infants, we would realize their desperate need for love and intimacy. We would also note that a baby's only real job is to study, digest and mimic everything he or she encounters.
Then we would go to work. We would create an economy in which, in most families, both parents needed to work outside the home to survive. Soon after birth, babies would be placed with caregivers who would tend to their basic needs but who, in most cases, would lack the time and interest to invest the same kind of love and attention as parents.
Working parents would remain on the job for ever-increasing hours. Their "free" time at home would be eaten up by bill-paying, cooking, cleaning, helping with homework and finishing tasks uncompleted in the workplace.
Many children would still receive considerable love and attention. To minimize that, we could design, say, an electronic box that beamed seductive, violent images into every dwelling.
The box would feature some uplifting programming--comedy, romance, educational shows. But it would also provide fistfights, beatings, rapes and murders.
Now a few troublesome kids would realize that such images are fiction. So we would invent "news" shows, highlighting real-life mayhem from local, national and even international sources. The box could also provide "talk shows" in which real people aired their problems before slapping, kicking and otherwise attacking each other as audiences cheered.
But this still might fail to make enough children violent. So what if we invented strikingly realistic visual computer "games"? Children could shoot, impale or beat to death lifelike images of people and monsters. Blood could splatter, "victims" could instantly revive to be killed again and again!
Some pesky parents would, of course, limit their children's exposure to the box and the games. To deal with that, we could create public living rooms, complete with comfortable chairs and popcorn! Here, children could share with strangers the thrill of experiencing, on gigantic screens and with sophisticated sound systems, vivid moving images of stabbings, garrotings, explosions and dismemberments.
Also, in certain parts of the country, rural and urban, we could glorify guns, make folks think they cannot live without firearms. Then we could make it relatively easy for anyone, even children, to get them.
Still not enough? We could do something with music. Kids love music, as anyone who has watched a baby react to a lullaby can attest. We could attach violent, materialistic or overtly sexualized images to music.
We could even persuade certain music-makers to celebrate guns, greed and irresponsible sex in their songs! They, too, could provide images for the box--of threatening-looking men and barely dressed women, all singing about the glories of instant, consequence-free gratification of every urge.
To be sure that children got the pro-violence message, we adults could pretend to abhor brutishness. Kids are natural rebels. So we could bemoan violence ceaselessly in the media, and--this is key--feign astonishment each time a youngster assaulted or killed someone.
So. If a society actually did those crazy things, would children--not every child, just way too many of them--behave in frighteningly aggressive ways?
Maybe. But what intelligent culture could be so stupid? Just thinking about the prospect is scary. Thank God it's just pretend.