by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
U.N. Visitor’s Plaza, New York, New York
A gift from Luxembourg.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last forty-eight hours, you have no doubt seen the coverage concerning the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. If you possess even a minimal level of empathy for your fellow human beings, twelve dead and fifty-eight wounded when their only crime was wanting to see a movie can only be properly described as tragic. Among the dead accounted for up to this point are a man who had been celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday (Alex Sullivan), a member of our Navy (Petty Officer Third Class John Larimer), a twenty-four year old aspiring sports journalist (Jessica Ghawi), and a six year-old girl. Some less responsible outlets are reporting this little girl’s name (Huffington Post, looking your direction), but other more responsible outlets are not. I will not post her name for the same reason others have declined: the little girl remains unidentified because her mother, also a victim of this horrific crime with gunshot wounds to the neck and abdomen, remains paralyzed in hospital and has not yet been told of her daughter’s death. Even in reporting on events, sometimes a little discretion goes a long way and does not impair the “public’s right to know” in any substantive manner.
Over the next few days, you will see many attempts by people with various political agendas trying to monopolize on this shooting to promote their pet causes. In fact, it has already started and in a most heinous manner. During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation’s “Istook Live!” show, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs” . . . and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter. Gohmert in one fell swoop illustrated that not only is he a base political opportunist, but that he apparently doesn’t understand the 1st or 2nd Amendments very well – a common affliction among Texas pols. Others pols are already using this as a way to promote their anti-gun agendas, their pro-gun agendas and the Twitter-verse is filling with statements from “our leaders” about this tragic event and all of them in some way self-serving.
I urge you to ignore these opportunists for a moment and to think about something else related to the Aurora shooting.
Multiple outlets are reporting that the accused gunman, James Holmes, had dyed his hair red and told the police he “was the Joker”.
There is the fantasy of violence. There is the reality of violence. They could not be more different in outcome. This presents the issue of instances like this where the line between fantasy and reality have clearly been crossed in some meaningful manner. Does this problem exist in the individual or in society itself? I submit the answer might be “a little of both”.
Consider this: one of the elements of drama is that the hero (or something or someone the hero holds dear) must be in peril. It creates tension, it moves the story. You cannot have drama without an element of danger or risk and very often that danger or risk is portrayed in the form of physical violence. As a species, we are wired to find this entertaining. There is nothing wrong with a bit of wish fulfilment in seeing the hero overcome adversity as entertaining.
The reality is starkly different. Witness real heroes like Jon Blunk who was killed defending his girlfriend Jansen Young during this rampage. Witness Jarell Brooks, a 19-year-old from Aurora, who put himself at risk to help Patricia Legarreta and her two young children escape, but not before he and Legarreta were wounded. Witness Eric Hunter, a 23-year-old from Aurora, who found two wounded girls and dragged them to safety in an adjoining theater before blocking the door to Theater 8 and preventing the alleged gunman from spreading his gunfire in to a new room of innocent theater goers.
All three possible outcomes. Death, wounding, escape from physical harm. All three equally heroic in that other lives were saved, some of them strangers with nothing in common but a love of the same kind of cinema and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a funny thing about heroism though. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously quipped, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” In real life, the tragedies and the heroics are real and have real consequences. The hero does not always win the day as they are prone to do in fiction.
Does our propensity for dramatic entertainment, let alone dramas involving violence, feed a propensity for violence? This is a question as old as drama itself. On one side of the argument is the catharsis argument put forth by Aristotle in Poetics; that in viewing tragic events, the audience’s negative feelings like fear and pity are purged. This line of reasoning was later supported by psychologists and psychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and A.A. Brill. On the other side are modern researchers who have found correlations between watching violence and the rate of violence in society, but causal connections between the two in the general population have been difficult to pin down. What is clear is that “exposure to media violence does not produce violent criminals out of all viewers, just as cigarette smoking does not produce lung cancer victims out of all smokers. This lack of perfect correspondence between heavy media violence exposure and violent behavior simply means that media violence exposure is not a necessary and sufficient cause of violence.” (“Media Violence and the American Public” by Brad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson, Iowa State University, American Psychologist, June/July issue, p. 482, 2001.) That a small segment of society seems particularly susceptible to being prodded in to violence through the consumption of media violence though seems undeniable. To me, this seems to comport with the rate in society of people with mental problems revolving around empathy like sociopaths and psychopaths. People who lack empathy would naturally not connect the actuality of violence with the fantasy of violence as they don’t care about the impact of their actions on others to begin with. Correlation is not causation and the root causes of violence are more complex than just a person’s entertainment choices. There are also environmental, social, economic, and personal history to consider. Some people in certain situations are simply going to be more prone to violence. While causation in the general population has been found in desensitization toward violence and violent entertainment, causation of real life violence with fictional violence has been more elusive although desensitization in itself has been can “[increase] aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, physiological arousal and aggressive behaviors, and decreases helpful behaviors.”
As a society, do we have a duty to mitigate all factors that can induce violent behavior in individuals? Even if that susceptible segment of society is a very small percentage of society? With complex compound causation, this is a practically impossible task, and even if “perfect mitigation” of contributing factors was had there are a certain percentage of society that are going to be violent psychopaths no matter what their environment is like. Where to do we draw the line a social inputs that can encourage violence and personal responsibility for individual action? Consider this as well: do we have the same duty to mitigate when the violence perpetrated by sociopaths and psychopaths is economic (as in the banking industry shenanigans that birthed the OWS movement), is purely psychological (as seen in pathologically verbally abusive spouses) or is purely political (as in the religious far right attempting to trample history and the Constitution to institute theocratic laws if not outright theocracy)?
Perfection is not possible. Evil cannot be eliminated in the world for without it we have no definition of good. The perfect removal of error from complex systems is a mathematical impossibility. Does that mean we should not try?
What do you think?
Source(s): ABCNews.go.com (1, 2), NBCNews.com (1, 2), Huffington Post (1, 2, 3)
~ submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
UPDATE: The names of all the victims have been officially released by the Arapahoe County coroner’s office. These are the names it is important to remember. Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6, Jessica Ghawi, 24, Alex Sullivan, 27, Jonathan Blunk, 26, John Larimer, 27, Matt McQuinn, 27, Micayla Medek, 23, Jesse Childress, 29, Alexander Jonathan (AJ) Boik, 18, Alex Teves, 24, Rebecca Ann Wingo, 32, and Gordon W. Cowden, 51.
A Personal Note to the Aurora Victims and Their Families and Friends:
My sincerest condolences. May your loved ones lost live on in your memories and may your memories be long, robust and full of happiness. May the wounded heal and take every advantage of their good fortune at surviving this senseless act of violence. May this harm done to you and yours not keep you in the depths of lament, but transform to a celebration of life – both theirs and yours. Peace, love and long life.
Gene H.
NOTE: For those of you waiting for the next Propaganda installment, I’ll either publish it tomorrow or publish next weekend depending upon time constraints. I thank you for your patience in the face of breaking news.
An article by a columnist ended with:
(Huffington Post). The myth of mystical control of behavior, including genetic control “in the wiring” is propagated even by a prolific writer who does not read widely enough to understand that:
(from my video link upthread). If we continue to spread the “it’s in the wiring” propaganda nothing will be done to counter that myth with the real story.
The behavior of society impacts every citizen from conception, to birth, to eventual death:
(Chemistry Lessons, emphasis added). Society has known of these things since Rachel Carlson pointed them out some 50 years ago, but having done nothing, “that [still] holds true today” and young kids continue to die of cancer.
In fact, the business as usual meme that ignores the ongoing mass murder of society:
(my video link up-thread). I say it is bully business for the strong international chemical and oil corporations to force their will on the weak, the citizenry, and I am not alone in that appraisal:
Wow! It surprised me that the HOlmes family lawyer didn’t correct the news report when she made the first family statement, but here we are, it is being corrected now. I guess I had way too much faith in the media and I have no idea why I did THAT considering I have known about their slipshod sensationalism for so long.
But the next question, of course, is what else in the “tea party story” was manufactured, or distorted on purpose, and which part of the “OCCUPY” story is being manufactured or distorted.
Meanwhile Holmes is being silent. What did Joker do after he was arrested in the third Batman movie? Should we look there for clues?
One of the things “government” has been accused of is using “chock events” in their panoply of tools. 9/11 has been given as the modern event unleashing the use of trauma weapons. Some have accused the FBI of using enticement and cooked cases to show not only their anti-terrorist detection skills, but even like booster shots keep the psyche prepared and on edge for fear of similar events.
I’ve only talked briefly with USA contacts about Aurora, they being the ones bringing it up. There I see the same fear as after 9/11. Speculation of course, as to how wide spread the effect is now.
But were it true that government has a finger in the spell of trauma events, then we would wish to investigate it.
One can take the Nigerian banker father who tried by contact with the American embassy to get his son under supervision as a possible “bad guy” in the terrorist scheme of things. Many factors revealed by sources other than the security forces, I believe, support the idea that it was an operatiion steered by a security force. The ineffectuallity of the explosion, the handover at the airpost and then through the checkpoint there. etc.
The key to these ops and the key to the answer on Aurora as being a psy op, is the procurement of a suitable operative from the terrorist groupies in one case, and the finding of unstable types such as Holms. They are clean of traceable links to the mannipulating agency. There are channels to test them and guide them, some indeed exotic.
I won’t take time with more development. Just loose speculation anyway, as I have not studied the Nigerian case with the son with the hot pants thst did not explode.
But having having seen how the trauma from 9/11 persist one wonders of the effecs of every event which shares the sam characteristics. And relatively small Holm events which leaves us feeling helpless to shield ourselves give the effect a great boost apparemtly. Studies will come.
Can 2000 years of persecution and Holoaust have caused the same effect on the Jewish people?
Two points:
ABC is blatantly lying. Before you touch the phone, the record funchtion is ON, preferably with backup.
De we need a law on it? Can we get one?
That the gulf war was profit for news was news to me.
I always wondered why it was so well produced. Now I feel that I know why. Did the networks coordinate with Saddam so that the rockets against Israel did not come at break time and rather at “network” times?
Matrix anyone?
bettykath,
Sad, but true. I have a friend who is a Journalism prof in the Midwest. His theory is that the First Gulf War was the death knell of serious journalism on television because that marked the first taste of serious advertising profits for the industry. I think he may be on to something there.
“When Disney bought you, did Goofy take over the news division?”
What news division? Isn’t all entertainment?
UPDATE:
HuffPo is reporting the following vis a vis the previously reported statement of the alleged shooter’s mother:
“In the hours after news of the massacre broke, ABC said that it had spoken exclusively to Arlene Holmes in her California home:
The woman, contacted at her home in San Diego, spoke briefly with ABC News and immediately expressed concern her son may be involved in the shooting death of at least 12 people overnight.
But on Monday, a lawyer for the Holmes family read a statement by Arlene Holmes to the press, saying that she needed to “clarify” the comments attributed to her:
If Arlene Holmes’ comments were indeed mischaracterized, it would be another black eye for ABC’s coverage of the killings in Aurora. The network was forced to climb down from an unverified claim by reporter Brian Ross that Holmes might have been affiliated with the Tea Party.
UPDATE: ABC News stood by its account of the conversation. It said that producer Matthew Mosk had called Arlene Holmes, and that she had only said “you have the right person” after Mosk had informed her that her son was identified by police as the lone suspect in the Colorado massacre. The network also said that Holmes’ lawyer had asked before holding her press conference if there was a recording of the conversation. ABC News responded that there was no recording.”
HuffPo published the little girl’s name before her mother is told about her death and now ABC can’t seem to keep their own collective foot out of their mouth.
Between those bits and the MSM giving the political grandstanding a platform, I’ll have to say that the high pitched whirring sound I keep hearing must be Murrow spinning in his grave. Did any of you actually go to journalism school? I mean, I can understand it coming from HuffPo. What they did wasn’t wrong, merely tasteless and unnecessary. But ABC? Come on, guys. When Disney bought you, did Goofy take over the news division?
Here is a list of quotes, together with their time location on the video I posted up-thread:
00:00 – “One of the most crazy making yet widespread and potentially dangerous notions is ‘oh that behavior is genetic‘” (Dr. Sapolsky).
01:00 – “nothing is geneticaly programmed” (Dr. Maté).
01:30 – “the whole search for the source of disease in the genome was destined to failure before anyone even thought of it” (Dr. Maté).
02:24 – “some of the early childhood influences … affect gene expression, actually turning on and off different genes to put you on a different developmental track” (Dr. Wilkinson).
02:45 – “[childhood] abuse actually caused a genetic change in the brain” (Dr. Maté).
03:28 – “a few thousand individuals were studied from birth up into their twenties, what they found was that they could identify a genetic mutation, an abnormal gene which did have some relation to the predisposition to commit violence, but only if the individual had also been subjected to severe child abuse” (Dr. Gilligan).
05:30 – “run with the old version of ‘its genetic’ and its not that far from history of Eugenics, and things of that sort, and it is a widespread miscoception and a potentially dangerous one” (Dr. Sapolsky).
05:44 – “one reason that the sort of biological explanation for violence, one reason that hypothesis is potentially dangerous, it is not just misleading, it can really do harm, is because if you believe that, you can very easily say ‘well there’s nothing we can do to change the predisposition people have to becoming violent, all we can do if someone becomes violent is punish them, lock them up or execute them, but we don’t need to worry about changing the social environment that may lead people to become violent, because that’s irrelevant'” (Dr. Wilkinson).
06:28 – “the genetic argument allows us the luxury of ignoring past and present historical and social factors. In the words of Louis Menand who wrote in the New Yorker very astutely:
… which is a good way to put it. So the genetic argument is simply a cop-out that allows us to ignore the social and economic and political factors that in fact underlie many troublesome behaviors” (Dr. Maté).
“The government” is made up of individuals. A “militia” is a group of individuals who bring their personal guns to the party.
OS,
I didn’t say it was going to be easy! 🙂 But the only place to begin at is the beginning. If we say we shouldn’t discuss it or deal with it so close to the event, I understand that. But when do we discuss actually making changes?
Mike S.,
Kristol is only making the claim so that he can attempt to make the argument that the Right is willing to compromise on reasonable gun control. If the assault weapons ban was still in force, this semi-automatic rifle would have come under the ban and he might not have had it in his arsenal.
Guys, this is what we are dealing with from a purely political perspective. My friend “Kestrel9000” put together a compilation of stuff he gleaned from around the internet last night. In real life, Kes is a liberal/progressive radio personality in New England who writes under the pseudonym.
This is on top of the feeding frenzy by the right wing–notice the comment by Bill Kristol on Fox who was so concerned that he suggested the Democratic Party start making more efforts at gun control. I did not fail to notice Mr. Kristol was not so concerned that the RNC and Mitt Romney also pursue that course of action.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/23/1112784/-I-don-t-do-windows?detail=hide
OS,
Kristol is generally a dumb, partisan bulb, but you have to admire his “chutzpah” in this statement, even if its intent was so obvious.
we should try not to hurt each other…
You guys/girls are standing in a circle again.
Causing a logjam. Disgusting behavior.
raff, HIPAA regulations have draconian penalties. Medical facility computers have to be secure and encrypted. You cannot even fax something to a computer legally unless you know it to be a secure computer; it has to be to a real fax machine. Medical records have to be under double layers of lock and key. Each violation can carry up to a $50K fine. Your suggestion would stand zero chance of implementation. As it stands now, if I try to get the psychiatric records on a person charged with a felony, it often takes forever and many phone calls, and occasionally the judge has to issue a court order with threat of sanctions on the keeper of the records before i can get them. And that is even when I produce a valid release signed by the inmate. One medical records clerk did not want to comply because the signature on the release form was “obtained under duress” (her opinion) because the former patient is in jail. HIPAA is a firewall of epic proportions.
raf,
I believe you called it correctly.
Blouise,
I missed your link until now. It suggests that my thoughts above are already coming to fruition. Sad.
OS,
I would think that the HIPAA laws could be amended to allow for a computer search for any medication used for mental health issues if Washington was serious about trying to prevent these kind of madness with guns. Washington and the states could make it mandatory that in order to purchase guns or ammo, you have to waive your HIPAA rights. I know that people will be afraid that the government will misuse this information, but isn’t there a sane middle ground that would work to prevent mass killings? Even though 1,000 rounds may not be unusual for someone who is using them for target practice, it is a lot of firepower when used to hunt humans. I have to buy my decongestant at the pharmacy in limited quantities to prevent people from misusing the ingredients, but I cannot limit the amount of ammo and guns that can be purchased? Restrictions can be made that will help prevent murders. Nothing can prevent them all, but shouldn’t society attempt through reasonable methods to prevent mass murder?
The next story I expect to see is the NRA and its supporters using the calls for gun control as more “ammo” to fuel the drive that Obama is trying to take away your guns. Heck, the Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann’s of the world might claim that Obama was behind this murderer so that he could take away the guns.
This spiral of nonsense has to end somewhere.
Thanks Scribe…..
YOu should do a little research on MKULTRA…BLUEBIRD….maybe the work of Dr. Colin A. Ross…. http://www.rossinst.com …
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