Raving Rant: A Royal Hypocrisy - Editorials

Raving Army turns his sights -- not literally, he's responsibly -- on Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly and gansta rap.

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Raving Rant: A Royal Hypocrisy

I stopped my subscription to Entertainment Weekly years ago, partially because they botched my name on the address label, mostly because it got to be an expense that I didn't really need. Besides, they had a website, and most of their stuff from the dead tree version either originated there or migrated there. One of the small pleasures to be had on the EW website, and on the back page of the print version, are short essays from Stephen King about popular culture. Since the man's well and thoroughly woven into the fabric of pop culture, it doesn't seem to be a bad thing. It likely draws readers to EW that might otherwise get their daily dose of celebrities, movies, and other ephemera from Ain't It Cool News. The website posted a new King essay on April 5th and the topic was video game violence. It went on to explain that a bill is currently pending in the Massachusetts State Legislature (HB 1423) which would ban video game sales to anybody under the age of 18. He correctly pointed out that there have been similar bills at various levels of government that were proposed and passed which subsequently died once they were challenged in court on First Amendment grounds.

King was honest enough to admit that he's not a gamer, and the fact that he was outraged by this bill speaks volumes about his willingness to defend the First Amendment. I was admittedly a little non-plussed about his backhanded "I-won't judge" comment, lumping God of War in with 50 Cent: Bulletproof. The former is an excellent game with some actual substance to it while the latter is a sad and laughable effort to cash in on a dubious sort of fame. Yes, both are bloody, both are violent, and there's certainly material in both that some might find objectionable. But one tries to get you to care about your character and the circumstances he's in, and the other is 50 Cent. The fact that King did, in an indirect fashion, try to judge the artistic merits of the games (focusing entirely on Bulletproof and leave the implication in the air that God of War was no better) bothered me. The earlier admission that he is not a gamer does not give him a pass on this sort of sniping.

That quibble aside, King very succinctly laid out the absurdity of banning video games with violent content while at the same time making no provision prohibiting violent movies or music at the same time. He accurately pointed out that movies have ratings and video games have ratings, both of which are voluntary, both of

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which depend upon people actually reading them and making an informed decision. He correctly advocated that parents need to be something more than just spectators and cab drivers in the lives of their children – that they need to be involved – and be willing to say "No" regardless of the dirty looks and pouts they will inevitably receive. So far, so good, and these are quite reasonable

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positions. For all the questionable content I consumed growing up, I was usually watching with my folks when it was around, and there were a few instances where they drew the line and said, "No, you cannot watch this yet" or "No, you cannot read this yet." It was probably the word "yet" that made the big difference. Drawing a bright line and saying "No, never" on certain forms of objectionable (or at least questionable) content is a good way to make it so your kids are going to nod and smile and proceed to obtain it behind your back. Setting a conditional boundary, the ever-popular "when you're a little older," is one that leaves you as a parent in charge while at the same time letting your kids know that you're willing to talk to them about it, maybe even reach a compromise. Even King pointed out that if you're going to say "No," you should back it up with a good explanation.

It's in the last full paragraph that King's arguments go off the rails. He'd done a pretty good job up to this point, but then he lost cohesion. The first big trouble spot was his assertion that the "culture of violence" had a very large component in the growing divide between haves and have-nots, suggesting that 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg, et. al, ad nausuem had been telling us for years about it and nobody did anything. I'm by no means an expert on rap, but even my limited powers of observation tell me that the early and indignant works of Run DMC and Grandmaster Flash, shouting out the message "we can do better than this!", somehow got flipped into the gangsta-bling delusions of Fiddy and Snoop, proclaiming "can't do any better than this!" as they swill champagne in pimped out Cadillacs while bitching about how hard it is for them to be, essentially, an asshole. I'd rather point out artists like Common and Mos Def as the true heirs to rap's early legacy and promise as an art form. I would also point out that it hideously undermines the point you're making about the assumed resentment between haves and have-nots when your examples currently fall into the former category. If anything, it's proof that some people in this society can in fact go from the one to the other, or even back from the other to the one. And Stephen King, a guy who could arguably be said to have been a have-not at one point in his life and became a world class have, is precisely the wrong guy to be decrying socio-economic inequality in America . I'm sure there's more than a few Benjamins lying around Casa de King which could be used to wipe the tears of left-wing existential angst from his eyes. But that was only the first part of the destruction of an otherwise well argued essay.

The straw which broke the essay's back was this bit:

Elephant Two is America 's almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.

Right there, in my mind, I heard the sound of a record needle being abruptly dragged across vinyl. Exactly what did this have to do with an ill-chosen and likely doomed bit of legislation in Massachusetts ? What the hell was he driving at? Whatever his thinking, the practical result of that sentence was to completely invalidate everything he had just said before. A fairly well reasoned appeal for personal responsibility and vigorous defense of the First Amendment shit-canned in an instant because King just couldn't quite resist making a completely gratuitous jab. Because of that one sentence, the implication is damning: Don't you dare blame the media for people being violent lunatics. But go ahead and blame the guns. The guns make people violent. Yeah, that's the ticket. The level of hypocrisy leaves me utter infuriated. To claim on one hand that people need to be responsible for themselves and the development of their children, and then shift the blame to another "root cause" of violence is absolutely inexcusable. Not only does it undermine if not outright eliminate the earlier argument, it perpetuates the same sort of mindless stereotyping about firearms and their owners that King indirectly denounced about video games and their players.

Let's lay all the cards out on the table here.

First, the mention of Cho Seung-Hui and his atrocity was completely irrelevant to the basic point at hand, which was the bill in the Massachusetts legislature and the larger issue of blaming video games. Moreover, Virgina's gun control laws, compared to other states, are fairly draconian. And yet, prior to the actual event at Virginia Tech, Cho obeyed each and every one of those laws! The son of a bitch, how dare he. There's a dozen different major points where somebody along the line could have done something a little different, and in the end, it might have only made the nightly news just a bit more lurid. If anything, the Virginia Tech tragedy exposed a major flaw in current legal thinking, that the best way to get convictions is basically to keep writing laws, piling them higher and deeper until a person is eventually found guilty of something. With regards to Virginia Tech, however, it's all a case of woulda-shoulda-coulda at this point. Waving that particular bloody shirt is pointless, not to mention tasteless, under the circumstances.

Second, just from a purely logical standpoint, it does not make any sense to protest the demonization of one inanimate object as the cause of a behavior while at the same time encouraging the demonization of another inanimate object as the cause of that same behavior. This seems to have escaped King. The consequences of this position also seem to escape King. After all, if it's OK for people to demonize guns as a cause for violence, then there's nothing to stop people from demonizing speech in its myriad forms as a cause for violence either. I would point you to the written and spoken words of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Robespierre, Osama bin Laden, and William Randolph Hearst as examples of speech used to cause violence. And if we're covering the written and spoken word, video games have both in spades.

Third, the source of violence in America and pretty much everywhere else is not guns. It's not video games. It's not rap music. It's not heavy metal music. It's not economic disparity. It's not some perceived hierarchal class structure that somehow spans all known cultures. It's us. Humans. Homo sapiens sapiens. At the end of the day, the full and absolute responsibility for our actions falls upon us. And while I'm certainly willing to allow for the existence of genuine mental defect or instability as an impediment or impairment to understanding the consequences of one's actions, I find myself generally intolerant to the notion that something other than a thinking individual bears responsibility for an event in their own lives, or in the lives of others. What is quaintly termed "Acts of God" might be the cause for a few events here and there. But the vast bulk of actions taken within human society are caused by human beings. The gun does not tell you to go kill people. The car does not tell you to drive when you're drunk. The cell phone does not pester you to call your friend and blather. The low grade steel of a component in your car failing isn't because the part felt like it. All of that and more comes about from a conscious decision made a human being. It might be at one or more levels of removal, like a car company CEO going with cheap steel, but it still comes down to a human decision. You decide what you're going to do with the gun. You decide what you're going to do with the car. You decide who to speed-dial on your cell phone. You might be happy, sad, angry, irritated, or even emotionally dead inside when you reach the decision, but the decision is yours to make and its consequences are almost always yours to deal with, assuming you haven't died as a result of your decisions or their consequences.

I imagine there's a question still hanging in the air. And in the interests of intellectual honesty, not to mention basic integrity, yes, I own guns. I've also been shooting for more than twenty-five years. I view shooting very much as a martial art and one that I've practiced for a long time with a great deal of enjoyment. Some people are doubtlessly going to argue that it's idiocy to try and lump shooting in with karate, aikido, or kung fu, but that is incredibly ignorant on their part. Martial arts, by their very name, are collected methodologies regarding the decisive application of force to conflict situations. Any asshole can throw a punch or deliver a kick. Any asshole can pick up a knife or sword and start waving it around. Any asshole can pick up a gun and start blasting away. Somebody who trains in the martial arts learns how best to apply those techniques and those weapons to a given situation. Moreover, they learn when to apply those actions, not simply lessons of timing, but considerations of legality and ethics as well. And like anything in this world, those techniques and any affiliated weapons can be abused, put forth to a purpose that is inherently harmful or illegal. I reject the stereotype of gun owners as crazed bloodthirsty barbarians looking for an excuse to blow people away, just as I reject the stereotype of video game players as amoral sociopaths lacking the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality. While I do not doubt such individuals exist, they are the minority, and a very small minority at that. They're the exception, not the rule.

I further reject the notion that "guns make it easier to kill." Like any device, its effectiveness is determined very much by its circumstances. If I'm standing out in the middle of the desert with a gun and there's not another person for a hundred miles in any direction, the effectiveness of the gun in regards to killing people is pretty much nil. By the same token, if I got into my car and started driving through a school playground at lunchtime, there's a good chance there's going to be a lot of people killed. The kicker: the nightly news would be painting me as a lunatic without giving any consideration to the fact I used my car to kill people, whereas they'd be waxing rhapsodic about a similar incident if I used a gun. If you cannot generate the same moral outrage for an event over a difference of means, then you've got a serious problem. It is also should be pointed out that, to my knowledge, Stephen King has never been shot but he has been run over by a car, and yet he has made no grand efforts nor sweeping statements to stop people from being hit by cars. Save for beating up the van that hit him after he bought it from the owner.

Thus endeth the rant.

- Raving Army

(April 23, 2008)


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