Mixed nuts

If you haven’t noticed, they’re going bonkers in the U.S. I think it’s safer to hide out in Saipan these days.

Leading the pack, of course, is the guy who ran amok with a gun out side of the White House on Wednesday (U.S. time). He took a bullet in the leg for the transgression. The resulting medical care was probably provided at government expense, which just goes to show you that in the land of opportunity, even gun-waving weirdos and potential assassins are entitled to suck at the taxpayer’s neck.

But this is just the tip of iceberg in psycho-central.
A few days before the White House incident, a cop in southern California shot his wife to death. Then he called the cops and told them he shot his wife. This guy certainly lacks the shrewdness to become a career criminal, I assure you. Which is moot, because Officer Rocket Scientist then sent himself to the great beyond, which at least served to improve the human gene pool.

At about the same time, some dude in Illinois strolled into the factory where he used to work and started hosing down folks with a rifle, which put the hurts on four victims and the moral hurts on another four. This guy also managed to remove himself from the human gene pool. He was evidently a breath away from going to the Big House for stealing stuff from that company. The term “model employee” doesn’t exactly come to mind.

But this does come to mind: What’s going on in the loony land? I am, and always have been, deeply suspicious of a society that worships television and has elevated vicarious violence to religious status. From the Gulf War to “real life” prime-time police docudramas, the “good guys” flailing the “bad ones” to death, or nearly doing so, has mass appeal to hundreds of millions of slack-jawed couch potatoes.

And then we have to add Hollywood’s trash to this violent heap, which is a whole story of its own.

The problem seems to come in when a nut case decides that he’s the good guy, even if the rest of us consider him the bad guy. But that’s really the only difference of opinion, since America has pretty much validated dealing death to its enemies, be they minorities in the LA and New York ghettos, rag-tag peasants in the Baltics, or children dying of disease in Baghdad. Once you’ve accepted the entire wholesale death-dealing gig, the leap from differing “good guys” from “bad” isn’t really all that far. It is, if you come right down to it, a matter of intensely subjective perspective.

There is a difference between “force” and “violence,” but the fury and the flash and the glory of the latter term is what sells to the mob. It’s probably not much different than the Roman Gladiator gig, and the parallels between these declining societies have been made by brighter minds than mine.

America can blame the Constitution (guns), education, economics, or sun spots and Elvis for all I care…what they’ve really missed is that a cowardly craving for vicarious violence makes cowards become-–what else?–-violent.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”