Media Matters

Here's a question - A teenager robs and kills a man because he wants to see how the real-life experience compares to a video game. Assuming that there is any point to placing blame, where does the fault lie?

According to officials in Thailand, the game is the bad influence, and should be pulled from the shelves. But does that make any sense?

It's a question that pops up a lot. Some time back Children's Television Workshop changed Cookie Monster's signature song from "C Is For Cookie" to "A Cookie Is A Sometime Food." Are we really expecting that children are taking their nutritional clues from a blue velvet Muppet?

Snickers had to pull a commercial in which Mr. T used a candy-bar-firing Gatling gun on a man for speed-walking, rather than running. Critics say that the add encouraged violence against gays. Allison Linn, over at MSNBC faults the "orange underground" Cheetos commercials for inspiring young people "to do mean things to other people." (This despite the fact that the commercials are aimed at adults, and I never saw one aired before 9 pm.) I don't think that I've ever met anyone who bases their understanding of appropriate behavior on snack food commercials.

The idea that the media represents a form of mind control is an old one. And it can do a lot, when it comes to shaping opinions. It's always interesting when you meet someone whose entire understanding of this ethnic group or that location is shaped by television and movies. But, in my experience, these are people who have no other frame of reference. You'd expect most people's understanding of the current situation in Georgia, for instance to be shaped by the media. The south Caucasus region isn't exactly a hot spot for world travel, and even news outlets here in the United States can have trouble placing it on a map.

But is there anyone really sheltered enough that Grand Theft Auto forms the sum total of their understanding of carjacking? Or that Sesame Street is their primary source of information about food? I'll be the first person to complain that, given the amount of rampant idiocy that one finds, it's somewhat doubtful that intelligent life on Earth is as common as it supposed, but even I don't go that far.

There is a part of me that suspects the blame game is at work. Thai officials would rather blame Western influence for a teenager's actions than chalk it up to stupidity or incomplete socialization. Gay rights activists find it easier to blame Mars, Incorporated for negative views of gays, rather than call out the public itself for supporting negative views of homosexuals. And the public wins, too - people who are afraid that their children might set themselves on fire to imitate the Human Torch can simply blame Marvel, rather than try to understand how children separate fanstasy and reality.

So we perpetuate a self-serving fantasy ourselves, one that says that we're helpless in the face of media giants that can literally tell us what to think, whether we like it, or not.

This Time, It's Personal

The debate over abortion in the United States is no big deal for me. I don't have a religious prohibition against it to live up to, and not being a woman, I'm immune from being pregnant. So it's a fight that I don't really have a dog in. Which is good, because I've always felt that the single biggest obstacles to any lasting resolution to the issue are twofold.

The first is that the opposing sides have staked out, generally speaking, mutually exclusive positions. Either abortion on demand is legal, or it isn't. You could make the point that allowing for abortion in life-threatening situations is a compromise, but the really ardent activists on both sides would still find fault with it. The radical pro-choice activists would see it as too restrictive - it wouldn't account for hardship or lesser health concerns than death, and the radical pro-life activists would see it as too liberal - there is a pro-life stand that expects the mother to give her life for the child, if that what it comes down to.

The second, and the one that is relevant here, is that it often becomes personal. Those on one side or the other see the rejection of their arguments, eventually, as an attempt to delegitimize them as people, and they often strike back with arguments designed to delegitimize their opponents as people. Even people who are otherwise thoughtful and tolerant, fall into this trap, as recently happened to John McGuinness. It's pretty easy to see that he feels personally slapped by the Democratic Party's proposed platform on legalized abortion, and retaliates making the uncharitable accusation that Democrats favor abortion rights because it results in fewer people enrolling in expensive social programs. Ouch.

But for all that, I understand the thoughts involved.

I was standing on the El platform at Howard Street one day, many, many years ago, when I encountered a young lady with a button that read "Abortion Free and Legal Now!"

"Free?" I asked?

"Yes," she replied. If I recall correctly, her rationale was that it did little good to have a right to something that one couldn't afford.

"What about other medical procedures?" I asked. "Like removing kidney stones? Should those be free?"

It was a trap, and the poor woman walked right into it, saying something along lines of "I don't think so."

I pounced. "So people should be allowed to die in excruciating pain, while elective abortions are free?" Of course, what I was really saying (if only to myself) was: "So I should have to come up with the money to pay for treatment of a very painful and potentially fatal condition that landed on me out of the blue, while paying taxes to provide money for tramps like you to be carelessly sexually active?!"

While she couldn't read the subtext of my comments, she quickly realized that she'd stepped on a land mine, and turned away, while I sneered at her in self-satisfaction. But it wasn't ten minutes before I repented what I had done as grossly unfair. Her point wasn't that abortion was more important than life-saving surgery, and I knew it. Her point was that abortion should be readily available to people who weren't ready or able to be parents, regardless of their financial circumstances. But rather than engage with her on the appropriateness of public funding for what I felt was normally an elective procedure, I'd taken it as a personal affront. So I'd ambushed her, given her an opening to delegitimize me, and then slammed her when she took the bait, calling her out as thoughtless, and thus delegitimizing her in turn.

We were both in our early twenties - she'd likely given no more thought to the broader implications of her position than I did about things that I thought should be public policy. And she likely knew nothing about kidney stones. I'd first read about them in high school, in a medical encyclopedia that my parents owned, but even with that, I was completely unprepared for the experience of actually having them in my sophomore year of college. She'd likely never heard of the condition - may parents hadn't, the first time it happened to me.

But I chose to see her button, with its simple position statement, as personal, and responded in kind. And, likely, given or reinforced a negative impression of abortion opponents (the really ironic part, since I didn't and still don't, have a principled objection to the procedure). I wondered, for a while, if I'd done nothing more than add to the heat, rather than the light, of the issue.

Money Money Money Money... Money

I was watching the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS when a story came on about HIV/AIDS in the District of Columbia's Black community. Predictably, one of the activists interviewed called for "a massive increase in federal government spending on AIDS in the black community."

Which leads me to wonder: If we were to "fully fund" only the top quarter, say, of initiatives that activists say should be receiving massive amounts of federal funds, how much money would that be in a year? Is that something that could even be managed? Activists tend to call for spending without thinking about all of the other causes (and politics) that are competing for those same dollars, firm in their belief that their crusade should be everyone's highest priority.

But somehow I doubt that we can really spend our way out of all the issues that people have identified.

Whoo Can It Be Now?

Okay, so it's not the best nature shot you've ever seen. This is why the real nature photographers shell out top dollar for the really buff lenses. But I don't have $4,600.00 to spend so I wind up making do with the cheap gear. But anyway, this is the first owl that I've ever seen in the wild. He was just hanging out in a tree while all around, robins were going stark raving bonkers. (But they didn't seem to be mobbing the owl. Occasionally, a robin would fly past, and the owl would pursue for a few yards, but for the most part they simply sat in nearby trees and made a racket.) It may be a Barred Owl, but its vocalization wasn't a "hoot," so I'm not sure.

Cat Bomber

Maybe I spoke too soon...

In Mark Tatulli's comic strip Liō, the title character owns a rather dangerous cat named Cybil. Dangerous because she (I think it's a she), has a short temper and remarkable skill with a shotgun, among other things. In various strips, Liō has needed to intervene to prevent Cybil from taking down a neighbor's dog with a high-powered rifle, and from using a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on a pair of neighborhood children that dared to laugh at the "Beware of the Cat" sign.

In today's strip, Cybil makes it clear that she wants to be fed - by standing on Liō in a suicide vest, one paw holding the deadman's switch. I'm curious if any letters to the editor, expressing outrage, are printed. I'm sure at least some will be written. But with any luck, people will let it pass.