Other
countries are watching what we do after our mass murders and it’s always the
same – nothing. Our high profile killers
capture the headlines as regularly as we receive our monthly utility
bills. What the world might not know is
that our Media is not only fascinated by them and loves them, but it makes big
bucks off them like pimps do with prostitutes.
Their mindset: if there’s a slow news day, let’s fill them with Lockup this or that, the intimate dreams
of prison inmates, or the sexual perversions of Richard Speck or Charles
Manson. The main thing to remember is to
feed the insatiable morbid appetites of the public like in the days of the
Roman Coliseum.
The
Left’s knee jerk solution to the killings nearly always centers on getting rid
of guns and saying the guy should have had psychiatric help. In this latest shooting one expert dismisses
the assertion that the shooter was evil by the old saw that he had a disease. That’s socialist code for “He’s not
responsible for what he did.” How many
times in the last 50 years have I heard this?
The
Media should stop its fake indignation and do something besides talking about
mass killings. Not only do they have the
conditioning power to do it, but they’ve adjusted the violence valve
before. In my book, Journal of the Silent Majority, I recalled how it was done. Remember all the TV shows like Combat with Vic Morrow that conditioned
us for intervening in Vietnam? When
Martin Luther King Jr. said Vietnam was draining off civil rights funds, the
Media re-tweaked the valve and eliminated those WWII violent shows – even
westerns and did for a long time. It
also began satirizing and poking fun at our soldiers, sailors, and Marines –
every service: I Dream of Genie, McHale’s
Navy, F Troop, Gomer Pyle USMC, and M.A.S.H,
all populated by idiots and fools. It
was no accident that support for the Vietnam War was methodically undermined by
the Media who counts on the public's short attention span.
Government
doesn’t have to pull the Media’s FCC licenses on the grounds of national
security even though our problem has become an international political and
social embarrassment. Since the public
owns the airwaves, we should demand that the Media initiate at least a six
month moratorium on the violence industry which includes Gangster Rap. They’ve done before. Cable, print, and radio should voluntarily
cease immortalizing our miscreant psychopaths: no pictures of him, no voice
mail, no national coverage or after-the-fact psychoanalysis, no reading of his
manifestos, no movie rights (Son of Sam), no Bonnie and Clyde, and no O.J. sensational trials. Most people think the Media’s role is to report the news and
not create it by capitalizing on avoidable tragedies that produce endless copy
cats.
