Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

TV

TV violence pushes vulnerable to brink

It seems we’ve run out of options. There’s nothing left but to expect the worst, and just hope that the worst, like the now-standardized daily “stray bullet,” avoids us and ours.

America now mass produces young male mass murderers — those no longer able to balance themselves along the brink; those who arm themselves with all they can carry, calmly walk into an airport, bus station, school or shopping mall and shoot until they’re shot.

While I’m sure we’ve never been short of brink-dwellers, the numbers of those who seem to be provided that extra little shove —the encouragement and inspiration to act on their thoughts—seems epidemic.

Last Sunday, after reading about the latest young man to determine that the time to act had arrived — 23 year-old Paul Ciancia entered LA International Airport on Nov. 1 to hunt down security agents; he shot and killed one TSA employee — I watched the Saints play the Jets on Fox.

Nothing like a little organized violence to steady the nerves after detailed reading about another attempted mass murder by another detached young male.

Anyway, while the game, by definition and design was violent, it couldn’t compete with the commercials, which now put the halt in NFL games every other Dorito.

First quarter ads included a come-on for a new movie. The clips included scenes of the White House being blown up, guns being fired during high-speed chases and bombs being detonated.

Next came an ad for a “best of pro-wrestling” video “game” — the computerized, massively muscled, hideous, hate-filled, extreme violence that the WWE has been laying on American kids for the last 35 years.

Soon there was a promo for a new Fox show that, based on its content, promised only mass slaughter, as supplied by assault rifles and an explosion that appeared to demolish a high-rise office building in Manhattan.

Moments later, an ad for a futuristic military video game—handguns, assault rifles, explosions, mass mayhem. We were told it’s “rated M for mature.” So is “Grand Theft Auto,” which 13-year-olds play, anyway.

Next, a promo for a punch-and-kick Ultimate Fighter match — between women — on Fox’s new sports cable network.

And all this just through the first quarter of the game.

The second quarter’s first ad was for a movie about “killers”; it was replete with fire, guns, even a bow and arrow. The narrator and large billboard told us that it “opens in theaters Nov. 22” — the 50th anniversary of the murder of President Kennedy.

Soon appeared an ad for the new movie, “Thor,” about a character, we were told, who “lives in a dark world.” Ya don’t say?

It never stopped. One promo for a Fox show included the sight of men and women brandishing battle axes, the kind that will slice you in half, coming or going.

At halftime, Fox’s NFL studio show abandoned football to run a promo for a new Fox show. Host Curt Menefee warned that it may not be suitable for kids.

Suitable for kids? It wasn’t suitable for anyone who could distinguish high from low. It was a clip of a guy with an ax chasing down a petrified woman.

Ax or no ax, it struck me that what TV now does far better than ever before is push the vulnerable closer to or beyond their brink.

It’s difficult to afflict the well-adjusted, to have them do a 180. Maybe the repetitive, antisocial messages that all forms of entertainment have become reliant upon can move them a few degrees off, but nothing that would have them storm a campus with an AK47.

But if the vulnerable are moved even one or two degrees toward or off their brink, if the messages become a prompt . . .

And that, I’m convinced, is what TV now regularly and systemically provides; TV’s always there to give the vulnerable that extra little push, the kind that makes all of us vulnerable.