A good person doesn’t find much funny about someone else’s pain.
One week ago, George W. Bush gave his final State of the Union Address. I caught the replay, sitting alone in my bedroom, staring at my screen in a sort of solemn fascination as the President delivered a well-rehearsed and admittedly well-spoken speech.
I watched for a few reasons. First, I’m an idealist at heart, and I enjoy the theatricality of this annual tradition (even if I find the speaker’s bullet points abhorrent). Second — and I know it’s an over-discussed topic — I enjoy watching the politicians rise to applaud or sit on their hands; it’s a beautiful piece of Americana that lends itself to a really simple drinking game. Ted Kennedy might have already been playing.
Mainly, though, I watched the speech because I was holding onto an immature hope that the President might address the issues I’m concerned with. Among them, my worries about a strange insensitivity to violence that seems to pervade our culture.
Unfortunately, he made no such comments. As I watched the President exit the House to the sound of both hollow and zealous applause (and wondered where he’d kept his autograph Sharpie hidden before he whipped it out á la Terrell Owens), I thought he’d missed his chance to say something meaningful about an important topic that might be weighing us down a little more than it should.
I know it’s not the President’s job to address every little thing that ails us, I just hoped he might have had at least some passing words for the entertainment industry. Violence in entertainment seems, at least to me, more pressing than last year’s tidbit on steroids in baseball.
By the time this column goes to print, two full days will have passed since the Super Bowl. I send my full congratulations to Giants fans everywhere, and console my friends from New England with a reminder that the Curse of Chuck Knoblauch lives on into its eighth year.
But Sunday, in between the tackles, I found myself becoming concerned with an obviously recurring motif in the commercials: people kept getting roughed up. Notably, a chip commercial showed a man setting a mousetrap seconds before another man in a mouse costume burst through a wall to pummel him repeatedly in the face. A candy commercial showed two bodyguards tackle a man for giving Carmen Electra a piece of gum. A tire commercial insisted that watching Richard Simmons getting hit by a car would be funny, and an ad for Bud Light suggested that beer makes you fly, until you get sucked into a jet engine.
All of these ads were interspersed with previews for Fox’s new The Sarah Conner Chronicles, which were, without exception, 30 plotless seconds of montages showing people getting pistol-whipped by a monosyllabic she-bot who couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag.
After the game, when I talked about this with my roommate, he pointed out two fairly obvious things: First, I’m easily offended by anything somewhat violent because I’m a bleeding-heart liberal who thinks if we all got together for a drum circle and a hug we could solve a lot of the world’s problems. Second, and I should have thought of this first, the intent of many of these ads is not to induce laughter through violence per se, but through surprise. Apparently advertisers know that if I gasp at E*Trade’s vomiting baby, I’ll be more likely to use that website.
No, I don’t think the people who make Doritos want me to punch someone in the face. The idea that these ads encourage violence is absolutely ludicrous. Violent commercials don’t lead to violent acts, nor do violent TV shows, movies or songs. But what the repeated presence of senseless brutality in these media does do is make us OK with pain, gradually used to suffering, unperturbed by injury. We become a little too comfortable watching someone get smashed.
And as we become gradually used to suffering, slowly, as our comfort with violence increases, we become more and more accepting of hurt in the world around us. Slowly, real pain, by distant extension, begins to be as unimportant to us as fake pain. Slowly, we lose track of how offended, how pissed off, we really should be. Slowly, all violence becomes the same inoffensive norm we passively allow to surround us. Slowly, we forget there’s a war on. Slowly, the genocide in Darfur doesn’t appear in the news. Slowly, suicide bombs, assassinations, kidnappings, perjuries and crimes cease to shock us. Slowly, we do less and less about these things, until one day it’s the year 476 again, and no one does anything for anyone else anymore because it’s every sharp-toothed man for himself, and we’re too distracted by the reformatted American Gladiators to notice the invading horde.
Why does it take something with the magnitude of Columbine, 9/11, Katrina or Virginia Tech to get our goad? Why aren’t we furious with our society for producing tripe like Meet the Spartans and its thousand hit-in-the-groin jokes? Why have we forgotten that nervous laughter is not the same thing as pleasurable laughter? Why has anyone ever paid Carlos Mencia to tell jokes?
Maybe I’m a prude. Maybe I’m too sensitive. Maybe I’m horribly embarrassed to remember myself as a seventh grader, cackling gleefully while showing my father a College Humor video of a boy getting hit in the head with a shovel. I can’t remember what could have possibly been funny about that video — I just remember my father’s concerned exasperation every time I log onto CNN and find war, disease, famine and hatred all buried beneath news of Brittney Spears’ marital troubles and a close-up interview with the new American Idol.
It’s OK to laugh. It’s okay to not be offended. But a good person draws a line, and a good person raises the occasional eyebrow.