In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, Fox TV pulled an episode of “The Family Guy” off the internet. The episode in question depicted Peter trying to win the Boston Marathon by running over competitors with a car. Carnage ensued, to comic effect. In the same episode, Peter is shown dialing a number on a cell phone given to him by a shady new friend. When he dials a number, we hear an explosion. He tries again and this time an explosion and screams are heard.
Some mischievous pranksters out there– you devils!– spliced the two segments closer together than they were in the actual episode to suggest that … actually, nobody knows what they were suggesting, though there is talk about conspiracies and clairvoyance and other nonsense. Yes, there are people who believe that the Boston Marathon Bombing was a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government to try to abridge our civil liberties and take away our guns. I’m not making this up.
What I am interested in is the question: how long until we can go back to “enjoying” the comedy of runners getting killed and bombs going off? The question is, why did we ever enjoy it, and why should we all be so delicate and sensitive about it now?
This kind of carnage goes on every day in Syria and Iraq and it never bothered us before to have a good chuckle about Peter’s violent shenanigans. And just days before the Marathon bombing, the American government made a profound statement: no amount of carnage is sufficient to justify the slightest inconvenience for any lunatic who wants to by a semi-automatic rifle with 50 shot magazine.
The political hypocrisy is bad enough, but Seth MacFarlane’s condemnation of the mash-ups (placing the two clips closer together to imply that the bomb was at the Boston Marathon) is a little nauseating. MacFarlane’s bread and butter is vulgarity, shock, and jokes about bodily functions, and it seems manifestly evident that questions of good taste never entered his mind before– ever– except as an imaginary line he could routinely cross over for pure shock value. But he sees which way the wind is blowing on this one and is careful to distance himself from his own bad taste for the moment.
And really… couldn’t they find something in South Park that was even more offensive?
We don’t hate violence. We love it. On the same day as Newtown and the same day as Columbine and the same day as Boston, you could scan any movie listing for any Cineplex in the country and find people paying extravagantly to see glorious full-color high-resolution loving depictions of humans slaughtering humans with guns, bombs, knives, and forks, with ropes and stakes and fangs, and swords and arrows and spears, and grenades and razor blades and stilettos. We LOVE violence more than anything except, perhaps, bikinis and beer.
When we are attacked, as in Boston, we act as if it is the violence directed towards other human beings that we are appalled at, because we are good people who would never intentionally harm anyone else, because to admit that we don’t really mind the violence when it’s done to somebody else reveals too much of our inner selves. We are shocked and outraged and monumentally indignant, really, because our tribe took a hit. We call it “justice” but what we really want is revenge. We say we want to prevent it from happening again when what we really want is for it to happen to them.
Without a doubt, a lot of people are appalled at violence in general, and when there is a catastrophe like Newtown or Boston, they prevail on public discourse because it is momentarily transparent that what we enjoy in the theatre and in our video games is exactly what it is: appalling. The perpetrators at least have an excuse: they have a cause.
The rest of us are just being entertained.
Afterthought
Even some gun proponents agree that there should be some effort made to keep the guns out of the hands of lunatics. But not really. Any rational definition of lunacy would have to include generals like Curtis LeMay, Vice-Presidents like Dick Cheney, and Senators like Ted Cruz who espouse ridiculous and preposterous theories about government and guns and violence and taxes and civic responsibility and the nature of the world — yes, yes, yes: if only we could keep weapons out of the hands of lunatics.