I'd like to think - reaching deep into my bag of Things That Are Not Topical - that some day people will fully grasp the essence of the televised-violence debate. The question is not whether video games, television, movies, musice, roleplaying games, et al cause violence, but rather whether the violence that is presented is given a proper structure by the consumers of the violence.

To some extent this goes back to Minority Report, which, for a movie I didn't like I'm certainly getting a lot of miles out of. In the movie, Tom Cruise plays an idiot disguised as a competent policeman, whose job is to stop homicide before it happens, through the use of three people (who it turns out are the futuristic equivalent of crackbabies) who are precognitive. Cruise's job is to get to the scene of a crime before it happens, then arrest the would-be murderer and haul them off to some sort of bizarre stasis field.

Anyway, my point is that one of the ideas that the movie raises is that of violence. Specifically, even though people in the future are aware that they cannot commit crimes within a two hundred mile radius of the precogs, they continue to do so. Most are of the crimes of passion type, but nonetheless they occur. It occurs to me that humans are no more innocent than any other animal species. We are part of nature, red in tooth and claw. So by trying to regulate violence, we are denying part of ourselves.

As far as I'm concerned, you can plaster all the violence all over the television that you want to. Make all the blood look realistic, have body parts all over the place. Why?

Not because I'm that big a fan of splatter core, but because being human is to explore. We deny our animal side at the same time that we are ferociously regulated by it - the earlier rant on biology and destiny makes this point. We are, once you get past the pretty trappings of civilization we've been creating for at least 40,000 years, animals. We all know that animals are violent as necessary, since kill or be killed is often the order of the day.

Consequently, when we start denying that we are capable of violence, when we start pretending that we haven't spent the last thousand or so years coming up with ever-more effective ways of taking each other down with guns, we are pretending that we are not animals. We are denying a fundamental portion of ourselves.

This has quite a lot to do with the television debate, which may seem to have been left in the dust a few paragraphs back. By trying to pretend that all in the world is sweetness and light, and by trying to pretend that we haven't spent most of history trying to kill each other, we are creating a false image of humanity and trying to pass it on to children, in the hopes that our vision will one day come true.

What actually happens is that the children realize that they're been bullshitted by their hypocritical parents and promptly take the family gun to school, shooting someone they don't like on the way. By denying the truth - humans are violent - we are creating this problem.

Rather than standing around, piously talking about how you don't support videogames that portray violence, for example, explain to children that the violence they're acting out is not realistic. I'm not a parent, so I'm not sure how you do this, nor do I know why I wandered into this aspect of the topic, but I do know that despite the fact that my brother and I grew up playing videogames, watching television, roleplaying and living in a house with many guns, we never shot anybody, nor did we ever feel so abandoned to the electronic babysitter that we had to shoot someone just to get attention.

Back on the topic, which was abandoned two paragraphs up. The point is that if you continue to try to perceive the world as you want it to be, rather than as it is, you are deluding yourself. More to the point, you are deluding those around you. People take their cues from each other, in much the same way that other animals do - you would seriously question the mental state of someone you saw laughing outrageously at a funeral, right? - but those cues must take into effect reality.

And the reality is that we are violent. Look at religion. Look at international relations. Look at history. It's all violent. But by putting your head in the sand, you are denying that this is reality. That violence is a fact, and that no matter how much you wish it away it's still going to be there.

Rather than hiding from it, why don't you try facing it?

Why don't you try explaining that life is not like a James Bond movie, or that there is a fundamental difference between fiction and reality, rather than trying to ban what thinking adults can see or do? Every time I find out that someone, somewhere has decided that something is too violent and I must be protected from it, I wonder what they're so afraid of. To take one example, after Sept. 11th, a movie (can't remember the name of it) was cancelled because the plot was that of a nuclear bomb traveling in first class on an airplane. This was felt to be in poor taste at the time.

I say, release the sucker. Anybody who can't deal with the movie should be smart enough to stay away from it. And if all their friends want to go see it, they should do so. The person who hasn't grasped that there is a difference between fiction and reality doesn't get to affect what everyone else does. They are only able to make choices for themselves. Not for other people. Because if your kids want to see the latest Arnold Shwarzenegger shoot-em-up, they will.

And it seems to me that the only rational response to violence is to explain that reality is not like that. To explain that there is a difference between what is shown on television and what happens in real life. To see that this is true.

Because I'm fucking sick of people standing around being offended by something and then trying to affect how everyone else interacts with that thing. So what if televison's violent? Rather than dictating that I can't watch Legend Of The Overfiend, parts 1-4, face the fact that, because I understand the difference between reality and cartoon violence, I'm not going to be walking around, proclaiming myself a demonic deity and raping everyone in sight.

To make the point crystal clear, rather than protesting the appearance of any violence or sexuality or whatever, in formats generally consumed by minors, why don't you try explaining to the people that you're trying to protect the correct way of living? If your children learn everything they know about sex from Caligula, they're not going to be the most successful people at sexual relationships. On the other hand, if you tell them about sex and how to conduct a relationships, they will (presumably) grow up to recognize what utter crap Caligula is.

Take responsibility well. Don't assume that to be responsible you have to dictate to all people what they can do, but assume that you have to interact with the people most influenced by the things you oppose.

One more example from memory lane: My mother hates my music. She thinks that a lot of it (the heavy metal) is utter shite, and the reason she thinks that is because it's degrading to women, or at least some of it is. I come from a generation that recognizes that women can rock out just as hard as men, so I don't find metal the exclusivist domain of masculinity that she thinks it is, but I also have enough self-confidence in me (instilled by my parents) to recognize that even if a song like "Rocket Queen", by Guns N' Roses, is misogynistic, they're not talking about me.

Don't assume that you can legislate violence out of existence; all that does is make it more interesting. I guarantee you that anything that is not explained or is forbidden is automatically more interesting to the rest of us. Humans are fundamentally violent, like all animals, but unlike them, we can explain why violence is not reality.

I'm on a roll,

Channon