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Show Us the Carnage, Continued
As gruesome as pics would be, they might change the responses of those in Congress who don't want to change a thing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2018/02/show-us-the-carnage/553706/
James Fallows
10:40 PM / February 19, 2018
‘Show Us the Carnage,’ Continued
snip//
From another reader, about the media deciding to be more brutally shocking (about brutal events):
I too have thought about the need to set aside concerns of media decorum and, with survivors' permissions, show all the brutal realities of mass shootings. A stark contrast is needed. In view of their dead, bloody bodies, the public should come to know something of the persons who were.
Even after the phrase “shithouse countries” was uttered, many media were knee-jerk reluctant to repeat it or to take pains to say its verbatim usage in the reporting would be one-time only, although doing so, without prelude, would have been entirely newsworthy and non-gratuitous.
And finally for today on the “carnage” theme, a complaint about “carnage-lite”:
A couple notes about the reader recommendations to "show the carnage" and to have a "change of heart."
The former echos what my senior high school English teacher said about violence on television and in the movies during the 1970s, that it wasn't real. Show real violence, he speculated, and people will be repelled and repulsed.
I'm not certain he was right, but he may have had a point; the carnage-lite media coverage we now get after mass shootings doesn't seem to be having a deterring effect.
And there's a kind of precedent for this too, though I hesitate to even bring it up--so much as even an allusion to the Third Reich is reacted to with the outcry "Overreaction!" But I think "show the carnage" was exactly the point of forcing German civilians to visit concentration camps during denazification. Collective guilt can have a powerful effect. But only if it's collectively accepted that there's something to feel guilty about.
Maybe this collective guilt can be the catalyst for that change of heart. After all, the civic heart has been changed about all sorts of things. It's now in the process of changing about sexual harassment, though I think automobile safety and especially smoking are more instructive recent examples.
In my lifetime, smoking has gone from being the marker of masculinity to more the tag of a weak will. The very idea of an airplane flight so much as hinting at the smoke-filled back room where Warren Harding became a presidential nominee is today all but unimaginable. This, however, didn't happen overnight, and not all by itself either. Government action helped to foster this change of heart, the kind of meddling that's derisively referred to as social engineering by those who fear the nanny state. And indeed, I'm certain that there are people who smoke on principle, because they have the right and freedom to do it. I wonder how many people own guns for this very same reason.
But I'm encouraged by this: In the last 50 years, the pendulum has swung so far on tobacco that the public sight of once ubiquitous smokers is now limited to those few in ever-shrinking designated smoking areas. So perhaps in time we as a people will indeed have a change of heart about gun violence and ownership.
The former echos what my senior high school English teacher said about violence on television and in the movies during the 1970s, that it wasn't real. Show real violence, he speculated, and people will be repelled and repulsed.
I'm not certain he was right, but he may have had a point; the carnage-lite media coverage we now get after mass shootings doesn't seem to be having a deterring effect.
And there's a kind of precedent for this too, though I hesitate to even bring it up--so much as even an allusion to the Third Reich is reacted to with the outcry "Overreaction!" But I think "show the carnage" was exactly the point of forcing German civilians to visit concentration camps during denazification. Collective guilt can have a powerful effect. But only if it's collectively accepted that there's something to feel guilty about.
Maybe this collective guilt can be the catalyst for that change of heart. After all, the civic heart has been changed about all sorts of things. It's now in the process of changing about sexual harassment, though I think automobile safety and especially smoking are more instructive recent examples.
In my lifetime, smoking has gone from being the marker of masculinity to more the tag of a weak will. The very idea of an airplane flight so much as hinting at the smoke-filled back room where Warren Harding became a presidential nominee is today all but unimaginable. This, however, didn't happen overnight, and not all by itself either. Government action helped to foster this change of heart, the kind of meddling that's derisively referred to as social engineering by those who fear the nanny state. And indeed, I'm certain that there are people who smoke on principle, because they have the right and freedom to do it. I wonder how many people own guns for this very same reason.
But I'm encouraged by this: In the last 50 years, the pendulum has swung so far on tobacco that the public sight of once ubiquitous smokers is now limited to those few in ever-shrinking designated smoking areas. So perhaps in time we as a people will indeed have a change of heart about gun violence and ownership.
