Our addiction to violence
LAST WEEK'S massacre at Virginia Tech, in which a student named Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people, then took his own life, set off a predictable frenzy of media coverage. For a full week -- while bodies of presumably less divine origin piled up in Iraq and elsewhere -- America threw itself an elaborate, televised wake.
This has become a national specialty in the age of perpetual news, a ritual deeply satisfying to all involved: the handsome, anguished anchors, the sponsors, we loyal viewers. It's that rare chance to experience our rubbernecking as ennobling, to indulge in the histrionic pleasures of collective shock.
But Cho's rampage came as no surprise to me. It was merely the latest manifestation of a culture firmly dedicated to pornographic violence.
Alienated and unhinged characters like Cho have always existed, of course. Thanks to current gun laws, they have been granted access to cheap, high-powered weapons. To view their subsequent implosions as stunning is not just foolish, but disingenuous.
While the political right has worked tirelessly to inflame Americans over issues such as gay marriage and immigration, no one in power has issued any sustained objection to the stylized mayhem that passes for a national pasttime.
We are awash in fictional commodities which happily exploit our willingness to view violence as nothing more than entertainment. If we are honest with ourselves, after all, we aren't rooting for Tony Soprano to work out his problems in therapy. We want to see him whack somebody. Period.
At the same time, ironically, the military forces of this country are engaged in a war, thousand s of miles away, in which dozens of soldiers and civilians are whacked each day. These deaths -- no less grisly, no less tragic for the survivors, and in many cases preventable -- have yet to make any Cho-like impact on the national consciousness. On the contrary, thanks to a cowed and benighted media, we never see the worst of the carnage. The fake corpses we lap up like cream. The real ones get dumped off-camera.
Am I suggesting that Cho (or any of our other gun-toting villains) were directly influenced by bloody diversions? That they saw one too many high-gloss snuff films and went ballistic?
Not at all.
What I'm suggesting is a more subtle and pervasive psychic shift: the citizens of this country -- awash in artificial renderings of violence, shielded from the realities of actual violence -- have begun to lose a fundamental sense of the emotional consequences of violence.
Anyone who has taken a look at Cho's literary efforts knows his head was swollen with dangerous fantasies. At a certain point, a fatal confusion took root: He stopped seeing his victims as human beings, bodies and souls with their own inalienable wishes and fears. Instead, they became moving targets for his impotent rage.
But don't the rest of us descend into the same mindset every time we head to the multiplex, or switch on the TV? Why else do films such as "The 300" or "The Shooter " or shows such as "24" or "Dexter" do so well? Because they deliver a vicarious jolt to the aggressive pathologies that dwell within all of us.
This, I suspect, is why we must all act so aghast when someone like Cho chooses to express these pathologies in the real world. Better to make him a scapegoat than a mascot.
But America can't have it both ways. We can't treat certain human lives as inessential, then hope to sanctify others. We can't celebrate violence as our national passion, then pawn Cho off as a mad man who has torn our innocence asunder.
I would ask the good and decent citizens of this country to put aside the false gravitas of the pundits and politicians for a moment, to stop trafficking in the happy myth of America as a land of gentle freedoms.
We must begin to confront our addiction to violence. If we don't, Cho will come to represent the future of this country: deranged, desensitized, and legally armed.
Steve Almond is the author of the forthcoming essay collection "(Not That You Asked)," to be published in September. 
