[This is a reposting of a submission to the Franklin Pierce University "Pierce Arrow" blog, posted originally on Oct. 15, 2009]
The following entry is written to help us gain perspective on some of
the media communications concerning the recent, horrific crimes
perpetrated in Mount Vernon, New Hampshire. It is shared with you to
contribute to a larger discussion that exists and should be engaged on a
wider basis about media and violence and how we engage the very
important issues of violence, crime and youth in this society. It has
been written knowing that this event is still fresh in the hearts and
minds of people not only in the communities of New Hampshire, but all
over the country. Communities, families, youth and individuals are
still shaken, questioning their safety, their family security and their
lives. It is out of respect for these communities, families, youth and
individuals that this entry is submitted for public review.
This writer is aware that this situation is still fresh in our
consciousness and emotions and that the issues that arise from it are
important to have in correct perspective. This discussion about the
media handling of this crime is considered key in our on-going search
for clarity, resolution and healing.
~~~~~~~~~~
It happened a couple of sundays ago….and became the talk of the
region and beyond. A “home invasion” planned and executed by four teens
in New Hampshire, raising so many important issues of life, death,
safety, class, youth, eldership, respect, gender safety, gendered
violence, parenting, schooling, community, isolation, culture and more
that eludes my consciousness at this moment.
The Keene Sentinel, in their Oct.8 edition, reported how fear has
changed to anger in the community, how, at least from one person’s view,
“..it’s just pure evil. There’s no explaining it” (page 6). Another
story presented the “what ifs”, questions of the closeness to other
families and homes, the unbelievable nature of this sort of violence in
this sort of neighborhood.
Tragedy of this sort is devastating and life-altering among many
other undesirable things and calls for clarity, understanding, communal
embrace, patience and a rededication to compassionate ways of thinking
and cultural production. Tragedies such as these call us to look
deeper inside ourselves to find not only the sources of these
pathologies, why they exist in some and not others, but also to find the
cultural practices that remediate and decrease, if not extinguish,
these abominable acts. These tragic occurrences, that rend heart from
heart, family from family, wife from husband, sanity from mind,
challenge us to the core of our being and ask us to deepen our embrace
of all that is good, right and loving in us and in the world.
We have seen countless numbers of situations from the Manson killings
to Columbine to Virginia Tech, to Mount Vernon and so many other places
and situations, where we are deluged with story after story about “why”
and “how” and the human cost of murder. The media have provided us
with information, perspective (to some degree) and statistics that at
once assuage our fears and feed them, too. Particular dialogues and
commentary in recent talk radio have created a dynamic that makes this
recent local New Hampshire tragedy doubly reprehensible.
As I drove back and forth to the university last week, I scanned a
few radio stations as usual on my ninety minute trek and was challenged
by some of the problematic commentary from WTKK 96.9FM. The discussions
seemed to raise so many questions, suggesting so many of the underlying
problems of a society out of touch with its own humanity, yet afraid to
look itself in the mirror for clarity and honesty and the hope that
grows from an intimate knowledge of the resilience of the human spirit.
It seemed that in the face of tragedy, talk radio was unwilling to be a
real resource, relinquishing what I would call its responsibility to be
a voice of reason, strength, maturity and hope.
So many things were said, but touched on in shallow form and content,
seemingly as if they knew not of what they were talking about. Issues
of cities vs. the country/suburbs and what our expectations were of
these geographical icons, issues of class, implied race, capital
punishment and parenting all came out in a confusing collage of
emotional melodrama that at times chafed in juxtaposition to ads for
bedding or hot-tubs or some such product.
Statements made on different days by different hosts seemed to
validate the same message of emotionalism and sensationalism beyond
compassion, of individualism beyond communal embrace and quick, violent
reactionism beyond that clarity that comes from true introspection.
On October 7, while listening to Michele McPhee’s show, grand
statements were being bandied about vilifying “shoddy parenting” as
being the cause of the four youth embarking on their violent excursion.
Through caller after caller and in her long tirades (well-matched to
the horrific nature of the subject), the story of the failure of the
suspects’ parents was told over and over. Through the hours, the story
deepened as new ideas about why the parents of these four young men and
many parents in general fall short of even modest expectations for what
is necessary to raise a socially-stable child. There were more
indictments than solutions, it seemed, as the stridency of the discourse
narrowed the possibility for real understanding and engagement of a
core problem in USAmerican society – the support and development of
youth in this culture.
Further into the evening’s exhortations, a 19-year-old woman called
in, claiming to know or know of one or more of the suspects in the
murder and assault case. This woman, named Sarah, reported that one or
more of the suspects had been seen days before the crime with
newly-shaven heads and shouting “free Manson”, a reference to Charles
Manson, a famous (infamous) and convicted murderer still serving time in
prison for his crimes. After claiming “breaking news”, McPhee
correctly asked about the responsibility of the school in reporting such
behavior in a world now informed by the dynamics of such events as the
Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings. McPhee correctly pointed to the
necessity of communal diligence in the face of such pre-crime behavior,
cleanly missing the point that she was beginning to contradict her
earlier statements that this kind of crime was solely or mainly about
shoddy parenting. McPhee was now suggesting, and rightly so, that there
is a larger social responsibility in being able to monitor and mediate
such anti-social behavior, especially where there are gross and outward
displays such as those reported by Sarah. Caught up in her own
momentum, it was apparent that clarity was giving way to narrow-minded
sensationalism. It always feels good at first, but never produces
enough of anything good to move us beyond the emotionality of our own
pain. And pain is what we should feel when someone is killed, when
ANYone is killed.
Which raises another issue embedded in the histrionics of the show.
There were many statements made by host and caller alike of the
“unbelievable” nature of this crime. This kind of crime doesn’t happen
in places like Mount Vernon. Clearly, this kind of crime is not endemic
to Mount Vernon or other small towns. The assertions came through that
violence was not a product of country or suburban life, that violence
in urban areas is one of the reasons WHY people move to places like
Mount Vernon or other rural or small population communities. Inherent
in this type of account is the suggestion that crime and murder lives
and breeds and belongs in cities, not like Boston (still a
parochialized, balkanized and idealized municipality), but like Roxbury
and Dorchester, like Detroit and Newark and Southeast Los Angeles.
Nowhere in this broadcast was there a clear critique of class and race
that would have led us to a better understanding of the dynamics that
actually create crime and violence and why crime and violence SEEM to be
so prevalent in some areas and not in others. McPhee and others
suggested that there was no connection between the crimes in Roxbury
(talk of which seems to be relegated to 1090AM) and that in Mount
Vernon, that these crimes were urbanized, other-ized types of crimes
that just don’t, can’t and shouldn’t happen in their midst. There was a
suggestion that different kinds of people, different than McPhee or her
listeners, commit these crimes, that these suspects were merely and
heinously thugs that have no social or private history or precursor, but
their own evil lives. These suspects are connected to nothing, but
themselves and at best they are exhibiting behavior that, in essence,
belongs somewhere else….somewhere more crowded, dirty, with less trees
and less people who go to parent/teacher meetings and Whole Foods
stores.
What McPhee and her show were communicating and cultivating was the
idea that these crimes happen in isolation of the larger, prettier, more
well-veneered society. McPhee and her callers refused to engage deeply
the inter-connected nature of urb and suburb, the connection of youth
to adult and that the failure of a set of parents is a failure of the
community of parents. We take credit as a city, state or nation when we
look to our own wealth, opulence and material comfort, how many Lexi or
Prii we have in our driveways and the sanctity of our greenspaces and
cleanliness of our streets. We claim that communally. It is a part of
our national jingoism, our fevered and immature patriotism in the face
of the international mirror, often held up to us by the fingers of
“third world” hands or the walls of “developING” nation political
structures. When we see the social structures fall apart in these
difficult and painful ways, we rarely take it on the chin as a national
pathology or even a localized , but, if not epidemic, then endemic
disease, at least from the standpoint of what is said in the media. The
show made no suggestion that when OUR children CONTINUE to display
anti-social and dangerous and pre-criminal or pre-dangerous behavior, we
ALL have a responsibility to notice, report and address these issues
BEFORE they become criminal and dangerous and horrific.
McPhee’s statement that the crime had “nothing” to do with video
games, television or even society itself is short-sighted, narrow,
misleading and without the support of well-known research. Though
cultural production such as television programming and video games do
not directly cause (generally speaking) crimes and violent behavior, as
powerful effects theorists would suggest, they do contribute to cultural
and personal beliefs about violence and crime, of gender, race, class
and access, of personal and social expectation, to our levels of
self-esteem, agency and ability to project ourselves positively or
negatively into our lives, communities and futures. The violence and
anti-social behavior which seems to drive television programming and
many popular video games informs us and validates ways of thinking and
being in the world, creating cultural space conducive to such behavior.
Though there may be no television shows regularly lionizing Charles
Manson, you can not get through one night of prime-time programming
without hundreds of violent and anti-social acts across all the
available channels. When I ask my students of media studies and history
what the predominant communicative icons of peace and love are in the
media I am met with the same stark silence each and every time. Our
culture validates the presence of violence in its midst and its dominant
media are the standard bearers of this presence.
On another note, the presence of the extreme validations of violence
can be easily seen in a music industry that regularly supports violent
and anti-social concepts in its lyrics. McPhee was notably surprised to
learn of the presence of “horrorcore” rap, a musical phenomenon that
aggrandizes concepts of violence, death and gore and reported as a form
of music listened to by the Mount Vernon crime suspects. Brought to the
forefront by another heinous crime allegedly committed by one of
horrorocore’s adherents, Syko Sam, a Washington Post story about the
crime highlights the “us” and “them” discussion that plagued the talk
radio landscape here.
“FARMVILLE, Va., Sept. 23 — The town is what its name suggests, a
little crossroads burg swaddled in crop fields and pastureland for miles
around. God and country-western span the radio dial, the main street is
Main Street and the barber sells Lucky Tiger flat-top wax.
Folks in Farmville figured that the town, population 7,000 or so, was
their haven, an oasis of quiet sanity in what a lot of them think is a
mixed-up, gone-to-hell world. That was before a 20-year-old Californian,
a rapper of luridly violent lyrics who billed himself as Syko Sam,
alighted in their central Virginia community last week.”
(
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/23/AR2009092304781.html)
The iconic descriptors of “little crossroads burg swaddled in crop
fields” and “pastureland” and “main street is Main street” and “God and
country-western span the radio dial” suggest that those of concern in
Farmville didn’t see this one coming. With all due respect to all of
Farmville’s citizens, it seemed as though it would have been extremely
difficult to extricatethemselves from their own cultural momentum to see
the onset of such a horrendous occurrence in which four people were
bludgeoned to death. But someone in Farmville invited Syko Sam into
their “oasis of quiet sanity”. And it seems it was their youth.
Neither Syko Sam (officially named Richard Alden Samuel McCroskey III
and reportedly from California) or the four youth suspected in the
crimes in Mount Vernon created horrorcore rap or the idea of murder, but
those ideas lived strongly enough in the core of our young minds and
hearts in these country oases to manifest themselves in the hands of
their youthful perpetrators.
What the above iconic descriptors also suggest is that the people in
these communities and beyond expect that crime belongs more comfortably
somewhere else and that, at least as far as the WTKK talk shows are
concerned, there is no credible connection between the communities that
the crimes happened in and the suspected perpetrators who lived in those
communities. There was in no plausible way any culpability on a larger
social level for the creation and support of people who might do
horrendous things such as these. The problem here, from the media’s
standpoint, is that the discourse leads us to scapegoating and
disconnection, rather than to a place of introspection and social
responsibility, where the initial impulse beyond our natural and correct
reproach of the behavior is remedial on the larger scale as opposed to
punitive in the narrow scale, as indicated by McPhee’s call to put these
young men to death. Admittedly, those same impulses to murder those
young people might exist in us all and the feeling that we should is
supported by our deep sense of hurt in the face of unconscionable acts
such as those perpetrated in Mount Vernon, Farmville OR “inner-city”
ANYwhere. We can kill these young men tomorrow, but will we have
figured out what the pathological precursors are that exist in our
society that validate and support this behavior beyond our own ability
as intelligent, somewhat empowered and concerned adults to abrogate?
What, in our hearts and minds and intuition and research and spiritual
knowing, is the key to preventing such growth and development of
anti-social, anti-human and anti-life behavior by these or others so
that this will not happen again or with such frequency?
These were the questions never asked by McPhee or Jay Severin, the next day.
Severin, host of a wildly popular talk show on the same station, did
ask his callers to weigh in on the issue of capital punishment. It is
an important question, given that we, as a republic, execute many
convicted criminals each year, so as a national aggregate, as a set of
states “united”, we condone such behavior. This sort of
legally-sanctioned behavior ought to be looked into with patience,
tenacity and diligence. What if we find that our legal support of
capital punishment is connected to the inference that violence is a
practical and functional way of getting your national, state or
privately-defined needs met? What if?
Executions assuredly stop the back end of the crime. That is clear.
That person can never commit a horrendous act again. That is key to
the discussion, but the larger issue is not the stoppage of the
commissions of further crimes at that point in the continuum. We have
the technical ability to end the lives of every person in prison and
beyond (weapons of mass destruction notwithstanding….and is the support
of such creating socio-political culpability in the cultivation of
violence in USAmerican life?), but when do we dedicate ourselves to
eradicating the presence of violence in other pre-crime areas of
cultural life and production? When do we stand up as men and women and
community and decry the high incidence of domestic, male-gendered
violence and abuse and stop it? When do we stand up as men and women in
community and decry the high incidence of sexualized violence against
children by men (predominantly…remember that even in the Roman Catholic
church, where we also never saw the violence coming, it was priests –
men – who topped the criminal ranks) and stop it? Must we keep in mind
that even McPhee and Severin would agree that victims of such heinous
acts are indiscriminately peppered amongst the “criminal element” that
lives and breeds ‘somewhere’. So where in this talk radio melee do we
come to clarity or true resolution? If children are the fruit of the
adult tree, how then do we conveniently assert that the youthful
committors of heinous crimes have no connection to the tree that created
that criminal fruit? No, McPhee and many gate-kept callers did assert
the culpability of the trees from which those four errant fruit fell.
The underlying and unstated problem truly lies in the nature of the
forest. If those young men or boys are “scum” as Jay Severin called
them, then what does that say about the culture from which they come?
Is there no connection betweeen one tree and another? Do not their roots
comingle in the social amalgam? It is my assertion that we have a lot
of root work to do and that, at least in these situations, for this
story, talk radio failed us in getting to the root of our social
responsibility, our own necessity to not only engage punishment, but
engage youth and life and truth and how to support it and grow it in our
young people, in their very spirits, beyond strident exhortations of
being the “best and brightest”. Do the “best and brightest” have no
responsibility to the youth of the city, country or state or have they
earned the right to sit in veiled conceit beneath their “Severin
doctrine” laurels. If they do (and they don’t), then WTKK, McPhee and
Severin owe them more than verbal banner ads for emotionalism and social
separatism. These subjects and stories and issues deserve more than
passing disconnection driven by the need for higher and higher ratings.
Since when has advertiser satisfaction transformed itself into social
invulnerability or safety from crime? Not only the nature of the talk
radio discourse, but the very nature of media-conglomerated and
corporate, advertiser-dominated media are in need of real critique and
overhaul if we are to seriously address the informational and emotional
and social needs of a society that is still plagued with horrific and
horribly frequent crimes like these that happen everywhere and, yes,
anywhere. It is not because these crimes only happen on the south side
of Chicago, not because they just can’t or shouldn’t happen in
Gloucester (as McPhee suggested in reference to another youth-crime),
but because they happen AT ALL. And these crimes are happening
everywhere. And if we are truly caring, intelligent and concerned
adults, then we take responsibility for youth in our midst and beyond
our midst if we hold the truth to be self-evident that this is a great
nation.
We are a dysfunctional national family at best…but not without hope.
Talk radio, in this instance and many others as I have noticed on
that station and not, has shown a keen ability to narrow discourse and
breed a support of parochialism far beyond that of normal men, but who,
in the guise of the talk show host, bring us to a point of witnessing
here, in the handling and packaging of this very difficult and painful
story of death and the destruction of life, security, safety and
happiness – and youth – a double tragedy. We are witness to an awful
commission of criminal behavior that behooves us to support the victims,
family and friends with renewed and deepened compassion, love and
vigilant engagement. They are deserving of that as any victim of such a
crime would be, no matter where they live. We are also witness to the
tragedy of a communications medium format that seemed unable to truly
provide a deeper insight into the human dynamic of violence beyond their
own predilection with feeding into the negative emotions that
understandably surface when things of this nature occur.
The narrow discourse of this brand of talk radio obscures the growing
presence and importance of rights-of-passage programs, youth
leadership, spiritual and cultural intiation programs that immerse youth
in the understanding and manifestation of the interconnective nature of
human life and life beyond humanity, to all that is. We don’t hear
about men creating men from boys, women creating women from girls,
adults in vigilant leadership in their communities supporting concepts
of communal respect and personal responsibility beyond mere civics and
citizenship. Programs like the Sacred Fire community and the Rights of
Passage Council and the work growing out of the programs of East Coast
Village, amongst many others, many following forms of time-tested,
indigenous cultural tradition that help youth (and adults) not only
understand themselves better, but their place in the world, their
communities and society at large and find a validation of their personal
gifts, a real way to be seen and supported and then provide support as a
caring, loving and empowered member of communal society, the goal of
any enlightened nation
How talk radio has packaged this issue raises contradictions that
exist between what is real and what we are comfortable with in our
minds. The contradictions in the apparent safety in the “country” or
“suburbs” vs. the problems ‘inherent’ in the cities, “inner” or
otherwise, obscure the responsibility that the society has in creating
the very cities that it decries in its media. This society created the
cities and the kind of violence that cities and our deep-seated social
pathologies engender. It takes no newspaper reporter to know that those
who support the social structures, corporations and cultural ideologies
that create and support “city” or urban areas live in small towns and
country homes, away from the hustle and bustle, nestled in their “oasis
of quiet sanity”. A focus solely on parents belies the reality that
solutions lie in the communal dynamics of the society, not merely the
personal family functionings of any young man, though the nature of such
is important and undeniable. If we simply kill those
boys-trying-to-be-men, we will kill our very own consciousness of the
resilience of the human spirit and consciousness of our neglected
responsibility for youth and who they eventually become, not only as
parents, but as interdependent, communally-empowered and supported
adults, never satisfied to stop short of available solutions because of a
band-leader only willing to play the catchy hook of a much deeper and
harmonious song.
May our social values and our cultural, mediated communications be in harmony.
May the victims of violence everywhere find love, support,
resolution, closure, healing in the dawn of the new day, the dawn of a
new embrace of and dedication to all that is good and correct in the
human spirit.
May we find the courage to look into the mirror held up to us by the
very faces and lives of the children we adults have created – our
children.
Ukumbwa Sauti, Department of Mass Communication
Pierce Arrow Blogger
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
