Some Underpinnings of American Violence (article)

Many authors now write about the “two Americas,” and by this, they usually are referring to the current divide between liberals and conservatives in our country. Other divides are not highlighted as often, but they, too, are all around us. For example, another division has Americans moving into areas of the country that suit their cultural, educational, and political preferences (Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, 2008). But the divide that we rarely address is between the ideal images of the U.S. and the less than ideal behaviors of Americans. This divide underpins our inability to understand fully, and thus to tackle, the violent outbursts of a few and any traumatic consequences.

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We routinely see the ideal America all around us. In TV shows and in movies, for example, almost every male actor is handsome and hardly a female performer is anything other than beautiful. On TV, too, we are offered glimpses of gracious houses that people buy or rent. The same images of beauty hold true for the magazines that arrive at our homes and grace our nightstands or coffee tables. The U.S. is presented as a charming place in which everyone lives contently in fun and rewarding settings. This image is shown on infinite numbers of websites that advertise vacation destinations, retirement locales, and thousands of college campuses. Finally, we have an infinite number of products that encourage us to think that beauty surrounds us; for example, classic furniture, computers, and phones.

The divide becomes apparent in our newspaper and TV news, which show another, not so pleasant America. Even this drumbeat of distress, murder, and mayhem only hints at the nastiness of the iceberg below the pleasant surface. The ideal image helps us ignore the persistently untoward and violent behavior of segments of our citizenry and to encourage them in their antisocial thoughts and actions.

Milder forms of illegalities encourage violent behavior and constitute the nasty iceberg underneath our pristine waters. There are the 18-year-olds who walk into bars with false identification to drink alcohol. There are the college students who smoke weed and think nothing of the impact on them and others. Then we see people texting while driving. Although these infractions may seem harmless, they point to a more profound problem: the illegalities that permeate large segments of our society allow too many to think that such behavior is permissible. Those most affected by this dismissive attitude often have developed a weak superego and conscience.

Then there are the more serious illegal activities, like those of merchants and industrialists who cheat their customers. There are the employers who, as Howard Stein has pointed out, fire thousands of employees without a second thought. (The best representation of his thinking is in Stein’s “The Inconsolable Organization: Toward a Theory of Organizational and Cultural Change,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 12, December, 2007, pp. 349-368.)

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Then we read of builders who, rather than hiring employees with full benefits, search for contract laborers in violation of local and federal laws and thus deprive these workers of benefits. Perhaps the most egregious of these misdeeds were those of American bankers a few years ago, which cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes, and pensions. These behaviors and this attitude point to an irresponsibility that undermines the fabric of our society. And they readily give the impression to someone who is not mentally and/or emotionally stable that he, or more rarely she, may also act outside of the law.

Barely legal and illegal behaviors are only one part characterizing our nasty iceberg; so are the various extremisms in our society. Amazingly, we have become used to them and immune to their effects. There is the loudness of our language and the import of violent vocabulary into our discourses, making it easier to accept actual violence. Some politicians now say, for example, that compromise is despicable and thus unworthy of a strong person. Also, while we have become resistant to the noise, some of it includes outright encouragement to act violently. Thus, we call our struggle against widespread drug use a war; the now infamous “war on drugs.” We called an earlier struggle on poverty the “war on poverty.” With this nomenclature, we brought war into our lives, but left the underlying problems unresolved. This, in turn, influences less stable individuals to assume that extreme language and behavior is perfectly acceptable.

This uncompromising language is supported by the violence in our media and the violent experiences of many individuals. Aside from the daily violence in our ghettos, including abusive language, screaming, and gunshots at night that many of my students report, there is the constant flow of violent TV shows and video and Internet-based games. Some groups, for example, completely ignore youngsters viewing and participating in make-believe murders.

There is still more to the iceberg. Our permissive gun culture encourages some to think that carrying loaded weapons that can kill dozens in one burst is perfectly normal. Those who agree also define America’s murder rate as normal. (In 2010, the number was still at 12,996 at a rate of 4.2 per 100,000 vs. Western Europe’s

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number of 1,852, at a rate of 1.0.) Not all Americans see this war on each other as normal, but it is to advocates of violence, be they hardline politicians, gun advocates and sellers, or those living on the periphery of society.

Oddly enough, Americans also do not readily connect war itself with the violence that percolates under our purportedly normal society. My first father-in-law said, “War is like an illness.” He had seen war firsthand in World War II and thought that soldiers not only bring home war-like behaviors, but that a society in war also becomes inured to its effects. America has been at war almost continuously for decades. We speak occasionally of the mental and physical illnesses our soldiers bring home and the trauma that their absence and return imposes on families. But we tend to ignore how America has, in the most recent wars, carried violence to Iraq and Afghanistan and how this nearly permanent warfare has desensitized us to its effects on people. Rather than seeking solutions by talking with our supposed and real enemies, we have decided too frequently that taking a stand, and using weapons to do so, solves our discontent with this or that regime. Rather than learning that war does not pay because it rarely resolves what was intended despite its high cost, we teach Americans that war is a good thing. We thus learn that killing people and destroying property is acceptable, if not laudable, for our own benefit and others’ salvation.

Our illicit behaviors, unforgiving language, and love for warfare have infected our society. Here, then, is my point: Those in our midst who have not been able to develop a stable conscience or are otherwise less well adjusted to what is called “normal,” all too often are unable to see behavioral boundaries and are incapable of arguing against, to themselves and others, extreme forms of expression. Some American leaders, and some others who do not see violence for what it is, maintain that it does not undermine the beauty of our society, and that the ones who commit violent acts are simply poorly adjusted or ill. Probably so, but now we can neither hide from violence nor hold back those among us who cannot resist behaving violently. The overall societal pressure to tolerate and to encourage illegal and violent behavior is so strong that some are unable to resist acting illegally and violently.

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