Site Ed. Note: The first piece speaks to a pet theory of ours, that it is not the openly violent programming on television or in movies (and certainly not, for goodness sake, an obvious satire opposed to violence like "Natural Born Killers" or an anti-drug film like "Basketball Diaries"--though if you want to believe the self-created legend of the killers themselves, go ahead and live in their world) which causes or nourishes the criminal bent of some few in our communities.

Rather, it is the sentimental piece on the news, the hand-wrenching reactions of the neighbors and relatives, the glorification, nay, anti-deification of the perpetrator, the sacrificial lamb to the slaughter to vent the anger of the nice, sweet "God-fearing" wholesome community which surrounds the subject, the cops and robbers shows, all those "wanted" shows, etc., which more likely comprise the final prime mover of the pre-disposed evil hand.

It isn't rock 'n' roll, satanic lyrics, backwards recordings or any of the other usual suspects.

More likely, "Lassie".

Occasionally, one in a million cases may find the suspect blaming such handy devices and openly--and that gets publicity, of course, to confirm the idiotic theories of tele-prompter readers on television, and a few well-meaning but sheltered from real life politicians, most of whom have never been face to face with an accused person in their lives except under the glaring intensity of tv lights. They have never gone to the jail at midnight without fanfare, sat down with a person and just chatted. And it is then that the unconscious and off-guard statements start to flow, that aesthetic tastes, often banal, but as often somewhat sophisticated, come forth. The tendency is simply toward movies and tv, drama, comedy, cartoons and otherwise, which most of the rest of us watch or have watched during our developing years and, in some cases, beyond, some violence to be sure, just as with the rest of us--but mostly just the good old wholesome stuff of tv and movies, and, further surprise, books, real books, too, as often as not.

The ultimate problem, of course, may be an unusual inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, but that inability begins in the home and is perpetuated in the school and the community at large surrounding them. It doesn't begin or end with the nature of the thing they may view or hear out of popular culture which doesn't have any similar effect on the rest of us. For that problem would as easily be nurtured, probably more so, by Mighty Mouse as it would by "Natural Born Killers".

No, it is something else--not the popular culture per se. And therefore we should not therefore be seeking to limit free expression just to satisfy a bunch of Neanderthalic fools who want to quash the artistic because they neither can understand it nor accomplish it themselves, and therefore launch upon it as the handy-dandy on which to fix blame for the ills of society--ills, we might add, which have been around for time immemorial, and in far worse manifestations than today.

What movie, television show, or rock band was it which precipitated the firing on Sumter? (Mr. Lincoln thought it was Uncle Tom's Cabin, but that was said to Mrs. Stowe only half in jest. But no one in their right mind ever suggested that the book or the play be banned, and it never was, of course, except in the South--which doesn't at all qualify the statement.)

And all such censorship in the name of stopping some violent act which would have occurred anyway, regardless of whether the putative, objectionable piece of popular culture was banned or stultified or not. In fact, the nefarious act would likely have occurred sooner without the objectionable thing which probably neutralized for awhile the tendency toward violence.

And that said, would the removal of all the detective magazines from the shelves in 1938--not what Cash advocates below, incidentally--have stopped the woman memorialized in the editorial from doing what she did? We venture to say it wouldn't have; it only supplied perhaps the delaying mechanism while she vicariously worked out her morbid fantasies through these devices. Her preoccupation with them was symptomatic of a warped fantasy world perhaps, nothing more. But the fantasies, we venture, would have been there regardless. For they come from childhood and inattentive parenting, with, to be sure, some pre-disposing genetic and physiological factors subject to re-direction. But, in the end, the casus belli is Pleasantville, that place steeped in its self-image of Perfection and Rotary, caring nothing of what the perpetuation of that stultifying, silly fantasy does to human beings generally. And caring even less what it does to young human beings able to think but unable to find an avenue of proper creative expression for their thoughts. And creative expression of all kinds, no matter how disturbing the result may appear.

And it is the fact, we find, that the prisons are full of creative people who have never had much of an avenue, if any, for expression of their creativity. It was deemed either too mediocre or too unsettling or, more likely, was shunned by their peers and families as being not the same stuff which they see promoted on their tv screens, and so… The mother in that case probably shared the teacher's concern or merely gave in to it, and rather than offering politely the lack of experiential data as the alternative explanation for the strange manifestation of a common perception, maybe the drawing of an animal in the wrong color, concluded that little Jerry's or Alice's head was undoubtedly warped and that this was a very disturbing development, such that the mother would see to it double-quick that the matter was dealt with by opening books up on wildlife for Alice or that the father would teach little Jerry to shoot a shotgun and take him deer-hunting…

Our bet is that if any enterprising sociologist ever sat down and did a thorough study of the communities where bizarre violence has flourished and then compared them to similar sized communities where such cases have been absent or few in number over long stretches of time, in the former they would find obscurantism running rampant, the idea that art, other than perhaps the established classical arts, is the product of devil-worship or drugs or something other than pure aesthetic enjoyment, while the latter would possess an open approach to the arts and self-expression of all age groups, not just those under 18 or over 75.

We may not like the art so produced always and may even think it to be something less than art. But would we rather be laughing hysterically at the moronic lack of perspective displayed in the gallery showing of a lifetime's worth of paintings, maybe even paintings which show anti-Semitic tendencies, by some unknown painter from Germany named A. Hitler who died quietly in Berlin in 1984, fully 66 years after he fought in the only World War we ever had, or the photographs of the other thing he did to show the world the greatness of his art?