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THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE IN
US
By Elliott Leyton in CBC Commentary 18 10 02
Elliott Leyton is an anthropologist at Memorial University
who
specializes in homicide. He's written half a dozen books on murder
and mass killings. On Commentary he says as horrible as it is
the
sniper is expressing a deeply held value of American life.
America is one of the world's great civilizations. Its contributions
to the arts, medicine, science and technology are unparalleled,
as is
its veneration of personal freedom, its industrial capacity and
its
military prowess. But its crime problem is unparalleled: Americans
are five to ten times more likely to be murdered than Western
Europeans; they're three to four times more likely to be murdered
than Canadians - all this despite the nation's vindictive treatment
of its criminals.
The pattern of bullyboy politics and pugnacious personalities
was
established long before Teddy Roosevelt told his citizens to
'carry a
big stick', a reiteration of an old American cultural principle
which
reveres violence as a manly and satisfying response to frustration.
In the 1860s, the Kansas City Times wrote about three men who
rode
into a town, robbed a bank and shot a little girl in the leg.
The
paper called the event "so diabolically daring and so utterly
in
contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its
perpetrators." What? They shot a little girl in the leg!
"In America," wrote Clancy Sigal, "murderers
are more valued,
certainly more admired, than their victims." No wonder that
by the
1980s, America's film heroes had become paramilitary figures,
paranoid and enraged, angry at anybody they could blame for the
world's evil.
America's homicide rates have begun to rise again after a
brief
respite in the mid 90s, led by increases of more than 60 percent
in
Boston and Phoenix. Yet the rest of the developed world produces
homicide rates that are only a fraction of America's.
Now a sniper, possibly a middle class male with connections
to the
government, the military, the militia or the police, is marauding
through middle class suburbs near the nation's capitol. Where
did he
learn the script he is now acting out?
Such killings are usually a form of suicide - the killer expects
to
avenge the real or imagined wrong that torments him, and then
to die
at the end of his murderous spree, either by his own hand or
in a
hail of police bullets. The killings themselves are his suicide
note.
But life must be seen as sacred and a civilization pays a
tragic
price if it encodes any of the following prescriptions:
That violence has a noble beauty
That a man must personally avenge his dishonour
That demeaning or abusing any vulnerable class, gender or
ethnic
group can be justified
That wealth, power and prestige are everything that matters
That winning is glorious and losing is shameful
That the suffering of others is their fault, not ours
Or, that war is an acceptable political game. |
