So I actually wrote this essay some time ago. I only just got around to playing with it and finishing it off, however... and as they keep saying in the books I've been reading (Stephen King, the Dark Tower series) the world has moved on. But I do have an excuse for myself. As some of you know, my life as of about a month ago was in that depressing post-college "I'm not doing anything with my life, and all my friends are on the far side of the world & won't write to me" stage. And just in the past month or so, I all-of-a-sudden have everything in the world to do. Part of it is that I'm going to be working at the ren faire (so no, I won't have any spare time before October...) and part of it is my boyfriend. He's new. He's wonderful. He's also a major time-sink. But that wasn't what I was going to talk about. What I was going to talk about was killing people. As Chloe so eloquently pointed out, (in "laser guns and magic swords") there's been rather a decline in children's cartoons of late. Though I barely remember watching them (at my cousins' house, when I was very young) I would have to say that in a vague way the old standbys like He-man and Transformers are still dear to my heart. And what about Warner Brothers cartoons -- half an hour of the annoyed pseudo-adult trying to destroy our stupid but happy-go-lucky hero and only damaging himself? Children love slapstick violence-- and as we all learned from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you need a solvent that'll disolve film before you can really hurt a cartoon. And yet modern children's programing is upsettingly watered down. It's not just pokemon, either. A couple months ago I happened upon a couple episodes of something called Dragon Tales. In theory it's kind of cute-- a brother and sister find a magic dragon scale which, when they wish on it, brings their wallpaper to life to whisk them away to a magic land to play with dragons. Which is all very well, but the worst that happens in said magic land is sibling rivalry, or losing a pet. Much as I get sick of the great battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil, it does at least add some excitment to everyday life. But no, we must not expose our children to violence. If they are sufficiently sheltered and protected, perhaps they won't think of resorting to it, later on in life.

We live in a very violent society, or so they tell us. And yes, things happen that shouldn't-- there are children stupid enough to believe that shooting their teachers and classmates will help them in some way, adults who get sick of themselves and take it out on their surroundings, people who never really learn that there are some things you just don't do... But very violent? This I'm not so sure about.

To a certain extent it seems that most human beings enjoy violence. It can be pretty exciting. And being the sentient intellectuals that we are, we are bound to disagree about things, about which we instinctivly argue. There are elements of violence in us all. But I would have to say that just in general, modern America is probably doing better with all this than just about any other time and place I can think of.

To our credit (or discredit, depending upon your viewpoint) we are, as a society, nearly as much obsessed with violence as with sex. From military history to video games, sports, television, movies, murder mysteries, the recent craze of vampire fiction... There's a lot of blood and death out there for the asking. But this is because people are fascinated by it, not because the media is sick and trying to corrupt us or anything. BUT-- the huge majority is all fictional. And when it's not, people don't tend to think it's ok.

Nine days ago they executed Timothy McVeigh. I happened to catch the news reports at the time, and was struck by a couple of things. Now, I don't really know too much about modern executions-- I don't believe they happen too often, and they're usually hushed up when they do. The impression I've gotten is that you really have to be a mass murderer to be given the death penalty; otherwise they just quietly lock you away and use their allotment of tax dollars to feed and house you. But I do know a little about historical executions, and this by comparison was a strange and bloodless pagent.

Death was administered by lethal injection, virtually painless and certainly not terribly interesting to watch, and he was killed in relative privacy, with a few prison officials (who appeared to feel greatly upset at having to execute someone) and a handful of media people selected to be present by lottery. The real circus happened outside the building, completely out of sight of the event, and even so it sounded like the crowd control was phenomenal. There were no riots, the media stayed in their assigned area and speculated, and the various protesters stayed in theirs. The people to whom vengence might have mattered were offered a chance to watch the event over video screens from a different city. Out of the some thousand offered the chance, fewer than two hundred availed themselves of this oportunity. Whether they were satisfied by the distant vision of an unbroken man dying in his sleep, still believing that he was justified in what he did, I couldn't tell you. But I think he definately deserves cool points for it, even if we all know (and whence comes this conviction?) that he was wrong.

Ok, so you're saying that this was our government, and they're supposed to be civilized; it's really McVeigh himself who I should be looking at when I start talking about violence. And you have a point; I think it's probably the misguided people who set off bombs that people mean when they say we're in a violent society.

But let's look at a little history.

Have you ever read a Victorian fairy tale? Specially intended for children? They're full of violence, and I don't just mean that the wolf ends up in the stewpot at the end of the three little pigs. They may have tried to sift out all the inuendo not fit for children's ears, but the blood guts and gore were perfectly acceptable for a young audience. (Please don't try to tell me that this is responsible for the horrors of the first world war, because I just won't believe you.)

What do you remember about the westward expansion? In my school system we learned about this in fifth grade. The Trail of Tears, where the remains of the Cherokee people were force-marched by the US Government from their homes in Georgia to a less... inconvenient... territory. Where they wouldn't be in the way. Or everything done in the name of "Manifest Destiny." The lawless wild west is practically a stereotype by now, and for those of you who watched the latest incarnation of Zorro, there was in fact a Californian bandit called Joaquin Murieta whose head, bottled in whiskey, became a travelling tourist attraction for years after his death.

Salem, Massachusettes was not the place to be in the 1690s. A bunch of bored teenage girls started playing around with vodoo rites, got scared of the consequences, and stared accusing other people of witchcraft. When they discovered that their village elders were taking them seriously, they got drastically carried away with the power trip. Literally hundreds of people were sent to incredibly primitive prisons, some while pregnant, some not released for over a year, not to mention the twenty-some executions on what neither you nor I would consider a scrap of evidence.

Need I mention the slave trade and all its messy aftermath?

Public executions have been the rage as social events for just about as long as we can remember. According to the 1999 Encyclopedia Americana, "Executions were devised as great public spectacles where crowds might observe any one of a number of methods of killing criminals." The death penalty was abolished in England by the end of the 1860s, but less than a century before that there were upwards of 200 crimes punishable by death (including shoplifting of items valued at 5 shillings, or shooting a rabbit) and between 1805 and 1810, between 2 and 3 thousand people every year were sentenced to death. Though many of them were pardoned or transported, this still left a whole lot of executions for the marketplace crowds to jeer at. Which, of course, they did.

You may remember, if you're familiar with The Three Musketeers, or similar stories, that dueling was outlawed. Now, up to a point this makes sense, until one starts to think about the necessity of passing such laws, and the number of people who disobeyed them. And for something like a slight to your honor. Can you imagine a world where the top of the society, not just the scum on the streets, feels it necessary to try to kill each other over a minor insult? It's a pretty frightening thing, really.

When most people think of the middle ages, they tend to have dreamy visions of armored knights jousting and rescuing fair virgins in long dresses. This (no offense) is a lot of junk dreamed up by the Romantics. You've probably heard about the plague, and the crusades, neither of which was particularly pleasant, but what you may not have heard about was the between crusades part where all the warriors came home, got bored, and went out raiding their neighbors for something to do. Yes there's a reason that Europe is full of huge defensive structures. And if you (like most of the population) happened to be a serf attempting to grow enough food to feed yourself through the winter, you didn't happen to like having the noble bullies from the next kingdom over come galloping through torching your hovels and possibly your crops, raping your wife and daughters, and who knows what else.

The Ancient Romans were all about spectacles of blood and death; the ancient gladiator was a great sex symbol, something like a combination of a rock legend and a star quarterback today. (Incidentally, the emperor Commodus was in fact killed while playing gladiator, though it happened ten years into his reign.) Arena battles were violent and bloody, although they usually didn't actually end in death. To perform in the arena it was necessary to be a slave, and even with the vast numbers of wars (the prisoners of which became slaves) going on in antiquity, slaves were quite expensive. The same of course was true of wild beasts, who for the most part had to be imported from the very edges of the ancient world. It was a great display of wealth and power, therefore, when large numbers of men and beasts were killed. At any rate, it was certainly a great way of impressing the populace.

Probably you've all heard of the decadence of Nero and Caligula, (fiddling while Rome burned, alternately sleeping with and murdering cousins, appointing a horse to the senate, that sort of thing...) but this was just playing around. A couple generations earlier, the young Augustus (then called Octavian) and Marc Antony had (with the rather unimportant Lepidus, who happened to be in the right place at the right time) taken control of the dying Roman Republic by appointing themselves as the Second Triumverate. (don't worry about this part-- basically they said, "We're in charge" and nobody else was powerful enough to object much) Anyway, they started out with a rather... unusual... method of establishing trust between them. In effect they sat down together and one would say, "So, I really don't like so-and-so. Will you let me get rid of him if I promise not to object when you kill this one of my friends?" And then they'd post a list of names, and pay bounties to whoever brought in the corpse.

Another generation before that, in the late republic (upon which so much of our modern American government is based) equally lovely people were running about: Crassus, part of the First Triumverate with Caesar, was just rolling in money, for various interesting reasons. He was the only man in Rome to own a fire brigade, and would choose nicely situated properties and discretely set fire to them. Then he would show up and offer to buy the blazing building for a ridiculously low price, and when the owner protested, would cheerfully point out how much the value was decreasing as they spoke. ("Oh look, the third floor just collapsed!") Meanwhile, the tribunes (government office "for the people," as opposed to the senate) Clodius and Milo were running about with competing street gangs beating up on each other. Clodius was eventually killed, and his followers thought it fitting to burn down the senate house as his pyre.

But enough about the Romans. Let's step back again and take a look at the Greeks. The ancient Greeks had lots of heroes, but the one they really identified with, as the sort of poster-boy "What it is to be a greek" was Herakles (Hercules to you unlearned barbarians.) Half a god, insanely strong, and, well, not too bright. Prone to get drunk and do really stupid things. Like killing his entire family by mistake. (That was why he ended up having to do the 12 labors, in case you were wondering) And this is the role model for the upper class male.

Well, so far I've just been talking about "Western Civilization." It's my culture, it's what I know about, it's what we're descended from. But we hold no monopoly on violence, or course. So just a couple of scattered examples in the interests of mulitculuralism:

The Aztecs had a thing about picking the best of their young intellectuals to keep as a sort of head priest for a year and then sacrifice to the gods by cutting his heart out or somesuch.

There are still places in Africa that practice female circumcision. (The theory, I believe, is that it discourages adultery by making sex a terribly painful ordeal.)

The ancient Persians had a lovely method of execution where they would fit the criminal in a wooden structure so that only his head, hands, and feet stuck out and then force feed and smear him with milk and honey and leave him in the sun to be eaten alive by insects and vermin.

For a time in India it was expected that a hindu wife would throw herself on her husband's pyre, should she have the bad taste to outlive him.

Ancient cultures in Egypt, Mesapotamia, China, and I know not where else have developed practices of killing off huge numbers of servants and animals to accompany their dead masters into the underworld.

Several different hoards of asiatic nomads came up with lovely punishments involving tying people to multiple horses galloping in different directions.

This is what I can think of just off the top of my head. There has just about everywhere, just about always, been violence. We admit to this, culturally, in some very telling ways; the second generation in the judeo-christian bible indulges in fratricide. And just don't ask me about the first couple generations of the greek gods... Long ago, before there was anyone else to kill, we are told, we were perfectly happy with killing our closest relations.

There have also always been people opposed to violence, too, in both loud and quiet ways. But it still happens. So what is the difference today? Well, too many people have the potential to do too much damage. A three-year-old in the wrong place with a grenade could probably take out more people than a trained warrior with a sword. And though we seem to have sufficient sense to keep grenades away from our three-year-olds, far too many people (and this isn't, globally, any great number. It's just more noticable than before with the explosions and the media coverage) don't seem to know how to raise their teenagers so they won't think the Christian Slader character from Heathers is a great role model. (I can't remember the character name...) There have always been disfunctional people-- murderers, rapists, child abusers, drug addicts, whatever-- but it seems like a lot of people consider these things the sole evil and responsibility of the modern world.

It is true that none of us were around for the earlier eras of the world, and it's also true that the past couple centuries did a lot of pretending violence didn't actually happen in "polite society"-- it was, naturally, a purely lower-class phenomenon, or was exported to the colonies (see: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) or was pasted over with a Romantic glamour. It's ok to poison your wife and run off with innocent young women if you're a proper brooding arch-villain...

Maybe this generation's models of violence more explicit and bloodier, but this is partly due to the modern trend away from stylization, and mostly because we have much better special effects. So the latest computer games are getting much better at simulating life-like corpses, who splatter blood about when they die. (But how many of us actually know from experience how life-like this really is? I'd rather have a generation of gamers than of warriors any day.) But how many of you have read (or seen the recent movie of) Titus Andronicus? Our dear Shakespeare, greatest writer to grace the English language, writing the sort of pop-art crowd pleaser that was all the rage in his day. You could not ask for a play more steeped in senseless violence. Not to mention that the first and greatest literature of the whole western tradition is an epic about a sulky warrior who, because his stolen slave-girl is taken from him, decides to allow his friends and comrades to be slaughtered by the enemy. (Yes, I have problems with Achilles. He's a spoiled brat.)

So it seems to me that really, against the evidence, we think we're getting more violent because we want to think that. People often seem to revel in a feeling of doom. Elaine Morgan, in her book The Descent of Woman, talks about this phenomenon as it comes up in evolutionary theory.

She then goes through and points out how, compared to any number of other species, we are barely agressive at all. But why does she need to contradict someone who clearly considers himself an authority on human behavior to do so?

The other half of the phenomenon, I believe, is tendancy towards nostalgia. It was always better in the old days, merely by virtue of them being far enough off that we don't quite remember how much we hated them. The older generations have been saying, "Now, in my day..." or, "Whatever is the world coming to?" from time out of mind. In Rome the phrase was "O tempora, o mores." (essentially "O time, o morality") In ancient Athens they executed Socrates for corrupting the youth-- that is, teaching them to ask questions.

So yes, we have drug lords, mob bosses, mass murderers, and other assorted misfits loose in our society. But if we hear more about them, it is mostly because there are so many more of us, and communication is so much better. It may be a horrible world out there, but so has it always been, and barring sudden changes in human nature, most likely so will it always be.

My mother tells about having come across the statistic that one third of all pregnant women get morning sickness, to which her reaction was, "Oh good-- that means two thirds don't!" We run across these statistics all the time. X percent of women will suffer some form of date rape. So many kids will encounter violence of some sort in their schools. And some of the percentages are pretty scary, especially for people like me who have at best known people, or known people who knew people, to whom these things happened. But even when it's 60 or 70 percent, there's still a lot of space to be sheltered at the top.

...or so says Thanate.