What if we created an educational system that would teach our children to view violence as an effective and acceptable way to solve problems; To feel inadequate, but to believe that buying things might make them feel better; To see gender, race, and age roles more from the narrow focus of stereotype than from the wider lens of diversity, and to distrust people from cultures or countries different from their own. What would such a system look like?

We could start by having a typical child live in a home with three TVs, two VCRs, three radios, three tape players, two CD players, a video game system, and a computer. Then we could expose children to twice as much TV time as classroom time, and 90 percent of it would be adult programming, unaccompanied by adult supervision. We could expose them to 200,000 acts of violence, 20,000 commercials, and 14,000 sexual references a year.

We could provide overexposure to toys, games, and video games in which the object is to solve conflicts and gain power through the use of violence. We could ensure that our kids are over-stimulated by sex and violence out of school while we debate what, if any, education about these topics they should receive in school. We could make sure our "news" shows focus more on the murder and mayhem in our communities than on the positive, empowering things happening around us. And we could do all this within the context of being the most heavily armed nation on the planet and the world's largest exporter of arms and violent media.

This is the media culture in which American children are raised, and the debate about whether it's affecting or just reflecting humanity has been around almost from the start. How does that song from South Pacific go? "You've got to be taught to hate and fear/You've got to be taught from year to year/It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear/You've got to be carefully taught."

I'm pretty sure that Rodgers and Hammerstein were referring to prejudice passed down by parents when they wrote that song for the 1949 musical. In 1949, relatively few American homes had a television set, so parents still had a shot at being the primary influence on their children. Today, with a television in the bedroom of many school age children, TV, and other media have become major influences as well. To what end?

In the aftermath of September 11, there are the movies that will need to be edited, or which may never be coming to a screen near you, due to content that hits a little too close to the homeland.

In a September 26 piece about the Hollywood reaction, film critic David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor asks some hard questions: "Are such maneuvers only cosmetic, to be reversed as public spirits rise in coming months? Could it be that Hollywood's long habit of drawing entertainment value from violence and destruction has helped shape Americans' immediate reaction to the September 11 events and may also influence ideas about how their country should respond to its actual and perceived enemies?"

Sterritt concedes that the answer to the first question is probably yes. "More troubling is the thought that public views of retaliation, revenge, and warfare may come more from decades of popular entertainment than from sustained reflections on history and morality," he writes. "For every film like Gandhi which takes a serious look at nonviolence and spiritually guided thinking, there are hundreds of movies that present war-related fear, hatred, and aggression as inevitable indeed, thrilling aspects of the human condition. This pattern rarely causes much concern among moviegoers or pundits. It's ingrained enough to go largely unquestioned." You've got to be carefully taught.

In this month's Harper's magazine, editor Lewis Lapham uses a Hollywood analogy to describe why Washington was so unprepared and the public so uninformed in September: "Accustomed to the unilateral privilege of writing the world's blockbuster geopolitical scripts, hiring the cast and paying for the special effects, the Washington studio executives seldom take the trouble to look at the movie from the point of view of an audience that might be having trouble reading the subtitles. Why bother? Let them eat popcorn and look at the pictures."

The Advertising Council in New York has been called in to help shore up the public's resolve in fighting the war on terrorism with ad campaigns to "inform, involve, and inspire" us. We should be seeing some 30- and 60-second messages any day now.

I read that because of all the revenue lost during the 73 hours of continuous "public interest" coverage of the unfolding crisis, television networks are starting to make some bailout noise of their own. Think about taking some of that footage and inserting commercials, just to see if it would be a dissonant experience. Plane flies into South Tower, cut to Gap commercial. Is it possible there were reasons other than the public interest that commercials weren't aired during those 73 hours?

In the meantime, we are urged to get on with our lives, to do our part for the economy by again shopping until we drop. And the Washington studio executives? What have they been doing for the economy? Oh, lots of things. Congress has been considering more cuts to the capital gains tax for the wealthy, bringing back the deductible lunch, and eliminating the corporate alternative minimum tax, which has made large corporations pay at least some tax, no matter how many loopholes their accountants can find. If it passes the Senate, the bill would be retroactive for 15 years, providing $1.4 billion for IBM, $833 million for General Motors, $671 million for General Electric, etc. But pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Eat some popcorn. Look at the pictures of waving flags.

In a recent speech, Bill Moyers said that the tools needed for creating safety and security for the future "must include an electoral system that is no longer dominated by big money, where the voices and problems of average people are attended on a fair and equal basis. They must include an energy system that is more sustainable, and less dangerous. And they must include a media that takes its responsibility to inform us as seriously as its interest in entertaining us."

Author Umberto Eco once wrote, "Democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection, not an invitation to hypnosis." My fear is that a majority of us have already fallen asleep in the poppy field of mainstream media. My hope is that the falling ash of the World Trade Center will be enough to wake us up.

Issue Date: November 9 - 15, 2001