How Television Kills Cops

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I was going to open up with a joke about it being - a final solution. But of course, the media has programmed you to react violently to such a suggestion. So we'll play it straight.

And maybe it ought to be played straight, for once. It's not how media people typically roll.

From the beginning, media has been an industry that, far from the civility of actual legal or - civil proceedings, which in contrast have been treated with an intentional decorum of trust, of grace, and due weight - 

Behind the scenes, the real power players behind the images that have become so familiar to us, of talking heads wearing suits - the real power players are the ones who own and operate the technology which creates the idols. And it's an industry that again, far from being one with the chief concern of fixing real problems, is one in which the power players themselves are inspired chiefly by vanity. There's not much in the way of altruism that inspires one to even become a television personality. Peggy Wehmeyer, a former ABC Religion reporter, said there are few more selfish things one can do in the world than aspire to be a television anchor. It's a job that really leaves practically no room for anyone else. It's difficult to find such honestly in a TV showman/showwoman. Which- I don't think even she can go so far to admit that even she was.

Broadcasting has always been, will always be, an industry of gimmicks - and not just to the end-user audience. It's been riddled with cut-throat, reckless anchors and announcers who, in some of the worst situations, would literally light one another's scripts on fire live on the air. That's just another day in broadcasting.  Be sure to check out my article on working with convicted felons in the field.

The personality you see on the screen isn't a person. It's an image that has been created, and, generally, can be just as soon destroyed by the technological wizards who made the idol for us, from the model in the studio, the talking head. All at light speed, with the help of ever more sophisticated equipment designed to do just that - to create dazzling idols faster than we ourselves can build them in our own homes.

I don't ever find it unworthy to note that the highest grossing films generally aren't the ones with gratuitous violence.

And yet, all of us, particularly us men, seem irrationally drawn to the image of a head being lobbed off; someone getting shot. And then, of course, there's that other kind of sensationalism that accounts for the majority of Internet data traffic.

What's the simple solution? Well, don't watch it. But that's not as simple as it sounds. Because media content, as I've discussed before here, is so effective because it has the power to short-circuit the conscious brain and skip directly to the subconscious - in precisely the way that so-called "subliminal" messaging does - the argument of the media industry that people who don't like it simply shouldn't watch is, from a natural order perspective, from a logical perspective, moot. Why not wave a bare male member in front of a woman's face all day and just tell her to ignore it?

So Christians dream of a world where all this is outlawed. And the American public is much too stupefied to vote for a thing like that. Or, these days, to vote at all, generally. We're not going to make television broadcasting illegal in the next five years. It's not going to happen.

Self-regulation also can be crossed off the list. It's become like the list of accounting don'ts at Enron. Networks don't care, and cable far less. Who knows what's lurking on the Internet. It's a Wild West indeed, in the mind. Which - really means nothing at all.

I want to focus on violence, because so often it's the dirty words and images that get the attention. And promiscuous women seem to love dirty imagery, because it "enables" other women to fall into the same traps of promiscuity those promiscuous women have fallen into, so that they have more miserable females to make life more ugly for good and bad men alike, and it generally just drags everybody down. And they call this feminism, or female empowerment. But I digress.

We're going to leave the s*#$&$tty words, and the pornography for now, and just address violence. Because it's overlooked in the wake of other sensational smut.

Why is gratuitous violence perceived as less of a threat than pornography or dirty language? Well, its effects are not only subconscious, like pornography, but it also fails to produce an observable reaction in men or women. Well, it produces a less observable reaction.

Ironically, the same part of the brain that "reacts" to pornography is the same part that "reacts" to violence. 

Over the long-term, exposure to odd sexual situations on television has tanked marriage (who gets married any more? And if it's you, God bless you.) Stands to reason that long-term exposure to violence would cause what- more violence.

And that's exactly what's happening. From the Oklahoma City bombing to the World Trade Center and back to Columbine, and now to Orlando - we see life duped by the idols on television.

Television entertainment - including the news, is dominated by violence. It doesn't matter if you're watching the latest sensationalized, sexed-up Law and Order SVU or the nightly news. All of it is designed to provoke a subtle reaction in you to keep you scared, to keep you fearful, and to keep you buying from the sponsors.

I can't stress enough that this isn't the fault of the news personality, or the actor. The News Personality is part of a machine. A senseless lemming that has, like the Enron exec, conditioned himself, out of his or her own need to survive, to believe that there's nothing wrong with what he or she is doing. That playing neighborhood-bloopers host - except with blood (or the suggestion of blood) exploding all over the bloopers - is somehow a sane way to treat anyone - even a television audience - is somehow a good thing, a public service - it's lunacy. And we are experiencing, first-hand, the fruits of that lunacy. Right now.

People preoccupied with knives and blood have always been more than welcome in America's psychiatric care facilities. Personally, I believe Jesus would have done them better. But fact is, we recognized the threat of that kind of way of thinking. Which - I know, you don't want to hear this, but it also exhibits itself in the form of promiscuity, and - get this - male effeminacy. The craziest psychotics - even in movies made by homosexual Hollywood - are always the guys who walk with that indescribable kind of extra shimmy. That eye, the homosexual lisp - 

And, granted, they're learning more and more to control themselves. To curb the outward signs of male effeminacy.

Television today, no longer allowed to represent this accurately on the screen. In fact, television does overtime to prolong this extremely un-funny gag that somehow, effeminate men are some oppressed class of people. Young people, brought up in the androgynous wake of the feminist rebellion of the 60s watched television where they couldn't watch actively involved passive fathers, and so the "wasteland" of television psychosis has emigrated into the livingroom, into the subconscious of America, so now we have a very real wandering wasteland of effeminate children and teenagers. It's mind over matter at it's very best. From the mopheads' long hair to the idea of a woman leading a man, we have, faithfully, adopted every ideal of our sick television writers' imaginations. From the screen, into reality. Reliably and without fail. Why? Because we become like what we idolize. 

And part of that idolatry is violence. What, in the world, would television, as we know it today, be, without violence?

Now, for most of us, our childhoods weren't riddled with violence. People didn't get shot every day. That's a fact. Maybe you grew up in a bad neighborhood. But I guarantee you, even if you grew up in Detroit, or Dorchester, or the California ghettos, whatever you experienced in real life does not hold a pistol to the bloodshed or implied bloodshed on television. And when I say "implied," I mean, everybody on television is constantly talking about murder, as they constantly talk about divorce. All of this "content," you must remember, is made by unhappy people who don't have families, don't have lives of their own. And wishes violence upon you merely that your life might be as miserable as theirs so you may commiserate with them. It's sick. Utterly sick.

So, again, I know this sounds outrageous to you (scandalous!). But here's what I would propose. First off, get rid of violent television. Don't consume it; and pass laws against it. I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but to kind of delve into it a little - if you're about to kill me over this -

Think about why you like to watch violence. Here's my theory- and by theory I mean, of course what I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, the way evolutionists think evolution is real. Men watch violence because the mere image of it tricks our subconscious brains into believing there is a perceived threat. Particularly if everybody else is watching it. And somehow, we think that by watching it, we'll somehow be better prepared when the Spartans come to destroy our wife and children.

I know, you'd never say that. But if John Eldredge's Wild At Heart means anything to you, you know the stories that we tell aren't merely stories. They're real. And that's why the Bible is so important to those of us who know it's the Word of God.

Otherwise, honestly, why would we bother watching it? Yes, it looks on the surface as if we're just casually sitting down to watch hundreds of men's heads getting lobbed off, hearts speared while riding horses - with the ease that we might play a game of bloody cricket.

But what feels so good about watching a doll come to life and kill innocent children, or a dude with a hockey mask off a bunch of camp counselor hunks and hotties? Or an attractive babysitter? How about that dude who dresses up as a rabbit?

You think it makes you more of a man to expose yourself to this, somehow. But that's the trickery of the imagery, of the technological idolatry, of the killer, of the war that's been conjured up on your screen, again by technological wizardry, which at best never actually happened or at worst is thousands of miles away. Perhaps in your country, yes, but it poses no immediate threat to you, and watching it is only going to divert your attention from your wife, and your kids. And it will, if you're not careful, turn you into those effeminate men with the wandering eye, like John Ritter or Marty McFly before his journey. In other words, overexposure to not just sex on television but violence can put you at risk of - yes, becoming homosexual. I don't like to call it "gay" because - I know, again it's crazy, but I still think we can bring back the joy and awesomeness of that word's true pre-90's meaning. Who doesn't want to be gay, right? (ha - okay, too far for you millennial hotpants-idiots) If it weren't so sad.

You know that you forget about 90% of what you see on television anyway, right? So it's not like you're learning from what you watch. Yes, visual imagery is the best way to get people to remember something. But there's just a never-ending flood of it - on the computer, on television - and the quantity destroys your appreciation for any kind of quality. So soon, your eyes just start to drink it in, until you have no idea- really, consciously, or unconsciously - what's going into your head and what's coming out. Somebody gets murdered. There's an axe on the floor. A news anchor talking about a terrorist shooting. What's real? What isn't?

Let me tell you something, and there is nothing more true on the internet than this, perhaps. None of it is real. Even this text you're reading right now - one can make an argument that this is - well, reading this has put you into a kind of trance, as all effective writing does. Which makes me as guilty as television. Except for this one thing:

When you're reading something - and granted, there are awfully tricky, smutty writers with awful intentions -

But when you're reading you actively have to concentrate on whatever it is you're reading, at least to a much greater degree than you do when watching television.

Why is this important? And here's where we start to get to the meat of the matter.

You're infinitely less likely to be deceived by something that you read than something you watch on television.

Again, writing is less deceptive than television. And by television, I also mean still images, photos with captions, that sort of thing.

Why? When you read something you have to question everything. I can't short-circuit the parts of your brain with my writing the way this photo does.

Sure. It's just a picture, right? Except even in looking at this image, I've already warped my own mind, in ways that I won't be able to forget. Think about it. You may forget everything I've written here, but the image of one man sticking a revolver to another man's forehead, for whatever reason, sticks.

God designed us that way. Why? Well, to keep us from getting killed in real life. We want to remember the guy pointing the gun so that we stay away from him in real life.

Except - again, he doesn't exist. Our subconscious has been tricked.

Oh, wait a minute- we can't see his face, can we?

And so, with all these television shows, vying to capture our attention, each of them trying to make us pay attention by manipulating our most basic survival instincts as natural beings, through artificial, electronic idolatrous means - 

Each of them has to outdo the last. Maybe, instead of the image you just saw, the geniuses at the competing network say, "I know how we can get an even higher rating! Instead of showing a guy pointing a gun at someone else, why don't we point a gun directly at our audience - like this!"

But eventually, this kind of gimmick, or gag (which is, I think we can define safely, as a television ploy to grab your attention for commercial purposes at the expense of your natural and normal cognitive functioning) gets old. So next time, the television execs say, "I know. Instead of a man, let's make the character the person that men are biologically wired to protect! Let's see how they respond to that."

I can't undo the damage of posting that photo above. And I am doing it to prove a point here. In an age of better people I would feel guilty about posting this kind of thing, but you've already been desensitized, likely if your'e reading this. Anyway, the network says, ah, this creative writer deserves a raise for the ploy of a woman with a gun.

And then, the very next hour, in the unbiased "news" broadcast, the news anchor is condemning violence against women.

Doesn't that just make your head spin a little bit?

On a conscious level, on a verbal level, the networks and their "standards and practices" are all about gabbing, and gabbing ad nauseum about protecting the weak and vulnerable in society.

But then you have all these headless shooters - people who don't exist in real life. But somehow - not somehow, I've explained it to you how they're doing it - are you getting all this? -- They're planting images in our head, in the nightly news, and in their sick, twisted homoerotic violence - And isn't it funny that they never show the news violence, they just talk about it -- but then they go and dramatize blood and guts so well the very next hour that they might as well be showing the actual news actuality of the person getting shot in the head?

"Actuality" again being another news industry self-deception misnomer. So many things wrong with the phenomenon of news.

To sum so far - television simultaneously talks down all kinds of things about gun control, and then plants images in our heads to suspect that everyone around us - people that, by all natural signs we have every reason to trust - because most people want for our good and their own. But the television imagery plants images in our minds that suggests in a most potent way that we cannot trust anybody. That everybody is our enemy. By parading hundreds of faceless killers in a make-believe world - well, it was once a make-believe world, but due to our own stupidity, we are letting television make it our new American reality, and we're exporting this hell to the rest of the world daily, who, by the way, are watching this hypnotic crack we produce intently -

We are choosing, by watching that violent program, to presuppose the worst in the people around us, to hate humanity, by presupposing that everybody around us could be that violent killer, that homosexual, that marriage-hater, that Christian hater. And worst of all, we are being taught to hate ourselves, amid all this hypertension, this neuroticism.

What's the solution? Far be it from me to endorse the liberal New York Times or the likes of most newspapers out there. I read OneNewsNow, but even they get the craziest suggestions from the dreaded Associated Press release company.

This isn't an original idea, by the way. I mean, I came up with a good deal of this on my own, but I'm sure it's all been said before. Neil Postman, in particular, has illuminated many of the underlying truths contained herein, in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death, the product of a better era.

I suppose that, largely per his suggestion, relying upon text news, though it wouldn't solve all our problems of mass media deception - because society's misanthropes have a funny way of ending up in journalism - the God-haters, the America haters, the homosexuals. Not busy enough leading a happy life on their own that they - we, if I'm honest - spend too much time writing about it. And some of us, trying to get better with that. And trying to liquidate our creative talents for the betterment of others, per the Great Commission.

I would say that the most obvious solution is - nix all gratuitous entertainment violence, including the news. No photos of violence. No photos of rioting.

But then, you say, Peter, we wouldn't know what's going on.

Well, here's the deal. We can still talk about it. It can still be reported in writing. And again - I would suggest avoiding this whole phenomenon of a broadcast anchorman. We all know he's reading off a teleprompter and is reading with all the necessity of a really poorly-trained actor. Those who can't make it in acting seem to go into journalism. But they mean to weave clever fantasies. They just don't have the talent for it. So they apply their wild imaginations to the news.

Nix the news, as we know it. I mean broadcast news, recited news. A little extreme-sounding, I know. But America is literate today- in the dumbest sense of the word.

And if someone isn't literate, he has no business watching people having their heads lobbed off at the theater or on television. Crying out loud, he's likely to go out and poison his wife and become one of those stars of Forensic Files. Life imitating technology imitating life.

Photojournalism has a way of getting Americans riled up. I mean, heck, that's how it got started with all the business with the Cubans. Prime Americans with a picture of some kind of human disaster and you can give them any old story to explain it, and generally, in our state of artificially-provoked pictorial subconscious consternation, we'll believe anything. We'll believe that if we're not careful, our neighbors will kill us. That the police will kill us.

Let's put the pressure on television legally to - end this 60-year-experiment of awfulness. But then there's the Internet and movies to contend with. I know, all highly unrealistic, you may say. But we've got to start somewhere.

As for the news, again - is looking at pictures and hearing immediate veiled threats of violence from the untalented actor you call the "reporter" or "anchor" going to help you respond any better to what's happening? Well, if you call fanning the flames of police attacks across this country a productive and healthy response, sure.

Everybody's on edge. And I want the police reading this to understand that when it comes down to those seconds, when that jumpy would-be criminal is about to shoot you -

You know, those moments when it's impossible to consciously register anything, because you have two jumpy guys with their lives on the line against each other -

You wanna know what matters? Black lives, all lives, sure -

But nobody can think about that. Why? Because in those few seconds of brandished guns, all those images in the mind's eye of the soon-to-be criminal - all the jumpiness of a life consuming pictures of fantastical evil, racist cops dreamed up by Hollywood scriptwriters trying to make a quick buck and outdo the competition -

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The frames have already flipped through the soon-to-be-cop-killers mind's eye. The policeman is already dead. A man has already become a criminal, bringing disgrace upon his city, his family, his race.

God bless you.