There has been a lot of talk talk talk lately about how to "solve" the "violence problem" in America. Many have suggested that the problem is caused by Bad Guns and that it can be solved by banning them. I think they're focusing on the symptom and ignoring the cause of the disease, which is Bad Writing.
Joseph Campbell and others have written persuasively about the power of myth. And Campbell, at least, was hip enough to define "myth" as That Which We See Around Us Most Often And Thus Are Most Influenced By. For most of the people in America, that means that *their* myths consist of what they see and hear on the Nightly News, read in newspapers, or see on TV and in the movies they watch. And what is the common denominator of *all* of these sources of modern myth? It's the WRITERS, dummy. If you want to find the source of what is wrong with America, look at the PLOTLINES of the myths they read and watch. The problems that they see on the News or on TV and in movies are almost always "solved" by either killing someone or putting them in jail. So, having grown up on a steady diet of seeing these two options presented as pretty much the *only* options, what do they do in their personal lives? Well, duh. The problem is in the WRITERS! The people who write the scripts for the newscasters, and the newspaper articles, and the TV shows and the movies are just Bad Writers. They have no fuckin' IMAGINATION. The only solutions they *can* imagine to problems are to kill someone or put them in jail. It's been a problem in myth since there were myths. Look at the Bible -- pretty much cover-to-cover violence and problems "solved" by resorting to violence. Look at the Bhagavad-Gita, in which the Big Blue God spends 18 chapters or so trying to convince his limo driver that the way to solve not only society's problems but his own spiritual problems is to go out and kill as many people as possible. Lack of IMAGINATION, I tell you. Forget all this "ban guns" stuff. As I said earlier, if you banned guns, they'd just use something else, because pretty much all of the myths they've ever heard in their entire lives have presented them with a "solution" to their problems that involves either killing someone or putting them in jail. BAN BAD WRITERS! Get rid of all the reporters whose imagination is so impoverished that all they can think of to write about is stories about humans killing other humans or putting other humans in jail. Get rid of the TV writers and the screenwriters who are so unintelligent and so lacking in imagination that they churn out endless iterations of the same themes. Line the motherfuckers all up against a wall and shoot them, or put them in jail. ( Just kidding about that last sentence -- I think a more suitable punishment for these guys would be to put them all in the same room and let them bore each other to death. :-) Then start training a new generation of writers who have some IMAGINATION, ferchrissakes, and can come up with some myths that are worth reading and worth watching. Recruit them from kids who grew up on the myths created by people like Gandhi or Buddha or Martin Luther King, and who can thus think of more than two solutions to the problems of the world. Then let these new writers start writing the News, and the TV shows, and the movies, and see what happens.
