CLICK-CLICK-CLICK = TICK-TICK-TICK?

I'm surfing through the paper this morning, and I read about the three teens who beat two homeless men, and murdered a third, near the place where I used to live. Even more outrageous than the crime itself, however, was the incoherent blather offered by Ron Slaby, a developmental psychologist at the Center for Media and Child Heath at Children's Hospital Boston. According to Slaby, the much-maligned media is once again at least partially responsible for this random street violence. He specifically cites video games, which could have "trained" these young people to kill without emotion. Another contestant on Slaby's blame game is television and music, which frequently portray the homeless as less than human, and inferior to those of us who don't actually live on the streets.

What a load of crap! Yes, it's true that video games today are more violent, raunchy, and realistic than when I was a thumb-mashing lad. But compare the number of buyers for games like "Grand Theft Auto" to the number of people who engaged on this recent homeless-rousting spree: Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, versus three. Now, I know what you're going to say: Phil X, you're unfairly leaving out all the previous incidents involving punks beating up the homeless. Hey, show me similar correlations between assaults and the media during the eighties, when television was still comparatively tame and "Pac Man" was advanced technology, and I might say you have a point. It just seems like convenient scapegoating to put the blame on video games, when thousands of people have contact with them, yet sh*t like this only represents the work of a few loose nuts.

Let me share something from the online edition of the Sun Sentinel, a South Florida-based newspaper:

"The National Coalition for the Homeless, which tracks random violence against the homeless using news and police reports, notes that in 2004, 25 homeless people were killed and 80 non-lethal attacks reported. That's a jump of 67 percent since 2002. Most of those accused were in their teens or early 20s."

I think it's safe to assume (and easy to validate) that video games, even extreme ones like "Grand Theft Auto," aren't being bought strictly by teenagers or folks in their early 20's. And yet, only youths in that age range appear to be killing the homeless without emotion. Perhaps being young and impressionable makes it easier for the pixel people to mold your brain with their digitized hands. But wait, a quick AOL search shows that 5.1 million copies of "Grand Theft Auto" were sold domestically in 2004, along with 4.2 million copies of a game called "Halo 2"--where you play from the point-of-view of a soldier who is trained, presumably, to kill without emotion--and 1.1 million copies of the similar "Halo: Combat Evolved." Assuming some overlap between the top two sellers listed above, and that half the buyers belong to the younger demographic, that means at least 2.1 million persons should be roaming the streets at night, chanting "No roof, no mercy," and going Sammy Sosa on the downtrodden. Clearly, however, things are not as bad as that.

But if it isn't video games stirring our youth into raging jackasshood, what is? "On Point with Tom Ashbrook," an NPR program broadcast this past Wednesday evening, might have offered an interesting clue. Ashbrook's guest, author and Harvard professor of political economy Benjamin Friedman, was plugging his new book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, in which he argued that economic growth is vital to sustaining morality itself, to "...nurturing openness, tolerance, fairness and democracy." According to Friedman, current American growth tilts so much to the rich that it doesn't count. Consequently, as more middle-class and lower-class families find themselves struggling to make ends meet, much less acheive the "American dream," they become increasingly xenophobic, and intolerant of those who seem different.

Would it really be that much of a stretch, going from fear of foreigners to hostility towards the homeless? Both parties represent sort of the same thing: an entity that stands out from the majority, and potentially "steals" the wealth rightfully belonging to the rest of us. Hardcore ignoramuses perceive foreigners as coming to this country and taking jobs away from "real" Americans, and the homeless as lazy bums leeching off the state. Personally, I'm hoping that the three thugs who went caveman the other night viewed their prey in such a way--as eyesores befouling their precious landscape. Heaven forbid Ron Slaby is right, that they did it just for kicks. Then where would the delicious irony come from, after they end up being sentenced to long prison terms, and become as much of a burden to the taxpayer as the men they assaulted/killed? I guess we'd just have to be content with prison gangs getting their kicks anally-raping them, and bludgeoning them with soap bars wrapped in towels. After all, they don't get video games.