Violence

I suspect that some sort of physical violence is part of seventy-five percent of all television and movies and novels, and I think that violence is ridiculous. Just think about it: Grownups conversing, having different points of view, then smack! He punches the guy, she slaps the man’s face, he shoots a room full of people. War movies. Fargo. Rape and justice movies. Gone with the Wind, Blade Runner, Pan’s Labyrinth. Rowdy bar scenes. Horror-torture shows. Even the intellectuals are on board. Norman Mailer promotes Gary Gilmore, killer. Christopher Hitchens ups the Iraq War. Sartre’s “curiously ambivalent” views on violence. Ayn Rand’s heroine, Dominique Francon, is raped in a philosophically inevitable way. Religious lore is saturated with murder and prostration. We cheer boxing, wrestling, hockey. We don’t blink at Guantánamo tortures and humiliations. We nod aesthetically at Mel Gibson’s bloody Jesus and decapitated Mayans.
 

Do we really think this is common, implicit, the human way? What made average and non-average violence possible, and our normalization of it?

My life did. My parents were without violence. My father came home from World War II a passive-aggressive lamb. Our home life was quiet, dissociative, suppressed, fake. Put a little boy in a home where feelings are not had except for the atmosphere of assumed happy. He is bullied and troubled at school, but comes home and all is quiet, mundane. His tension builds but it is internalized. He is anxious and does not feel good, and is all alone. He says nothing real but the real happens: holes bitten in shirts, fingers gnawed, hair pulled out, tics erupted, ants burned on a light bulb. A quiet mind. Life goes by and time produces fake surfaces, fake presents. There’s the young man who talks, grows a persona, writes some poems, imagines – or would imagine – that he is growing up.

There’s a whole philosophy of death that has been growing inside us. Because somehow we sense our potential but also sense it is too late. Beneath today’s mild or pretty colors there is brown and black. Beneath the woman’s mobility and earning power is the girl’s imprisonment in silence and unfairness. Beneath the adult’s ability to “choose” was the child’s inability to have his way and maybe eventually to feel what that means. Within them are muscular and chemical and emotional constrictions that eventually have to berserk, which only means to expand like a spring to their long-suppressed normal, except that there is no normal knowable anymore, as it existed only in the past.

We cannot reach our normal, our self. There is no greater frustration. We slam our fist on the table, or we think of destroying a race. It is violence of our molecules, of our soul.