TV violence becomes the norm in '92
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
It has been a long time since I awakened to the sounds of cartoons in my house. Years ago there was always a child up before me, roosting in front of the TV when I came downstairs, watching the "Smurfs" or "Gummy Bears" or some other early morning show.
These days my children sleep as late as they can and the TV remains silent. I haven't seen a cartoon in years.
Except for last Saturday. Sometime mid-morning I wandered into the family room and there was my 15-year-old watching an old episode of "Davey and Goliath."
"Davey and Goliath" is a television relic. It made its debut in 1962 and is technologically obsolete. The characters are barely three-dimensional. Their mouths aren't synchronized with their words. Their bodies move with the jerky motions of rusted tin men.
The show is morally obsolete, too. "Davey and Goliath" always has a message and messages aren't in these days. Nobody wants to be talked at, not even kids, which is a shame because the world could use a few modest principles.
In any case, in the episode I watched, Davey finds a lost girl and, being the Good Samaritan he is, sets her in his wagon (Do children have wagons anymore?) and accompanied by his talking dog, Goliath, carts her around the neighborhood asking the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker if anyone knows her.
In the meantime, on the other side of town, a celebration is going on. It's "Good Neighbor Day" and everyone is partying and all the kids are receiving free "I'm a good neighbor" balloons.
Except poor Davey. He's missing the whole thing. By the time he joins the festivities, the party's over and all the balloons are gone.
The moral of the story is, of course, that there's a difference between saying you're a good neighbor and actually being one.
"Moral, moral. Yes, indeed, this story has a moral, moral."
Years ago most stories had morals. All of Aesop's fables did and most television shows incorporated a moral in their plot and the most popular children's movie of all actually verbalized its moral.
"And what did you learn, Dorothy?"
"I learned that if I ever go searching for my heart's desire again I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there then I never really lost it to begin with."
If all this moralizing seems a bit sacharin now, it is perhaps because we have been denied sweetness for so long, that even a touch feels cloying. For television today gives us the bitter. These talk shows aired last Tuesday: Donahue: "My husband slept with our baby sitter"; People are Talking: "Husbands who are obsessed with pornography"; Maury Povich, "Couple hasn't had sex in 15 years"; Oprah Winfrey: "Pregnant women whose husbands cheat".
Every day "true" but sensationalized news stories abound. Sit-coms are full of sex, movies full of violence. The fallout from this is what we've become: A nation addicted to drugs, plagued by violence and obsessed with sex.
Garbage in, garbage out is more than a saying. It's a fact evidenced by our lives.
Garbage in, garbage out is a fact evidenced by our lives.
This was theory, of course, until last week when entertainment executives and scholars met at Harvard University and announced as fact what most everyone else has known for years. "Television violence normalizes violence," declared Leonard D. Eron, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The good professor went on to say that television actually "molds children."
Of course it does. How could it not? How could any human being sit for hours every day in front of a TV, listening and seeing, but not absorbing its words, its images and its messages?
Inner-city kids are more prone to violence because they watch more TV than kids in the suburbs. And why do they watch more TV? Because their streets are unsafe. And what do they see on TV? More violence.
This is a circle. This circle is America. This is who we are in 1992.
Television executives say that they don't create the violence, the sex and all the seamy, selfish lives. These things exist.
Perhaps they do. But television exploits and exaggerates them, and presents as the norm what was once the aberration, until the aberration becomes the norm.
Now the norm is violence and the aberration is "Davey and Goliath," a continuing tale about a boy and his dog, learning to live a moral life in a flawed but struggling to be moral world.
