BILL MOYERS:
Welcome, but be forewarned: a few scenes in
this hour are disturbing, because we are dealing
with violence and don't want to hide what
is true about it.
As you know, one year ago this weekend, as
you know, 20 school children and six educators
were massacred at the Sandy Hook Elementary
School.
The killer also murdered his mother, and then
killed himself.
28 deaths in all, from guns.
And across America, perhaps as many as 30,000
more have been killed since that fatal day.
This is why I have asked Richard Slotkin to
join me.
He has spent his adult life delving into how
violence took deep root in our culture, from
colonial days to now.
In his magisterial trilogy, "Regeneration
Through Violence," "The Fatal Environment"
and "Gunfighter Nation," Richard Slotkin tells
how America came to embrace a mythology of
gun-slinging settlers taming the wilderness
to justify and romanticize a tragic record
of subjugation and bloodshed.
His latest book, "The Long Road to Antietam,"
tells the tale of the bloodiest day in American
history.
In these and other works, this preeminent
cultural historian tracks the evolution of
the gun culture that continues to dominate,
wound and kill.
Richard Slotkin has retired now from a distinguished
teaching career of over four decades at Wesleyan
University in Middletown, Connecticut, just
45 minutes from Newtown.
Welcome.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Thank you.
BILL MOYERS:
What were you thinking as the first anniversary
of the massacre approached?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, I was thinking of the sadness of that
day and just the idea of all those, as one
woman at the town said, "those poor little
babies" being slaughtered.
And I was also remembering with some anger
the way in which one of the first knee-jerk
responses to that event was a kind of rabid
defense of, not only defense of gun owning,
but a kind of plea for extending the privilege
of gun ownership and the number of occasions,
type of occasions on which guns could be used.
And not only that the different places that
one can carry guns and also the number of
situations in which it's permissible to pull
out your gun and shoot somebody.
I'm thinking about Stand Your Ground laws,
so-called.
BILL MOYERS:
When one of these massacres occurs, do you
automatically or just habitually think about
this long train of violence that you've been
researching and writing about for so long
now?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, thinking about this Adam Lanza case,
the killer in Newtown, at first it just seemed
to me a crazy kid doing something almost inexplicably
crazy with a gun.
As the report has come out--
BILL MOYERS:
The state report recently--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
--yes--
BILL MOYERS:
--came out a couple of weeks ago.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yeah, the state report has gone into the way
in which he used videogames and obsessively
played violent videogames.
And apparently did research on massacres.
And there's a way in which in the individual
case you see something that also works on
the cultural level.
And that is that people will model their behavior
on examples that they consider to be heroic.
And that's how mythology works in a culture.
There are cultural myths that define what
for us is a positive response to a crisis.
And it's embodied in media.
And we learn it through the media and we model
our behavior on that of heroes.
And apparently Lanza in the way he conducted
the massacre was making the kind of moves
that are the standard moves of a person playing
a violent videogame.
You'd never enter a new room unless you've
put a fresh clip in your gun.
So he would shoot off half a clip and then
change the clip anyway-- because that's what
you do when you're playing a videogame.
And that image of playing out a script that's
been written for you, that has some value
for you as a way of gaining control or being
a hero is what he's living out.
And what Lanza did was really to indoctrinate
himself and train himself in a way analogous
to the way we now use videogames to train
the military.
BILL MOYERS:
Talk about that a moment, train himself?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, that is he's obsessed with performing
some validating act of violence and he does
these-- he treats these videogames as training
films.
I could do it this way.
I could do it that way.
And as I follow out the script of the videogame,
the videogame validates my actions in various
ways.
You triumph within a narrative, or you simply
score points and build up a score.
BILL MOYERS:
There is a video game, believe it or not,
it's violent I'll warn you, it's violent -- it
allows you, the viewer, the follow the killer
of Newtown--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, I--
BILL MOYERS:
--to follow Lanza, and actually shoot the
kids in front of you.
BILL MOYERS:
You are a cultural historian, not a behavioral
psychologist, not a weapons expert.
What do you suppose the producer of that video
had in mind?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Just simply exploiting the appeal of violence
in a particular kind of situation.
And also in this case, there's an appeal of
transgression, of--
BILL MOYERS:
Transgression?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, of violating everybody else's norms and
doing something that really grosses everybody
out.
You think even, to take a more normative example:
the videogame Grand Theft Auto, in which you
behave like a criminal, you'd think in a kind
of standard videogame you'd be the hero against
the bad guys.
But the appeal of that is that you get to
go to the dark side as, to use the language
of Star Wars.
And the dark side of the force always has
its appeal.
The graphics put you in a very realistic situation
so that you're the killer.
It's an imaginative leap that in my generation,
it took a little more difficulty to make that
connection, but we made it nonetheless.
I grew up with western movies.
BILL MOYERS:
So did I.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
And I'll say John Wayne-- he wasn't necessarily
my hero, but he's the type of a kind of hero
that I admired.
And we played guns in the street.
You'd start off-- guns were-- you were cowboys.
You'd segue without a break into marines and
you'd segue into cops and robbers.
But the gun was the thing you were playing
with.
BILL MOYERS:
And yet so many who would do that never went
out like Adam Lanza--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
No--
BILL MOYERS:
--and started killing.
That's why people are reluctant to say this
causes that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes just to extend my example a little bit,
one of the syndromes that people working with
Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD was something
called John Wayne Syndrome where the young
men had internalized the John Wayne model
of heroism and one of their problems was they
felt they had failed somehow to live up to
that model.
And that's the psychology we're talking about
here.
You internalize a model of heroic behavior
from the media that purvey the myths that
shape your society.
And there's a whole spectrum of responses
you might have in relation to that internalized
model.
You might not do anything yourself.
You might simply consent that the government
or somebody act on your behalf, you don't
make the war yourself, but you consent that
somebody make the war for you, kill the bad
guy for you.
BILL MOYERS:
The report also says he used a spreadsheet
to chronicle previous mass shootings and collected
articles all the way back to 1891 about school
shootings.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes.
Yeah, his imagination is horribly fascinating
in a way because he's reaching for a historic--
he's not just reaching for a model.
He's reaching for a historically validated
model that will somehow invest what he's doing
with meaning.
What the meaning is, is gone with him, but
the gestures seem to me to point to that.
BILL MOYERS:
So put it historically what this tells us
about the lone killer.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
We produce the lone killer.
That is to say the lone killer is trying to
validate himself or herself in terms of the,
I would call the historical mythology, of
our society, wants to place himself in relation
to meaningful events in the past that lead
up to the present.
BILL MOYERS:
You say “or her”, but the fact of the
matter is all of these killers lately have
been males.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, yeah, pretty much always are.
BILL MOYERS:
And most of them white?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yeah.
Yeah, I think, again this is because each
case is different, but the tendency that you've
pointed out is true and I've always felt that
it has something to do, in many cases, with
a sense of lost privilege, that men and white
men in the society feel their position to
be imperiled and their status called into
question.
And one way to deal with an attack on your
status in our society is to strike out violently.
BILL MOYERS:
I guess we'll never understand this.
That official report laid out Lanza's troubling
behavior.
He was diagnosed at six with sensory integration
disorder.
He couldn't stand to be touched.
He had Asperger's syndrome.
He closeted himself in his bedroom with his
windows sealed by black plastic bags.
He didn't want to communicate with his mother,
except mostly through emails.
What do we take away from this-- knowing we'll
never know?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
I think the thing that I'm tempted to do with
that is to shift away from the unknowable
Adam Lanza to the people around Adam Lanza
and his mother-- that here you have an obviously
disturbed young man, everybody sees it, his
mother sees it.
And one way of dealing with it is to buy him
guns as presents; buy him fairly exotic, well-chosen
models, train him in the use of apparently
this elaborate arsenal which his mother had.
And she said she loved her guns and never
made the connection to the fact that these
guns are available to an extremely troubled
young man.
And the neighbors never questioned that her
love of guns might be putting weapons in the
hands of somebody that they found disturbing
to deal with.
And to me that speaks of our mystique of weapons.
Perhaps his mother thought the gun was curative
in some way.
We have the gun as a symbol of productive
violence in our history has magical properties
for a lot of people.
And I have this horrible feeling something
like that prevented anyone from seeing just
how desperately dangerous was the situation
which these people were living.
BILL MOYERS:
It's almost incomprehensible that when the
police went into the Lanza home after the
massacre, they found this gift she had left
him, a check that was dated the 25th of December,
Christmas.
And it was to be used by him to buy a CZ 83
pistol.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
She must've thought that the gun would do
him good.
BILL MOYERS:
Richard, you live close to Newtown and you
followed this of course, not only because
as a citizen but because of your work in history.
What did you see about the reaction of the
community in the days and weeks following
that that affected you?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
The thing that really got to me most was the
strength of the pro-gun reaction that came
out almost immediately, that, anticipating
that of course there'd be some call for some
forms of gun regulation or gun control that
there was kind of a preemptive attack on that
by a range of organizations within the state,
no, it's gun control won't do any good.
And within a couple of weeks I was on a panel
discussion in which there were four people
who had been typecast as anti-gun which I'm
not really-- and the pro-gun people, as if
it was a 50/50 balance.
And of course the pro-gun people kind of took
over the whole thing because it was-- a bad
moderator.
So you got the impression that the state was
sharply divided.
When the governor came out with a program
of increased regulations, the majority was
so overwhelmingly for it that the bill passed.
BILL MOYERS:
I remember that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
And without any back and forth really about
it.
So that it turned out that they weren't even
a large minority, but they were a minority,
minority within the state.
And yet rhetorically their presence was very
powerful.
And the arguments that they were making were
the kind of arguments that resonate with our
love of liberty and so on.
They really to just take this terrible incident
and a situation which might lend itself to
some sane regulation and just blow it up into
a life or death of the republic kind of issue
which makes it almost impossible to deal with.
BILL MOYERS:
You said you were not anti-gun.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
No, I'm not.
There are situations in which it is perfectly
reasonable for someone to want to own and
use a gun.
Hunting is a legitimate and respected and
necessary aspect of the ecology.
There are many people in many places, many
different kinds of places, rural, far from
police, where it makes perfect sense to want
to own a weapon for self-defense.
So can't say I'm against guns.
But then when you go beyond the rational,
it gets a little crazy.
Why wouldn't you want if you're a legitimate
gun owner, why wouldn't you want gun ownership
to be regulated in such a way that to the
extent feasible criminals, insane persons
could not readily gain access?
Why wouldn't you want a prohibition on illegal
gun trafficking if your guns are legal and
it's a legal sale?
Why wouldn't you want rules mandating some
program of safe storage of weapons so that
people can't be as careless as Mrs. Lanza
seemingly was in leaving guns around where
crazy people and criminals can get their hands
on it?
That's where the rule of reason has to enter
in, and that's where it doesn't enter in.
BILL MOYERS:
There was a surge of sanity on the part of
politicians again after Newtown.
Truth be told, and as we all know, very little
has changed.
How do you explain that?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, I think the extreme gun rights position,
so called, some once called it “gun-damentalism”
connects on a kind of spectrum to more normative
attitudes.
You have, as I said, reasonable gun owners.
Then you have the American consumer.
The American consumer looks at the gun as
it's a piece of property.
The American consumer wants to use his property
without restraint, wants to throw his plastic
water bottle wherever he pleases, wants to
drive a gas-guzzler, wants to play his boom
box loud.
Which is a crude way to put it, and yet I
think there's a lot to that.
Nobody wants to be bothered registering their
weapons.
Take it a level down from that or level further
out from that, there's an ideological level
which really kicks in around the time of the
Reagan presidency in which gun rights is a
very powerful symbol for the deregulation
of everything.
If you can deregulate that, you can deregulate
anything.
And then the last level is what I'd call the
paranoid level, the people who think that
they have a Second Amendment right to resist
Obamacare-- that the constitution protects
their right to resist the government, that
that's what the Second Amendment is about.
And that's dangerous stupidity and nonsense.
But it uses the language of liberty and rights
that we're used to thinking of in other contexts.
And if you think of all of the rights in the
Bill of Rights, haven't they been extended
and expanded over the years?
Why not Second Amendment rights as well?
And that's the level at which it gets pernicious.
But their appeal, their ability to control
the debate, I think, comes because their position
coincides with the interest of the Reaganite
ideologue who doesn't want to regulate anything
and the consumer who simply doesn't want to
be bothered.
BILL MOYERS:
And don't both of those strands, both of those
tendencies have their roots deep in our culture,
going all the way back to the beginning?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, yes, I mean, the thing that's different,
that's exceptional about American gun culture,
so called, is the license that we grant for
the private use of deadly force.
Other countries have similar levels of guns
in the home.
BILL MOYERS:
Now, Switzerland is a militia state--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Switzerland.
BILL MOYERS:
--and the guns are kept at home.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
But the guns kept at home in those countries
are not used to murder individuals.
They're not used to settle property disputes,
are not used to shoot somebody who comes to
your door trick-or-treating and you're not
sure who they are.
And what we have in this country is we have
a history in which certain kinds of violence
are associated for us with the growth of the
republic, with the definition of what it is
to be an American.
And because we are also devoted to the notion
of democratic individualism, we take that
glorification of social violence, historical
violence, political violence, and we grant
the individual a kind of parallel right to
exercise it, not only to protect life and
property but to protect one's honor and to
protect one's social or racial status.
In the past that has been a legitimate grounds.
BILL MOYERS:
What do you mean?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, I'm thinking of the Jim Crow era in
the south where if a black man is walking
on the sidewalk and towards a white man and
the black man refuses to give the sidewalk
he can be-- any sort of violence can be safely
visited upon him because no jury will convict.
Cases where-- another book that I wrote about
in which a successful black farmer refused
to sell his crop, this was in South Carolina,
for the stated price.
And events escalated from a personal attack
to ultimately lynching.
So we granted to private citizens the right
to police the racial boundary and the social
boundary.
BILL MOYERS:
You write in one of your books, "In American
mythogenesis," the origin of our national
mythology, "the founding fathers were not
those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed
a nation at Philadelphia.
Rather they were those who … tore violently
a nation from implacable and opulent wilderness."
Talk about that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, first of all I have to say that every
nation, every nation state requires a historical
mythology, because a nation state is a kind
of political artifice.
It pulls diverse peoples together.
And so you need an account of history that
explains that you're actually all the same
kind of person or that your different natures
have been blended through experience.
So what--
BILL MOYERS:
We the people?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
We the people.
And the United States is a settler state.
And this begins with colonial outposts in
the wilderness.
And our origin has a story then, has to be
how did we go from being these small outposts
to being the mightiest nation on planet earth?
Well, we did it by pushing the boundaries
of the settlement out into Indian country.
We did it by ultimately fighting wars against
Native Americans, driving them out, displacing
them, exterminating them in some cases.
And in the process of pushing our boundaries
out, we acquired certain heroic virtues--
an ability to fight cleverly both as individuals
and cooperatively, and a connection with nature
which is particularly critical.
As a country really develops you get a kind
of American exceptionalist notion of progress
which is that American progress is achieved
not by man exploiting man, but it's achieved
by conquering nature, by taking resources
from nature, farmland originally, timber resources,
ultimately gold, minerals, oil and so on.
In the American model, in order for it to
work, you have to say that Native Americans,
Indians, are not quite human.
And therefore they, like trees in the forest,
are legitimate objects of creative destruction.
And similarly blacks, African Americans, are
legitimate objects of exploitation because
they are considered to be not fully human.
So what you get in this, the evolution of
the American national myth, really up through
the Civil War is the creation of America as
a white man's republic in which, different
from Europe, if you're white, you're all right.
You don't have to be an aristocrat born to
have a place in the society.
You don't absolutely even have to be Anglo-Saxon,
although it helps.
But so among whites you can have democracy.
But the white democracy depends on the murder,
the extermination, the driving out of Native
Americans and the enslavement of blacks.
Both of those boundaries, the western frontier,
the Indian frontier, and the slave frontier,
are boundaries created and enforced by violence,
either literal or latent, potential violence.
BILL MOYERS:
So that's why you wrote something came from
this mythology, something about "the land
and its people, its dark people especially,
economically exploited and wasted, the warfare
between man and nature, between race and race,
exalted as a kind of heroic ideal."
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes.
That is the frontier story.
That's the western movie in a way.
That's “The Searchers.”
BILL MOYERS:
The movie, “The Searchers,” yeah.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
The movie, “The Searchers.”
Yeah.
That's James Fenimore Cooper.
That's Buffalo Bill.
In a curious way you can even take it to outer
space, but--
BILL MOYERS:
How so?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, space, the final frontier.
"Star Trek" was originally going to be called
“Wagon Train to the Stars.”
BILL MOYERS:
You mentioned Buffalo Bill.
Didn't Buffalo Bill say "the rifle as an aid
to civilization?"
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, but that's exactly the American myth.
Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett's rifle, killing
the bears, killing the game, killing the Indians
is what makes the wilderness safe for democracy,
if I can paraphrase Woodrow Wilson.
BILL MOYERS:
And Samuel Colt, who gave us his famous or
infamous pistol, there are many versions of
a quote either by or about him, something
like, “God created men equal, Colonel Colt
made them equal."
There's even one that goes, "Abe Lincoln may
have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them
equal."
On and on these variations go.
What do you make of that idea?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, that's the Colt, “The Equalizer,”
was the nickname for the Colt revolving pistol.
BILL MOYERS:
I didn’t realize that.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yeah, and it's a curious-- it represents a
kind of shift if I may, that the mythologized
weapon, the rifle, is a hunter's weapon.
And it's also a soldier's weapon, a plainsman's
weapon, but also a soldier's weapon.
The Colt pistol is a man killer.
It's a weapon that's used as much within the
boundaries of society as on the borders of
society.
And Colt-- one of Colt's original marketing
ploys was to market it to slave owners.
Here you are, a lone white man, overseer or
slave owner, surrounded by black people.
Suppose your slaves should rise up against
you.
Well, if you've got a pair of Colt's pistols
in your pocket, you are equal to twelve slaves.
And that's “The Equalizer,” that it's
not all men are created equal by their nature.
It's that I am more equal than others because
I've got extra shots in my gun.
BILL MOYERS:
But you write about something you call “the
equalizer fallacy.”
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, the equalizer doesn't produce equality.
What it produces is privilege.
If I have six shots in my gun and you've got
one, I can outvote you by five shots.
Any man better armed than his neighbors is
a majority of one.
And that's the equalizer fallacy.
It goes to this notion that the gun is the
guarantor of our liberties.
We're a nation of laws, laws are the guarantors
of our liberties.
If your rights depend on your possession of
a firearm, then your rights end when you meet
somebody with more bullets or who's a better
shot or is meaner than you are.
BILL MOYERS:
And yet the myth holds--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
And yet--
BILL MOYERS:
--stronger than the reality?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, yes, the myth holds.
And it is stronger than the reality.
Because those guns, particularly the Colt
is associated with one of the most active
phases and most interesting phases of expansion.
And therefore it has the magic of the tool,
the gun that won the west, the gun that equalized,
the whites and the Indians, the guns that
created the American democracy and made equality
possible.
BILL MOYERS:
But there are other nations with a particular
history different from ours that have been
very valid.
I mean, Nazi Germany was no slacker, the Soviet
Union, Europe, all white countries contributed
two wars within 30 years of each other.
They have their own peculiar violent tendencies.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
The difference in American violence-- two
kinds of difference.
One, it's settler state violence, that is
to say it's legitimated when it's directed
against Native Americans, Mexicans outside
the boundaries of society or against an enslaved
class within it.
Eliminate slavery and you start to make problems
there.
We're a colonial society in which we've incorporated
elements that the Europeans never really incorporated.
And the second element is this democratic
individualism that we grant the license to
kill to individuals in a way that Europeans
don't.
Their violence predominately, their mass violence
especially, is social, police state violence,
class warfare of a violent kind.
For us the murder rate, individual violence,
lynching--
BILL MOYERS:
30,000 people killed every year by gun violence.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, and I would take it back even further
than that to the period between the Civil
War and the 1930s when you had, partly as
a result of the Civil War, a society awash
in handguns, war surplus handguns, very few
law, no national regulation of most things,
essentially a sort of a right wing Republican
dream of the unregulated society.
And what you got was social warfare waged
by individuals and groups of individuals.
BILL MOYERS:
KKK.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
KKK.
But in the south that is on the racial boundary
in the south KKK, White Citizens' Council,
Knights of the White Camellia against blacks,
against their white allies in the Republican
party.
In the north you have labor wars in which
armed strikers are opposed by so-called private
armies of detectives, we'd later call them
goon squads, but called detectives then, armed
to shoot the workers.
BILL MOYERS:
Homestead 1892, Ludlow massacre out in Colorado.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Right.
So you have a period in the United States
as I say from 1865 to 1930 of extreme social
violence in which America, a lot of Americans
are armed.
European visitors all remark on the prevalence
of pistols and Sears manufacturers a whole
line of men's pants with a pistol pocket.
BILL MOYERS:
What about the argument we increasingly hear
that we need to have more guns because of
a threatening government?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
To me that's the most nonsensical thing I've
ever heard in my life.
First of all, the government isn't the black
helicopter government that they have in mind.
But if it were, your guns wouldn't do you
a bit of good.
And it's an idea that began with the big lie
about the reason that Hitler took over in
Germany was because he disarmed his enemies.
The communists were not disarmed.
They were outgunned.
And they didn't have the army on their side.
There's one, in that panel discussion I was
in somebody--
BILL MOYERS:
After Newtown?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
After Newtown.
One of the spokesmen spoke about the—that
oh if the Poles had had more widely distributed
guns, the Germans would never have invaded.
Right, you know, a bunch of farmers with shotguns
standing up to the Wehrmacht.
The Japanese didn't invade California because
they knew Americans were all heavily armed.
And that the Japanese never intended to invade
California had nothing to do with it.
It's a pernicious lie.
And the reason it's so pernicious is that
it legitimates the idea that you have a right
to violently resist the government.
Most people won't do that.
Most people when the cops come to the door,
will put their hands up if it comes to that.
But there are people, some of these violent
tax resistant movements, who take that position
very literally.
BILL MOYERS:
We continue to hear from a lot of people,
notably Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle
Association.
Here's what he said right after Newtown.
WAYNE LAPIERRE:
The only way, the only way to stop a monster
from killing our kids to be personally involved
and invested in a plan of absolute protection.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a
gun is a good guy with a gun.
BILL MOYERS:
So what kind of society do we get?
What kind of social order do we get if everyone
is armed?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
To me we get a very dangerous, or if we're
talking about the United States, it's extremely
dangerous because there are so many things
about which Americans feel violently.
The country is still very much divided by
race.
The anger that one hears about things like
Obamacare, the rage that's expressed, the
level of political rage makes me feel that
there's anger out there looking for an object
and that the more heavily armed we are and
the more permissive we are about the use of
guns, the more dangerous it's going to be.
BILL MOYERS:
I hear you talking about race and wonder how
that has shaped the pattern that produces
more outrage over mass killings like this
one, and there should be outrage, than over
the slow but steady accretion of one on one
killings in the inner cities.
I mean, over 106 kids were killed last year
in Chicago alone.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yeah we don't regard as outrageous in the
same way the daily killings in the ghettos
and in the black neighborhoods that we do
when it's, you know, little white kids in
a little white suburb.
There's also a difference though in that one
is a kind of abhorrent outburst of violence
in a part of the society that feels immune
to violence.
Whereas we've allowed violence in our cities
to become a kind of normative pattern.
And actually I shouldn't say we've let it.
It's always been that way.
It goes back as far as our cities go that
they've always been violent places.
And the culture has taken a kind of dismissive
attitude towards it.
BILL MOYERS:
How so?
Why, historically?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Historically I think, it has to do with the
way in which members of racial and ethnic
minorities are not considered to be fully
human, so we expect them to behave violently
to each other.
BILL MOYERS:
And a threat to jobs, a threat to our own
standard of life, standard of living.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
That's right.
BILL MOYERS:
The Irish were seen as a threat to the wellbeing
of the Protestants.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Now, the blacks in the cities were a threat
when they were rioting in the '60s, a threat
to white neighborhoods.
And you got gun control and attempts at violence
control as well as measures of social welfare
taken in order to avert that threat.
But black on black violence in isolated, in
urban, neighborhoods leaves white America
untouched in both the literal and the figurative
sense, even though that is the largest share
of the killings that go on.
BILL MOYERS:
Well, we talked about videogames.
But what about movies?
Here's a group we put together.
BILL MOYERS:
If we find that entertaining, are we in a
societal way condoning or validating violence?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
I think it has to do with proportion.
There's so much violence and it's so inescapable.
If you look at the-- if you sort of did a
genre map of the different types of films
that are now available, so many of them are
violent action movies that if you're taking
your repertoire of responses to the world
from the art that you consume, violence is
the right response in, let's say, eight cases
out of ten.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is that, aside from just
the sheer level of raw violence that one sees,
the question I would ask is what kind of rationale
are movies now, television programs and videogames,
what kind of rationale for violence are these
stories providing?
The old Western movies provide a very important
rationale.
And that was the principle that no moral,
social, political problem can be resolved
in a Western without violence.
Anyone in the Western who thinks you can get
away without a gunfight is wrong.
And there, it isn't so much the spectacular
quality of the violence, because by modern
standards, it's pretty tame.
But it's that insistent rational: the only
way to resolve the situation is violence,
and anyone who thinks differently just doesn't
understand the way that the world works.
BILL MOYERS:
I have actually wrestled for some 20 years
with something you wrote in “Gunfighter
Nation.”
You said that central to the myth, the myth
of America, the myth of how we came to be
is the belief that “violence is an essential
and necessary part of the process through
which American society was established and
through which its democratic values are defended
and enforced.”
So we invoke violence because we think it
not only saves us but nurtures us and that
we have some kind of obligation to use it
in the service of spreading democratic values?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yes, and it validates our beliefs, it validates
our values, the things we stand for if we're
willing to fight for them.
Nothing validates them like combat, fighting
for them.
And, you know, and the frontier myth is the
oldest myth.
We have a couple of others that work with
similar kind of power.
One of the ones that I was thinking of when
I wrote that was what I call the “good war
myth” or the “platoon movie myth.”
And that's the-- it's the newest of our myths,
it comes really out of the Second World War
in which the United States, which had been
always a white man's republic, an Anglo-Saxon
white man's republic, becomes through the
platoon movie, that ethnically and racially
mixed unit now becomes a multi-racial, multi-ethnic
democracy united how?
Through war against a common enemy, a good
war, a justifiable war, a necessary war, a
defensive war, a war that liberates Asia and
Europe through the force of American arms
so that our self-transformation into all men
are created equal finally, whatever their
color or creed or national origin, is achieved
through war and only through war.
BILL MOYERS:
As you know so well, President Theodore Roosevelt,
back at the turn of the 20th century wrote
that quote, "mighty civilized races which
have not lost the fighting instinct … are
gradually bringing peace into the red wastes
where the barbarian peoples of the world hold
sway."
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yeah, he also said that a savage war, a war
against savages, is always a righteous war.
And it was certainly what Roosevelt was doing
there was taking the American past of Indian
fighting and of conquering the west by driving
the Indians out, and expanding it to an international
stage.
BILL MOYERS:
So this idea of the frontier continues to
summon us, to--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yeah.
It does, although not often in as literal
a way as Teddy Roosevelt would've had it.
Two analogies, sort of two examples occur.
One is: why is it that for liberals, I'm thinking
about Obama particularly, the war in Afghanistan
was a war of necessity whereas the war in
Iraq was a war of choice.
They're both wars of choice.
But the war in Afghanistan has all of the
hallmarks of savage war, a primitive enemy
bent on our destruction, can't make a deal
with them, can't liberate them, can only destroy--
I'm thinking about the Taliban and I'm thinking
about the Al Qaeda, people there.
BILL MOYERS:
Bin Laden hiding--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Bin Laden, yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
--out, operating from there.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
That's a righteous war, whereas Iraq, Iraq
was supposed to be World War II, was supposed
to be a war of liberation, but it wasn't.
And it soon became obvious that it wasn't
that.
And so you’ve got a kind of public revulsion
against that, among some liberals who supported
it initially, but not against-- not until
recently anyway, not against Afghanistan.
And the second piece of that is the economic
piece of that which is that the American economy
is an economy which perpetually expands without
costing anybody anything, without cost to
a lower-- without exploiting a lower class.
For the past 30 years it's been perfectly
obvious that that's not working anymore.
The rich get richer, the working class gets
poorer.
And yet we still hold to that.
Why don't we believe-- why don't we believe
in global warning and the consequences of
that?
Why don't we believe-- because nature's inexhaustible,
has to be inexhaustible.
If nature is not inexhaustible, infinitely
exploitable, then the American system will
stop working.
Let's not even say whether it used to work
or-- it will stop working, it will fail.
And we can't afford to believe that.
BILL MOYERS:
So we create myths that help us organize our
beliefs against the reality--
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
That's right.
BILL MOYERS:
--that we cannot factually deny?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
That's right.
That's right.
BILL MOYERS:
So what is implicit in this notion of regeneration
through violence?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
I think it's, for today, it's still our belief
in the validity of violence as a way of dealing
with the complex problems that as a nation,
as a society, even as people, that we face.
We still trust to military action excessively
in dealing with foreign affairs.
And we still, it's still a kind of predominant
mode.
We'll cut foreign aid of all kinds, but we
won't cut, or not cut as much, military budgets.
We'll develop new ways of using force to intervene
in foreign affairs, covert ops, special operations,
but force still has that critical role for--
it's almost like there-- it's not necessarily
the first resort, but sure as hell is not
the last resort for us.
BILL MOYERS:
I sometimes wonder if Charlton Heston will
have the last word on this argument.
Here is Heston speaking in the year 2000 at
the annual convention of the National Rifle
Association.
Their nemesis, at the time, was Al Gore running
for president as a Democratic candidate, who
they said would take away their guns.
CHARLTON HESTON:
So as we set out this year to defeat the divisive
forces that would take freedom away, I want
to say those fighting words, for everyone
within the sound of my voice to hear and to
heed and especially for you, Mr. Gore -- from
my cold, dead hands!
BILL MOYERS:
What do you think listening to that?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
I think the man's an idiot.
If the government was actually the kind of
government he somehow fantasizes, they would
take the gun from his cold, dead hands.
There's a wonderful line in the first “Men
in Black,” where the space alien comes and
wants the farmer's weapon.
And the farmer says, "From my cold, dead hands."
And the alien says, "Your negotiation is accepted."
I mean, that kind of defiance is cheap.
Because it threatens a resistance that would
be illegitimate if it was undertaken and that
no one in their right mind would actually
undertake.
BILL MOYERS:
But mythologically, what does it represent?
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Well, it's an assertion that you're Davy Crocket.
That you're-- well, I guess, in his case,
it could be an assertion that you're either
one of the revolutionaries at Bunker Hill,
defying the British, from the age of the weapon
he was carrying, I would assume he was defying
the British.
Or it could be Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy.
And this notion that if you don't like the
way the… if you don't like the outcome of
the election, go start your own country.
Take up arms against the government and somehow
that's a legitimate and constitutional action.
It isn't.
It's unconstitutional.
And if you do it, the government will come
and take the gun from your cold, dead hands.
BILL MOYERS:
What a conflicted country this is.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yeah, yeah.
But think of the resentment and the fear that
would lead to that kind of posturing on a
public stage.
That's the, to me, that's the menace of our
time is that undercurrent of resentment and
fear and hatred that finds an outlet in the
legitimated forms of violence.
BILL MOYERS:
Including the killing of 26 people, 20 of
them children, in Newtown, Connecticut.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
Yep.
BILL MOYERS:
Richard Slotkin, thank you very much for being
with me.
RICHARD SLOTKIN:
You're very welcome.
