Dial File — Steve Bornfeld: Shame, Shame, Shame

Friday, June 18, 1999 | 9:38 a.m.

Steve Bornfeld is the Sun features editor. His television column appears Fridays. Reach him at 259-4081 or steveb@lasvegassun.com

"It's a shame the way you hurt me. ..." -- The Spinners' Motown classic,

"It's a Shame."

S-H-A-M-E: It's a shame we don't have more of it. And it's especially shameful these days, when we should be ashamed of ourselves.

We need S-H-A-M-E to combat media violence -- instead of the let's-legislate-it-away thinking that has become the knee-jerk, post-tragedy posturing of the censorship-minded.

America is democracy. Democracy is free speech. Free speech is messy.

How messy? Well, despite content ratings, V-chips, lyrics advisories, warning labels and website blockades, here we are -- again: haunted by the Littleton massacre, the Georgia school shootings and the specter of The Next Horror; wondering, beyond the crucial issue of gun control, whether pop culture chaos -- blood-curdling music (see story at right), blood-splattered video games, blood-soaked movies and bloodbath TV shows -- can be curbed.

TV has been the most outwardly contrite medium, canning violent series episodes ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Promised Land") and an entire violent series (CBS' mob-themed "Falcone"), banning talk show donnybrooks ("The Jerry Springer Show") and manning a gun control crusade ("The Rosie O'Donnell Show").

Of course, such decisions are based as much, if not more, on economic fears -- violent programming in post-Littleton America equals bad PR equals possible protests equals advertiser pullouts equals loss of revenue -- as on any troubled collective conscience among TV types. And of course, such self-censorship will abate as Littleton fades from public memory, leaving permanent pain only in the hearts of those intimately involved and signaling the re-emergence of full-throttle TV carnage.

Not to be callous, but: That's life in America.

However, short of shredding the First Amendment in the meddling jaws of government, this modern-day malady has an old-fashioned if tough-to-achieve cure: S-H-A-M-E. A return to a cultural climate in which pop culture peddlers actually face social leprosy -- not to mention economic ruin -- for pulling the threads out of the social fabric.

TV apologist/defenders tell us that: 1) The tube is a convenient scapegoat for a larger societal sickness. Yeah, fine. 2) The tube has an on-off button -- use it. Yeah, fine. 3) The tube should be monitored by vigilant parents. Yeah, fine.

All true. All pat excuses for an industry largely ruled by baby boomers, a generation (yours truly included) notorious for its immaturity and evasion of responsibility through slick semantical arguments (sound like anyone we know, America?). This is a generation that is so busy hurtling toward the next millennium that it tends to dismiss any traits of the past -- including S-H-A-M-E -- as quaint, campy and outdated, i.e., Not Cool.

We need S-H-A-M-E. We need a sense of moral outrage that lasts longer than a network news cycle and longer than CNN thinks it should last before it trains its cameras elsewhere. We need a moral code that defies MTV-shaped attention spans.

How do we do it? Damned if I know. As Peter Finch famously fumed in "Network": "I don't know what to tell you to do -- but I know that first, you've got to get mad."

Mad as hell.

Are you gonna take it anymore?