[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 57 (Monday, April 26, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4147-S4148]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             TEEN VIOLENCE

  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I wish to address the Senate today on 
the subject of the violence in Littleton, CO. I note that over the 
weekend a number of funerals took place, and as I speak another funeral 
is occurring as a result of the shootings in Littleton, CO. I think it 
would be appropriate for us to observe a moment of silence for the 
victims of the shootings that took place.
  (Period of silence.)
  Mr. BROWNBACK. I thank the Chair.
  Certainly, all of our thoughts and prayers are with the people in 
Colorado, across this country and across the world, who have been 
touched by the terrible tragedies in the shootings.
  We cannot ignore the shootings that took place in Littleton, CO. I 
think we really must say that this time we will address these problems 
that are in our culture. They are here. We have a culture that 
glorifies violence and killing, where perverse things are put on 
television as normal. Ours is a culture that has far too much darkness 
in it.

  Just listen to some of the words of the writers in various newspapers 
across this country when they have discussed today's culture. This was 
in last Thursday's Washington Post in the Style Section, mind you. Its 
headline: ``When Death Imitates Art.'' It says:

       Before Teenagers Commit Violence, They Witness It in 
     American Culture.

  Here is how the writer starts:

       In what used to be the dark corners of our culture, there 
     is now a prime time cartoon with a neo-Nazi character, comics 
     that traffic in bestiality, movies that leave teenagers 
     gutted like game, fashion designers who peddle black leather 
     masks and doomsday visions. It's all in the open now, mass 
     produced, widely available. Even celebrated. On countless 
     PCs, killing is a sport. And there's Marilyn Manson, a 
     popular singer who named himself after a mass murderer and 
     proclaims he is the Antichrist.
       Film, television, music, dress, technology, games: They've 
     become one giant playground filled with accessible evil, 
     darker than ever before.

  Listen to this:

       Consider: Of the last 11 major movies released on video 
     since April 6, seven of them have violent themes. Among them, 
     ``Art Pupil,'' about a high school kid obsessed with Nazism; 
     ``American History X'' about the rise and fall of a skinhead; 
     and ``I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,'' a teen slasher 
     sequel.
       ``There is no question in my mind that film and society 
     interrelate,'' said Douglas Brode, a professor of film at 
     Syracuse University and author of 18 books on the movies. 
     ``And not just films but music, video games, all of it. There 
     is a connection. It may be tangential, it may be tight. 
     Nobody knows for sure.''

  And so caution and perspective are urged.

       It is surely one of the great debates of this decade: Does 
     the culture simply reflect the dark, decadent times in which 
     we live or is society this way because the cultural 
     proprietors have run amok.

  Listen to this from the Wall Street Journal, written by Peggy Noonan, 
a columnist. This was in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal. She 
writes this:

       What walked into Columbine High School Tuesday was the 
     culture of death. This time

[[Page S4148]]

     it wore black trench coats. Last time it was children's 
     hunting gear. Next time it will be some other costume, but it 
     will still be the culture of death. That is the Pope's 
     phrase; it is how he describes the world we live in.
       The boys who did the killing, the famous Trench Coat Mafia, 
     inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam. Think of it 
     this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims 
     in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, 
     come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go 
     through him again and again, from this direction and that. 
     The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from 
     the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, 
     on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by--all are waves. The 
     fish--your child--is bombarded and barely knows it. But the 
     waves contain words like this, which I will limit to only one 
     source, the news.

  Then she goes through and lists:

       . . . was found strangled and is believed to have been 
     sexually molested. . . .

  There are a number of headlines, and they finish this portion by 
saying:

       This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the 
     sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture 
     and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in 
     it, which is everybody.

  Listen to this from the New York Times today:

       By producing increasingly violent media, the entertainment 
     industry has for decades engaged in a lucrative dance with 
     the devil.

  That was in the New York Times today. It goes on to describe a 
process that our young people are going through, that a former Army 
officer talked about being desensitization, conditioning of people, 
being able to do heinous violent acts that they are taking culture 
conditioning through a movie, music, the Internet that just constantly 
bombard them and it desensitizes them to the humanness surrounding 
them.

       Dave Grossman, a former Army officer and professor at West 
     Point and also the University of Arkansas, says that these 
     are the same techniques that were used to great effect during 
     the Vietnam War to increase the ``firing rate''--that is, the 
     percentage of soldiers who would actually fire a weapon 
     during an encounter from the 15 to 20 percent range in World 
     War II to as much as 95 percent in Vietnam.
       Grossman has written ``On Killing: The Psychological Cost 
     of Learning to Kill in War and Society,'' in which he 
     discusses how conditioning techniques were used to teach 
     Vietnam-bound soldiers.

  And then it goes on and he says many of these same techniques are 
involved in our culture today.
  Mr. President, we have got to address this. It is time to do 
something. I think we in the Senate have to say we are not powerless to 
address this. We can fight back, and we must fight back. We know this 
is going on in the culture today. We know it is out there. We know what 
is happening. We know what happened in Columbine. We also know, most of 
us across the country, it is likely to happen again somewhere else, in 
some other good high school, in some other place where this never 
should happen, as it has happened in the past in Paducah, KY; Pearl, 
MS; other places; Jonesboro, AR; across this country. We can and we 
must fight back, and now is the time to do it.

  I suggest two solutions. No. 1, anybody listening or watching, let's 
all pledge that we will change our culture, our individual culture we 
are involved in right now, what is it that is going on in our family, 
in our community, in our school, wherever we are within our culture 
that is part of this, and let's change it. We are not helpless to 
changing this. What is coming into your home right now? Do you have 
things coming into your home right now that are violent, that are of a 
nature with which you wouldn't agree, or over the Internet, magazines, 
video games, movies, television? We are not powerless to stop it coming 
into our homes. Let us all pledge to stop it.
  I hope that many people across this country will start societies for 
cultural renewal within their communities where people can come 
together and say we are going to change the culture in our community; 
we are not going to wait on producers out of California; we are not 
going to wait on Washington to do this; we are going to change the 
culture here, now; we are going to bind together and we are going to 
say, what can we do in our community to reduce teen suicide, to reduce 
child abuse, to reduce out-of-wedlock births, to reduce the violence, 
the drug use, to reduce those sorts of things in our culture.
  Let's not wait until it comes to us. Let's start binding together as 
people and forming societies to do this now. We can do it. If 10 people 
in any community of a limited size, say, of a quarter million, would 
come together and say, we are going to change the culture in our 
community, they could start this in their community and they could get 
it done. With passion, with prayer, with people of commitment, they 
could do it. It could happen. They could move forward. They can change 
their culture. We can each change our culture. Let us open our eyes and 
see what is happening.
  The second thing I think we in the Senate need to do is create a 
special commission on cultural renewal. We need to address this topic. 
We in the Senate should have a high-level commission of people from 
multiple walks of life searching for the answers to two questions: One, 
what made this culture the way it is? How did we get to this point we 
are today? What made us this way? Second, and more important, how do we 
change it?
  I will be hosting a hearing on May 4, asking about the marketing of 
violence, in the Commerce Committee. There we are going to be asking 
people to address the point about the marketing of violence in our 
society and how it is being used to sell various products and what we 
can do to stop it.
  I want to be clear, too. We obviously have limits in government, and 
government is part of the culture, but it is not the total culture. 
Government is limited. This is much more about all of us joining 
together to say we can change these sorts of things. We want to 
highlight some problems such as what is taking place in the marketing 
of violence. Why are companies doing this? What is their mode of 
operation? How can we dissuade them from doing this? Because it has a 
profound effect throughout this culture, as the people in Littleton, 
CO, know all too well, as we know all the rest of the way across this 
Nation.
  Cultures change, and we must determinedly change ours, not so much by 
laws as by changing our thinking about what we consume. We can do it. 
We must do it. We will do it. It is time we do it.
  I am afraid people are getting to the point of wondering if we can. 
Yes, we can. As the culture moved in this direction, it can assuredly 
move away from it. But it is going to take a determined effort. It is 
going to take an effort not just of saying OK, Washington is going to 
solve it, or Hollywood is going to solve it, or New York is going to 
solve it. We each have to dig in and try to solve it in our own 
community, and we need to address it from here, too.
  I will be pressing this on the leadership of the Senate, that we do 
have such a high-level special commission so we can get at these 
issues: How did we get to where we are? How do we get away from this? 
How do we solve it? And we can.
  I thank the Chair, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative assistant proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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