Violence Kicks Butt!

Steve Stajich
Mirror contributing writer

   Talk about low tech: Thomas Junta, the “Hockey Dad,” will go to jail for killing a man with his fists. Like in the cowboy movies. No gun control issues here. Just primal drive, a big man over one who was not as big, hammering on the dude until dead.
   Ellen Goodman, in her syndicated column, noted that the fight started when Junta became upset that Michael Costin, who was a referee at a kid’s hockey game, was allowing the play action to become too rough. Costin communicated to Junta “That’s hockey” and Junta disagreed. The fight started over violence; there was too much of it in a kid’s hockey game.
   Goodman gets a headline “Violence Breeds Violence,” which is no news bulletin but a worthy concept to ponder. As would be “Poverty Makes For Hardship,” “Drug Companies Like Money” and “Everything in World Owned by One of Three Guys.” Like most events that cause us to wonder if humankind’s evolution stopped somewhere around the first steam railroad, the “Hockey Dad” murder gives us pause. But, now paused, where does it cause us to look?
   On the one hand, you can just throw the whole thing aside with “Some big goon lost his temper.” The fact that he was a kid’s father doesn’t mitigate anything, since society makes it harder to get a Costco card than to become a parent. In raising a family, at what point would anybody have said, “I think Junta, as a father of a 12 year-old boy, might, you know, pound a guy’s head in.” We don’t have that kind of review yet. Hell, we’re still working on how to get the nail files off our airliners.
    Sports rev up male aggression, and thousands of column inches have reviewed that aspect of modern living. Our response to all the writing and jaw boning about it? Professional wrestling is the number one draw on cable television, and NBC invested millions in a more aggressive form of “X” football. True, the XFL didn’t work out as TV, but some might say it was only because the violence wasn’t properly served-up.
   So, what are we doing about toning down the level of violence in American life? Less than nothing, since violence is a commodity that often trades with financially rewarding results in the free marketplace of commercial banality. And how has that been impacted by the events of 9-11? Well, frankly, we’d like to do more violence to those who brought it down on us. And we wouldn’t mind seeing some movies in which our violent but justified (says… history?) responses in the past are portrayed as ennobling and righteous.
   But, hang on. Now we’ve got war in there with Hockey Dad. Goodman says in her column “If there are just wars, there are no just ‘rink rages.’ If countries cannot always walk away, hockey dads can.”
   Let me pitch that while I think Ellen Goodman is generally right, there is something we might walk away from and that’s an entire culture saturated with violence.
   Sometimes America feels like a big seven year-old boy who doesn’t want to go to bed before the monster movie is over. Even though he’s falling asleep and he has school tomorrow. People will propose simple common sense solutions, such as “We won’t allow smoking in public places, since it makes you dead.” And immediately, that seven year-old boy starts balking, saying it’s impossible and unenforceable and maybe even unconstitutional.
   You could make movies without guns and cigarettes. I’ve seen it done. It would be wrong to make it the law, but it might be something we could incorporate under the general heading of “caring.” You could depressurize the whole “Kick Butt!” mentality in modern life by not reaching for it so often in film, television, and advertising. At the present time in our culture it’s comically funny to see humans beat each other up in entertainments, when it would be wrong to see those same people hitting and kicking a dolphin. Great for dolphins, bad for kid’s hockey.
   We go to great lengths to get what we want in our relationship to violence. Last week, there was a generic submarine war movie on, with Cary Grant as the “skipper.” In one overly long scene, somebody with very little medical training performs an emergency appendectomy on a youngish sailor they all called “kid.” The clock ticks, the crude medical instruments are boiled, Grant puts the kid under with ether… there is praying. The “kid” pulls through! His life has real value.
   Ten minutes later, Grant and his sailors are sending torpedoes into Japanese ships. Never mind the details, they’re killing hundreds of enemy sailors. Of course, we never hear any screaming, or see men jumping into freezing waters. We don’t see death. We see toy boats smoking, sinking. You know these movies, you’ve seen then a million times. You cheer as hundreds die. Fine, you know, because it was “Tojo.”
   We often want violence to work like a garage door opener, a push button mechanism that does the deed for us and we don’t have to get out and get dirty. At the ready, under our control. Containable, focused. Not quite the case in suburban Boston at a kid’s hockey game.
   War is hell, but it’s also a mess. Ask any American who has lost a son or daughter not to enemy fire, but to friendly fire. That’s definitely a case of violence breeding … loss. Perhaps some of those parents would have an interesting reaction to jingoistic “kick butt” slogans and funny movies where people are shot, then somebody makes a joke.
   You can spin plenty off of the “Hockey Dad” event, but maybe the one thing we should take from this tragedy is that it was ours, not just theirs. It belongs to all of us, unless that was some kind of illegal kid’s hockey game those boys were playing. Michael Costin’s death wasn’t funny, it wasn’t entertaining, it didn’t make us feel good, it wasn’t a response to terrorist aggression. It was simple human violence.

This Week’s “Know Your News” Quiz

1) Tina Brown’s “Talk” magazine
   a) has laryngitis.
   b) is ceasing publication.
   c) will expand and become “Piffle World.”

2) New airport baggage screening procedures
   a) caused no additional delays.
   b) are stressing Aaron Sorkin.
   c) include the instruction “Turn and cough.”

3) Kirk Kerkorian’s ex-wife may have
   a) revealed too much about their finances.
   b) exacerbated their differences.
   c) exacerbated their half-century age gap.

Answer Key

(b) “But, getting back to me…”
(a) “But, getting back home before Easter…”
(a) “But, getting back to my allowance…”