Beware of Me, and Death by Media
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In this cybernetic age every virtual location you visit, on the Net or your own computer, is a citadel on a hill protected by some kind of handle and password. We are constantly pressed to come up with new names, and of course to remember them every time we return. I found it useful to name our hard drives after the kids' pets. Our older hard drive is named for "Escape," their now-deceased hamster, and our new and biggest drive is called "Twitchy," after their bunny, whose nose twitches. My father asked me to get him a subscription to New Scientist Magazine, and naturally I had to come up with yet another handle and password in order to fill in the online forms. I asked twelve-year-old Silvie for a suggestion, and she came back with, "Beware of Me," an expression that she finds amusing lately, in the manner of teens everywhere -- they have a potent fashion sense, even in language, I find. I said that the name had to be one word. "Make it `bewareofme' then." So I did, and that is my logon name at that site now. To my surprise, I later found that Silvie without knowing it was quoting God, who says just that in the Qu'ran, and Baha'u'llah cites it in the Iqan where He says,
"Gracious God! How could there be conceived any existing relationship or possible connection between His Word and they that are created of it? The verse: "God would have you beware of Himself" (Qur'an
If you beware of God, then, you pay attention to the difference between Him, His word, and all other creatures. "Beware of Me," says God, and by understanding and accepting His Manifestation, we beware.
I could not write my usual blog entry yesterday because our Haldimand community staged a garage sale (to defray the the National Fund's current deficit) at our home and we were busy moving objects around; the event turned out well and made more money than I have seen in a sale like this, the sum amounting to well over a unit. Tomaso had an earache and I left it to Marie to hold the fort while I drove him to the emergency. They X-rayed him and, though the results are not final, adenoid problems are suspected. Later, exhausted after the activity, I sat down with the kids to watch two episodes of the original Star Trek series on VHS tape.
I had not seen the old Star Trek for over two decades, though in the Seventies I watched every one over and over Ad Nauseum. The years had done their work and it all seemed like new again. I did not expect the kids to take much interest, being used to modern, special effects-laden fare. Most of the special effects in these two episodes involved chintzy colored floodlights. Silvie hovered, though she saw enough to notice the similarity of the plot to a certain Futurama episode. I had to explain that Futurama is a relatively new production, and that Futurama rips off Star Trek, not the other way around. Tomaso was enraptured, though, and though I had planned only to watch one episode he coaxed me to watch both.
Most of the time the characters on Star Trek are doing what the audience is doing, watching television screens, though they can often talk back to theirs. This is not photogenic. But what surprised me was how effective they made the coordinated operations of the flight deck of the original series. It is still so utterly cool! They made the right decision when they modeled it on submarine rather than airplane crews. In a sub everything is repeated several times, presumably in order to be sure that it is not misunderstood or forgotten. The captain is like, "Forty five degrees left rudder," and the rudder guy comes back with, "Forty five degrees left rudder." In an airplane the pilot just moves his arms to the left. What is cool about that? No movie about airplanes has anything like the spine tingling suspense of the excruciatingly slow moving world of the submarine. Airplanes crash and burn before you have time to react, but a submarine has creaks and groans; it does not go gently into that dark night, it dies a slow, crushing death. If you have to die on one, pick the airplane; if you want to watch somebody die in an interesting way, pick the sub any day.
Even in the second Star Trek series, the New Generation, with better writing, acting and special effects, they still could not improve upon this standard submarine model. I still recall with a tremor the all-time most suspenseful TNG Star Trek episode. Picard is on the flight deck and Laforge is deep in the bowels of the
But nobody doubts that the great appeal of Star Trek was its vision of a happy future with a united humanity occupied with great challenges. It educated several generations in the appeal of our Baha'i ideal of diversity. Sure, if you take the original series from the perspective of today it seems tepid. In that future the world was still run by white men speaking English. But compared to the alternatives offered at that time, this was a diamond in the rough. Even today, though the media has improved its diversity, you still do not see Pygmy starship captains or Aboriginal newscasters. And of course, never a hint that any language other than English rules, even in the latest incarnations of Star Trek, at least among humans in the United Federation of Planets.
I mentioned that my father subscribes to New Scientist. After he is finished, I read them over. This is the most interesting article found there lately,
"The Media Make a Killing; Can media coverage of suicides inspire copycats?," by Michael Bond,
"On 28 April, the president of the American Psychiatric Association, Pedro Ruiz, did what many of its members wish he had done earlier. He wrote an open letter to the news media asking editors to stop airing photos, video clips and writings of Cho Seung-hui, the student who killed 32 people and then himself at the Virginia Tech campus on 16 April. Ruiz warned that the publicity would inspire copycat suicides and killings."
The earlier Columbine suicide murders, and the massive attention given to them, inspired hundreds of imitators, the article points out, and the even greater attention given by a profit-hungry mass media machine to this atrocity will surely kill many more innocents. Death by media. The article continues,
"There is compelling evidence that extensive media coverage of a suicide is followed by an increase in the number of people taking their lives the same way. This pattern has been observed across the world. In a report released in 2000, the World Health Organization warned that repeated coverage of suicides tends to encourage suicidal preoccupations, particularly among young people."
I remember when this WHO report came out, it inspired me to explore the Baha'i faith, and religion in general, as tools for suicide prevention. I was preoccupied with suicide for over a month, producing dozens of essays, to the extent that at least one of my readers worried that I was gliding down the slippery slope to self-destruction myself. Now that I am going over the thought of Plato and Aristotle again I am reminded forcefully how important it is to keep a tight control of the flow of information.
Both these thinkers advocated strict censorship, and each for slightly different but very cogent reasons. Sum it up in three words: "Beware of Me." Forget that stale, stupid debate between total license and stark censorship, it should just be a matter of taking control of our own destinies, and of keeping the channel open to our God. Humans live and breathe data, and it only makes sense to take firm hands on the steering wheel and turn it in the right direction. One expert is quoted in this article saying,
"Publicity about a celebrity murder and murder-suicide serves as the spark to send a vulnerable, questioning, suicidal person in one of many directions."
Exactly, there are many directions which a traumatic experience can send a sensitive soul, and suicide and murder are just one option. Another, healthier choice is to pray to the extent that one's soul is telling one to pray, which may be a great deal; this desire may rise to the extent that a large percentage of the population may become mystics. That is a good thing, far better than murderers and suicides, or both. If the media pays attention to bad options, these will inevitably be imitated. Here is the value of productions like Star Trek that point to a happy future with hope, where all can participate in the good of all. On the other hand, the present media obsession with Muslim extremists digs up the reverse, a future threatened by diversity. It is,
"... in the public interest for the press to exercise restraint in times of tension. Unpublished studies by a team at the
If you want to take an instant, powerful anodyne for the anger and truculence that the media inspires, just read aloud one of the public talks of the Master. They are amazing examples of rhetoric. The more you read, the more amazing it becomes. If only the news media talked like that! We would have to declare peace and shut down all the arms factories. Sometimes you read these addresses and it all seems to be saying the same thing, very predictably. But then these sharp little statements jump out, fly high, and explode in your face. "Beware of me!" They are like landmines, those cluster munitions that leap up and chop off limbs at the knee. Of course, I mean "landmine" in the highest and purest sense of the word, good landmines, the sort that remove hate, anger and self-destructive urges. Anyway, this is one of the most important paragraphs in the article,
"Tom Pyszczynski at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, has found that attitudes towards extreme solutions - such as using excessive force against an enemy - are easily influenced by public debate. Iranian students stopped supporting suicide attacks against the US once they believed public opinion was against the tactic, and Americans who favoured strong military force against their "enemies" softened their attitudes when shown pictures of families from different countries or when reminded of what they shared with others (New Scientist, 14 April, p 42). `Information in the media affects the kinds of thoughts that come to mind, which in turn affect attitudes and behaviour,' he says."
The article, importantly, also points out the complicity of scientists, who stood in line to be interviewed about the killings. Such was the rush that one got the feeling that it would be a betrayal, an offense to the dignity of the dead, to say nothing about it. But something lurked below, bugging me. Consider that,
"...there is evidence that the number of copycat suicides is proportional to the amount of media coverage they get."
It is the same thing with all sex and violence, the more attention it gets the harder it is to get rid of the problem. The song says that "evil grows in the dark," but it is clear that very often it grows in the full light of day, it grows because we look at it.
I resisted a strong urge to talk about those killings at the time, for I felt that would only emphasize what is all too obvious, the tragedy of mass killings. Hardly a controversial thing to say. At the same time I felt in my gut that it had suddenly been deemed politically correct to mourn them loudly and publicly. Having read this article, I know why I felt chary. In reality the best contribution was to contribute nothing at all. As the Writings put it, "silence is best." Yes, they were tragic ends, but so were the deaths of many, many more traffic victims and other un-baptized, unprofitable deaths out of the media spotlight that day. These ends were just as lamentable, but they did not feed quarters into the slot machine.
It was therefore with mixed feelings that I read of Baha'i institutions coming out with pious statements about this suicide killing. We need to be careful not to be like those shrinks, lining up to talk about an issue that it would do the world a lot more good just to keep our mouths shut about. We may get some attention for ourselves by doing that but our first concern must be sincerely to further the public good.
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