First came the liability suits against tobacco companies -- smokers, you see, had no idea those darn cigarettes could harm their health, despite the fact they'd been calling them "coffin nails" for decades.
Then came the recent spate of municipal "liability suits" against handgun manufacturers, supposedly to recoup the costs of medical care for uninsured gunshot victims. (Cynics replied, only half in jest, that if handguns are so dangerous and unpredictable, the manufacturers should immediately stop selling them ... to the police forces of the cities filing the suits.)
Regardless of whether one harbors a love of tobacco or victim disarmament, thoughtful observers had begu to ask: which industry will be next?
Glad you asked.
"It's a new area to us and we have a lot to learn," admits Mary Koelbel Engle, director of the Federal Trade Commission's four-month-old, $1 million study into movie violence, prompted by last spring's deadly student shoot-'em-up at Colorado's Columbine High School.
But "All we are going to do is report," asserts Ms. Engle, soothingly. "We are not going to say it's right or wrong to target 14- or 15-year-olds (in marketing violent products.) Just whether or not it's being done."
Sure. Congress -- and the private liability lawyers who are already drooling to get their hands on this official federal document -- are just as likely to file lawsuits contending feature films and video games don't expose kids to (start ital)enough(end ital) decapitations.
"Government officials have asked for all sorts of confidential information that industry officials say even the studios do not see," reports Faye Fiore of the the Los Angeles Times. The federal snoops are seeking "memos, focus group research and strategies that may show efforts to market to children the movies, music and videos that the industry has rated for mature audiences," along with files of the Motion Picture Association of America that may indicate how movies are rated for violence, and who decides which violence is inappropriate for children.
And I do mean "snoops." The Times reports investigators for the FTC -- the same folks now trying to break Microsoft Corp. -- "are finding imaginative ways to penetrate an entertainment world that they could confess to know little about, asking student interns to mail-order dark video games or cruise teen Web sites from home so there will be no government footprints."
Using child spies? And thus exposing "mere children" to the very "dangerous" violence being investigated?
The federal probers deny this is "a McCarthyist throwback to the days of subpoenas, loyalty oaths and blacklists." But in fact the only limits on how the FTC's "findings" will be used are those of political expediency, and the imaginations of the trial lawyers.
In the past, gory comic books were blamed for teen-age "juvenile delinquents" stealing hubcaps. And who can forget the thinly veiled racism of the railing in America's pulpits when popular radio stations first began "corrupting the morals of the nation's youth" by playing that "satanic rock-and-roll music"?
There's nothing really new in this clumsy attempt to pin blame on some talisman of popular culture for the pathologies actually generated by prison-like government schools doping up unknown numbers of our young men on Ritalin, Prozac, and Luvox. And such misguided campaigns would likely run their course without doing much harm, absent government involvement.
But to "investigate the marketing of violence" is to investigate motion picture and television (start ital)content(end ital) -- a subject previously considered immune from government meddling under the First Amendment, and rightly so.
Anyone who believes such government meddling will end with motion pictures and video games should climb right back on the turnip truck. Mark Twain was far ahead of his time in satirizing a world in which an uneducated white boy could be the "master" of a long-suffering adult black slave, but "Huckleberry Finn" has nonetheless been banned from many school reading lists for language and descriptions judged Politically Incorrect by modern standards.
What other great literature would fail today's test of Political Correctness when it comes to treatment of women, racial minorities, or -- gasp -- violence? Shall some unelected government bureaucrat now prepare a "report" on whether 14- and 15-year-olds are being targeted with "inappropriate levels of violence" by the greedy publishers of Shakespeare, Beowulf, or the Bible?
It's not enough to say government is "only studying." The government is empowered to study only those things it has some power to regulate. Since free speech is not one of them, this "probe" should be brought to quick and unceremonious end.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at $24.95 through Mountain Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, NV 89127; at 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
* * *
To subscribe, send a message to vinsends-request@ezlink.com, from your NEW address, including the word "subscribe" (with no quotation marks) in the "Subject" line.
All I ask of electronic subscribers is that they not RE-forward my columns until on or after the embargo date which appears at the top of each, and that (should they then choose to do so) they copy the columns in their entirety, preserving the original attribution.
The Vinsends list is maintained by Alan Wendt in Colorado, who may be reached directly at alan@ezlink.com. The web sites for the Surynowicz column are at http://www.infomagic.com/liberty/vinyard.htm, and http://www.nguworld.com/vindex The Vinyard is maintained by Michael Voth in Flagstaff, who may be reached directly at mvoth@infomagic.com.