I about spit my Cheerios across the kitchen table the day Ann Landers took on the Police.
It was the summer of 1985. The band was two years out from the release of “Synchronicity,” a record of giant proportions that cemented the Police as superstars. And “Square in Delaware” was taking on “Murder by Numbers,” a song included as an extra track on cassette copies of the album.
“My husband and I are aware that much of today’s music is trash, but this number is frightening,” Square wrote to the newspaper advice columnist. “Murder by Numbers,” no hit by a long shot, was Sting’s comment on political power, using the rise of a stealthy, bloodless serial killer as the illustration. Square knew the words — she included a “Photostat” of the lyrics for Ann Landers — though she might have missed the metaphor.
Her question to Ann Landers: “Is it any wonder so many kids are killing themselves and others? Such lyrics, when heard over and over, can make a profound impression on young minds. ... Not only does the current music encourage violence, it promotes sexual promiscuity and is extremely provocative.”
Pretty funny, in a way — and not just because I was picking up cereal splattered across the broadsheet — as Ann Landers provided her condolences to Square in Delaware, along with a short list of other, equally “trashy” songs.
But in my 21-year-old head, I thought I knew what was going on: They just didn’t get it. I thought the same thing a few months later when the Capitol Hill wives of the Parents Music Resource Center scored congressional hearings to push for warning labels on records deemed too profane, too violent, too overtly sexual.
I bought a ton of vinyl in those days, spending nearly as much time in record shops as I did in my college classes. They influenced me in ways I’m not sure I can explain. But an undying love for Lou Reed didn’t send me uptown looking for my man. (Though it is true that: “Despite all the computations/You could just dance to a rock ’n’ roll station/and it was alright.”) And “Murder by Numbers” didn’t have me slipping Mickeys in anyone’s drinks.
Why did I need anyone’s restrictions?
Back in 2012, all of that is a long way to go to get to news nobody can shake.
On balance, this doesn’t have much to do with what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. How could it, really? Twenty-seven people shot and killed — 28 if you include the shooter — most of them at school on a Friday morning.
Except that it does have something to do with the conversation seeping out around the seams of that horrifying time, date and place.
Enough of the back story is out there about Adam Lanza — the socially awkward 20-year-old who took his mom’s legally registered guns, killed her, went to the school, blew his way past secured doors and then murdered a path through hallways and classrooms — that there are plenty of places to look for cause and effect. Guns and ammunition. Violent video games. School security. Access to mental health care.
And everyone’s on the defensive, no matter their corner, with their own versions of: They just don’t get it. All ask: Why are they going after something I’m pretty sure doesn’t make me a bad person?
I’ll admit, I don’t get the attraction to violence coming out of Hollywood or the video game industry any more than Tipper Gore, then a senator’s wife from Tennessee and face of the PMRC, got the music I was listening to.
I’m sure I’ve missed the point of the “Die Hard” franchise as I concentrated less on the action and more on the logistics of the disaster action team that would be bringing up the rear in real life.
And maybe it’s the fact that my video game skills begin and end in the laughter of nephews as they sack my quarterback over and over in “Madden NFL ’12” that I’m about to write to Ann Landers myself about the gore streaming out of today’s first-person shooters.
But, man, the guts and head shots, more creatively rendered and graphically splattered with each new release ... that has to desensitize a body, right?
I asked Doug Elfman about that. He’s a full-time gamer whose “Game Dork” column appears each week in the J&C. His best of 2012 list, published Thursday, was littered with violent titles.
“I’ve been reviewing games for 10 years, and playing them for decades,” Elfman said. “I don’t think there’s any more violence than before. But the artwork and visual graphics of video games have improved due to technological advances, so murders are more realistic than ever. Does that have an effect on gamers? Perhaps.”
He makes a case that the games work from the same premise as over-the-top action movies: “We watch them to feel integrated in a narrative, which may just happen to include killings for the sake of fictional conflict.”
Back to video games, Elfman said: “You see, the thing non-gamers don’t understand is that most of us players don’t get involved in games to kill. We get involved in games to go on vibrant missions, take part in adventures and solve puzzles. To do all that, games often require us to kill virtual people or aliens or Nazis or zombies.
“But the rush we get from games isn’t the killing per se; it’s the solving of obstacles, which includes eliminating virtual people.”
He’s right, I don’t quite get it. Just like I don’t get the need for big magazines that hold large numbers of rounds in semi-automatic assault-style weapons.
Just like I don’t get what happened in Newtown, Conn.
I do get why I gravitated toward questions about guns and games in the aftermath. Elfman had me pegged: “People always want to crack down on things they don’t partake, and they always resist other people cracking down on things they do partake. ‘Don’t mess with my backyard, but do whatever you want to someone else’s.’”
In 1985, Ann Landers clearly didn’t know her way around the backyard of a record store.
But she did take a wise step back — one I was too piqued to notice at the time — in her reply to Square in Delaware.
“I agree this is pretty trashy stuff, but if we tried to suppress it, there would be loud cries about censorship and the First Amendment,” Landers wrote.
“As I see it, we have no alternative but to hold our noses, insert earplugs and hope our kids grow out of it — as we did.”
The question, now, is how do we grow out of it? America’s not going to hold its nose, keep its earplugs in forever, right? Do we have that self-control in our own backyards, whether they contain more brutal images, outsized video body counts or bigger rounds of ammunition? (Yes, we’re all looking at you, Wayne LaPierre, over there at the National Rifle Association.)
Then again, maybe we just don’t get it.