By Donald M. Taylor
I was beginning to feel my age. Here I was coaching these 45 teenage men in the fine art of licensed violence that is the essence of modern-day football, but with each practice the generation gap was becoming more obvious. Every session ended with the entire team, coaches included, taking the traditional twenty-minute slow jog around the football field as a form of warm-down. It was here that one really had an opportunity to understand the preoccupations of these young men. At times I wondered if any topic other than women was taboo, but surprisingly these young men would, in the course of so many practices, cover everything from the mundane to the profound.
A frequent favourite was recent movies or videos they had seen and the rule seemed to be that the more violent the film the more “awesome,” “radical,” or “hot” it was. I had the usual kindly old coach’s view on the matter, believing there to be too much gratuitous violence in films, no doubt a cover-up for lack of plot and character development. It soon became apparent that I was the only one in the group, indeed according to my players, in the universe, who had not seen all these movies. It was starting to get to me not knowing who “Rambo” was and so in desperation I asked two of my players to rent for me what they and their team-mates considered to be the 10 best videos. Off they went and soon after off I headed home for a weekend designed to allow me to communicate meaningfully with these “modern” teenagers.
At first I didn’t get it. The films all had the basic ingredients that I had resonated to as a young person. There were good guys and bad guys and a good deal of violence, although certainly more realistic and gory than I remembered. I was now ready to join in conversations with my players feeling completely comfortable with names such as Rambo. But something wasn’t quite right, I knew the names, the plots were mindless, but still I couldn’t shake the deep sense that I was missing something.
It came to me while watching the late-night news, which featured a story about a federal politician, who was under pressure to resign from office for some indiscretion. Bingo, the light went on! What the videos all had in common was not merely the violence, but all had a common enemy. The common enemy was our very own societal institutions. In one case it was Rambo against the American military complex, in another case the bad guy was a small-town sheriff and his deputies. In the next it was the justice system, followed by corrupt politicians, and the Catholic Church.
What is it like for a young person to be constantly confronted with the basic message that all our societal institutions are evil? In order to appreciate the implications of my discovery I began to reflect on my own exposure to movies through the years. In terms of Hollywood, I would not consider myself an aficionado in any sense of the word. I grew up resonating like all my buddies to whatever was hot at the time. In my early years this meant the western or duster as we used to call it. The self-reliant cowboy against the world; and that world included evil cowboys and evil Indians. So the message was clear: Native people are evil, and occasionally white people turn bad and its up to my heroes to rid the world of their evil.
Next came the war movies. American soldiers, who almost missed out on two world wars, were depicted saving humanity from the bad guys. Heading the list of bad guys were, of course, the Germans, Italians, and the Japanese. As the World wars retreated from being foremost in our minds, the spy guys took over. American good guys constantly outwitting evil Russians or Chinese.
As ethnocentric as these movies were, and at the risk of crossing every politically correct boundary, the psychological effect was uplifting. Every movie reinforced the basic premise that my group is good and other groups by comparison are bad. No problem with self-esteem here. Moreover, it gave us confidence that our way was right, that our institutions were the most just, and that our authority figures were to be highly respected. Respecting our teachers, religious leaders, and politicians was a logical extension of the more general belief that our group was the best. After all, every movie reinforced it, confirmed it, and actually proved it.
What Watergate did to shake people’s faith in our political structure, the Vietnam War did for the moral superiority of western democracy. The Vietnam War produced no instant Hollywood movies. It was only 25 years later that a nation was ready to digest the sorry reality. It is in this context that the videos rented by my football players surface. We have the same good guys but there has been a dramatic change in the bad guys. Gone are the range of outgroups upon whose backs we built a positive identity. Instead, the enemy is our own cherished institutions. On the one hand, at least Hollywood is not reinforcing ethnocentrism by casting in an evil light on Native peoples and a wide assortment of national groups with whom we share the planet. On the other hand, our own institutions are being undermined to the point that young people genuinely do not trust them.
The implications are unthinkable. It means the obvious in terms of not expecting fair treatment from police officers and the courts of law, and it certainly explains the outright disrespect for political leaders. But it extends into daily life. Teachers are not respected, and it shows. Indeed the young person’s fundamental contract with society is in jeopardy. The contract that says that if I work hard in school I will obtain good grades and those grades will be respected in terms of obtaining employment and advancement. It stipulates that if I pay taxes, I will see the services, and if I treat people with warmth and respect, I will receive the same in return. The minute young people lose faith in that contract they no longer feel obliged to keep up their end of the bargain. Even worse they are demotivated. What is there to work toward if there is no relationship to what the young person puts in, and what they get out?
The onus is not on young people but on us as a community. Hollywood is a mere reflection of our inability or unwillingness to spell-out the contract and live by it. Recently Hollywood has discovered a new trend, which may take some of the heat off our own institutions, but in the long run merely covers them over. The new bad guys on movie screens today are, not every other national group, not our own institutions, but rather aliens! What better enemy; one that requires no politically incorrect putdown of another nationality, no challenging the integrity of our own institutions. Give us unknown monsters and aliens to fight and we will all become a global village, united in our quest to rid the planet of aliens. I just hope we don’t soon discover there is life out there.
Now come on guys, one more lap around the field and hit the showers.