Insane Clown Posse: Threat Or Menace?

A friend has two kids in public school, so I apologized to her for the education they’ll not receive, and she went on to tell me what they do when classes let out: 

Video games. 

They come home from Ukiah High and Pomolita Middle School and play video games until their fingertips bleed and vision blurs, and then fiddle with their smartphones. She assumes homework requires getting to Level Six on Mario Brothers or, more likely, achieving Ninja status on War Commando Black Ops Series 9. All she knows for sure is that there’s a whole lot of shooting and exploding going on. 

Then we talked about her job and her mom’s health. What we never talked about is the terrible impact video games are having on the tender emotional state of kids these days. 

Which means that just one measly half-generation later we don’t hear a whisper about the grave threat video games hold for our nation’s teenagers. Not a syllable. 

But we all remember the outcries a dozen or so years ago of the violence and crime spikes certain to come in the wake of children being exposed to the evil world and twisted values created and promoted by video games. 

Therapists and child psychologists issued grave warnings and made solemn predictions about the rising tide of sociopaths soon to swamp society. There were newspaper stories featuring interviews with school counselors and social workers, all with headlines reading “VIDEO GAMES: Threat or Menace?” 

On television it was just as bad except you also had to look at the faces of worried talk show guests who came armed with statistics (“By the time the average American teenager reaches high school he or she has witnessed 98 million video game homicides!”) plus more dire predictions and more alarming conclusions. 

The stats were always delivered with worried looks, furrowed brows and quavering voices. Dismayed talk show hosts shook their heads. 

To meet the threat, Tipper Gore wrote books, Congressional panels impaneled panels, concerned parent groups circulated petitions, Joe Biden sniffed women’s hair, and video game executives made billions of dollars. 

I well remember those years filled with heated up sociologists and angry analysts. Son Lucas was a teenager at the time, midway through the purgatory of Ukiah High’s diploma assembly line, and he played video games as if getting paid. 

Among his favorites was Grand Theft Auto, a jolly compilation of thuggery, prostitution, drug running and dozens of murders, all within one block and/or 30 seconds of the game’s first carjacking. Loads of fun. 

He had a small library of such fare, and he spent a lot more hours playing those games than he spent practicing his saxophone. He sometimes played video games competitively among friends who gathered upstairs; I could hear jeers, cheers and laughter at the mayhem those teenage warriors visited upon one another. 

Then, without me even noticing, they all grew up. And not one of his former teen buddies has ever killed anyone or stolen a car or come within a mile of a misdemeanor. Lucas himself hasn’t played video games in more than a decade. 

And the nationwide spike in crime and violence the shrinks and experts confidently predicted? Never happened. Crime rates, including homicide rates, continue to drop. It’s such a non-issue that embarrassed psychologists haven’t bothered to do research to determine the extent of emotional damage video games induced compared with teens who had instead been playing saxophones. 

It would be easy to dismiss it all as just more of the merry-go-round passing for news cycles, but how often do we, as a society, fall for it when similar (or even dissimilar) trends pop up among youngsters? 

As kids in the ‘50s, we did “Duck and Cover” drills so we wouldn’t die from nuclear fallout. And in 10 years how many of us died? Zero. 

Today we forbid little tykes from touching, smelling, talking with, playing with or looking at each other, and also make them wear face masks. How many children have died from COVID 19? Statistically, zero (with a 3% margin of error). 

Did rock’n’roll doom teenagers? Record albums were reportedly stuffed with secret satanic messages, so Tipper Gore wrote books, congress blah blah blahed, pastors burned Beatle albums, Joe Biden bumped his head, hard, and yet no one sacrificed goats on altars to Beelzebub. 

And no team of sociologists ever did research to determine if Motley Crue admirers suffer mental disorders at higher rates than Presbyterians. Who among us still stays awake nights worrying about the Insane Clown Posse? 

Mendocino County once was hard hit by paranoiacs convinced microwave ovens caused brain lesions (and refused to enter restaurants that used them) and we endured a surge of resistance at the notion of eating genetically modified foods. These were labeled “Frankenfoods” by clever but dishonest promoters of a ban on GMOs. The referendum of course, passed by an unhealthy margin, and today you and I are not allowed to grow alfalfa using cloned dolphin kidneys. 

We still spot faded “Hang Up Your Phone & Drive” bumper stickers and we remember car wrecks were predicted, laws were passed, editorials were written, Joe Biden had his 38th brain scan, and a week later technology morphed into smartphones. We survived. Do cell phones still cause ear cancer? 

The future promises endless fodder to feed the perpetual motion machine of insanity-generating bubbles in our intellectual sewage system called the Internet. Do Walmarts have prisons hidden in their basements? Does Instagram make you bald? 

Will emails and texting reduce national literacy back to grunting, pointing and emoji hieroglyphics?

(Tom Hine, author of this and every other TWK column, will be ready when the world devolves into nothing but emojis and clever messages like LOL, WTF and ASAP.)