Tragedy as Child's Play

By LANCE MORROW

We played Lord of the Flies in the remoter woods of Rock Creek Park in Washington. We collected stones in bushel baskets and hid them among the dogwood blossoms. And then, nasty little sociopaths, 10 or 12 years old, we lay in ambush and at the signal hurled rocks full force at our enemies, who were led by the boy with yellow teeth.

One day an older boy, who was almost ready to shave, brought a pellet pistol to the war, not a feckless Daisy that would merely sting but a penetrating gas-fired model, almost as wicked as a .22.

That same day, in the midst of battle, I flanked the boy with yellow teeth and sidearmed a perfect strike at his head. I knew I'd nailed him the instant the rock left my fingers. The missile struck him in the temple, and he clutched his head and fell to his knees, blood gushing through his fingers. I fled in horror, and the war was over. But I secretly cherished a certain involuntary glow of pleasure at the perfect bull's-eye I'd thrown.

What if we'd had automatic rifles? Would we have used them? Our violent imaginations were in business for themselves, loose in the wildwood. We had not signed the Geneva convention. We did not desire blood, but we had not thought the play through to consequence; our fun lay in a kind of self-obliterating game of action and in the glee of power.

I do not mean to say, God knows, that boys will be boys. But it is part of childhood to enter into parallel universes of "play" that may be sinister and that may become the more captivating the more it simulates reality. Usually the play, a form of testing and learning, is not fatal. But boys back to the dawn of human experience have had it in their bones to play violent games. Even the priggish Henry Adams, as a boy in the middle of the 19th century, joined the Latin School's army in a bloody rock-in-the-snowball battle on Boston Common against a mob of "blackguards from the slums."

It seems grotesque to think of the Jonesboro slaughter in terms of play. But that is a way to approach the otherwise mystifying spectacle of children gunning down children. First of all, play is not necessarily innocent. Nor is childhood. The innocence of children (which was the unspoken premise of much horrified commentary last week about the Arkansas shootings) is an adult myth. The reality is children's extreme vulnerability; their storms of anger and irrationality and their dramatically imaginative lives, which conjure monsters and heroes and set them in motion--whole Iliads. Those imaginations sometimes indulge crazy fantasies of revenge and annihilating vindication. The vulnerability, anger and extreme fantasies of children have been a constant over the centuries, I think. The late 20th century has not reinvented human nature, even though American perfectionism, in league with what is perhaps the amnesia of the dollar people on the subject of human tragedy, may encourage that illusion.

The little Arkansas shooters were not entirely different from the dysfunctional brat in the park in Washington (me) who nearly killed the boy with yellow teeth. But some things were different in Jonesboro.

We ex-children have created an elaborate culture of fantasy. The more brilliantly our moviemakers and television makers succeed in their work of the technological and artistic imagination, the more their audiences are transported back into the realm of the child-id that is most hospitable to fantasy--a zone of suspended disbelief wherein all things become possible, including deeds of graphic violence. It is sometimes said that too many television shows and movies are cynically targeted at 12-year-olds. That's not exactly the point: the makers of those shows in effect appropriate the imaginative world of the child because the youthful brain is the environment most frictionlessly sympathetic to fantasy, no questions asked. The tiresome, responsible brain of the adult breaks into the action and says, Now wait a minute.

We pay a moral price. Our profitable fantasy culture has set up a resonance by which, in the minds of children, a murderous dream of revenge, say, slips easily through the looking glass into actuality. The greater our creativity, in some sense the more we disturb the ecology, the balance of nature, between the universes of fantasy and actuality. Naturally, this disturbance is most dramatically manifested in children, who lack the reality-testing resources of experience and self-possession to make the necessary distinctions, and to subdue the animals that sometimes get loose in their brains.

So when you link a fantasy culture to the wondrous American inventory of guns, you may now and then get a little terrorist. Guns fire vicious daydreams into the actual. Squint and point, and one magic trigger-finger's twitch, the merest spasm of impulse, may send the world into mayhem. That is a power so seductive that it might even have a little Satan in it.