The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
America has become numb to violence because it just drowns in it, day in and day out.
I remember being a kid and seeing the 'National Inquirer' at the grocery store checkout line. When somebody actually picked up a copy, it was mortifying. You felt dirty for them. But now it's perfectly acceptable to read something like that. There's absolutely no taboo surrounding that kind of exploitation.
I think we can see violence in a whole range of realms. We certainly see it in the media, where extreme violence is now so pervasive that people barely blink when they see it, and certainly raise very few questions about what it means pedagogically and politically. Violence is the DNA, the nervous system of this system's body politic.
On TV you can, you know you can cram, you know, 30 people into a closet and have an orgy, and then they can all shoot up, and everybody has cigarettes in their nostrils and their ears. They don't care. So yeah, television is amazing right now.
I remember when the first police scary video thing came out, and you thought, wow, ooh, look at this, come and look, come and look. And now it's on every channel.
One of the great things about 'Jericho' that is a parallel with 'Over There' is, in this country, we tend to forget the news we don't want to know about. We're so oversaturated with media and other images that we can turn our head a little bit.
All kinds of ways of expression are spreading out all over the place, information is overflowing, and it's harder and harder to be excited about anything.
I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.
