Speaking of his film Petulia, Richard Lester said he had diagnosed a gratuitous violence in American life which came from a catastrophic sense of disillusion. He argued that the way American children are raised to believe that their country is the greatest in the world, with the standard of living that is worth having and the perfect political system (ingrained in a two hundred year old document that may be amended but never really altered) can breed unprocessable anger when life doesn’t work out for some people for reasons that may not be their fault. And if you know it’s not your fault, and it can’t be the fault of society, then where does that anger go? It builds and builds and maybe finally erupts.
I live in a subsection of a failed empire, like most Europeans. There’s an American dream, and many Americans are busy furiously dreaming it, but you never hear of a Scottish dream. It’s hard to picture what such a dream would look like. Shortbread and heroin, possibly. There’s no British dream, or French or German or Italian or Spanish dream. What we have is various rather unsatisfactory realities. This accounts for the dynamic, positive, can-do attitude that is so admirable so much of the time in Americans, and it would be sad in a way to see this yielding to acceptance of the vicissitudes of fate or the acknowledgement of random injustice in an uncaring universe. But it might be healthier, at least for some people.
It’s this phenomenon that I think explains the different levels of gun violence in the USA and Canada, where guns are just as available. There’s no Canadian dream to get disenchanted by. Canadians base their expectations on what they see around them and aren’t taught to expect something better, though they are no doubt as alert as anyone to the possibility of attaining better with a bit of luck and hard work. In American discourse you hear all the time that failure is not an option, is not acceptable, and yet we’re all of us failures in something or other, and if we can’t accept that, how do we go on?
This being so, do we set ourselves to addressing the emotional problem rather than imposing greater control on firearms? No, that seems crazily optimistic again. Altering the mindset of an entire nation isn’t a very realistic goal, and there are aspects of the gung ho mentality that are as admirable as they are ludicrous. Just take their guns away. Also disarm the police, to keep it fair. There’s nothing impractical about this idea. If the majority united and organized behind the idea of gun control, no pressure group could stop them. Or maybe I’m crazily optimistic too.
by David Cairns