Can we survive in a kick-butt, smart-mouth society?
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- Teenage murderers in Littleton, Colorado, have awakened the social critics within us. For outrageous expressions of violence in our midst, we blame television, the Internet, video games, rock music, pornography, sleaze, schools, parents, teachers, gays, materialism, guns, malls, devil worship, elitist athletes, foreigners, fundamentalists, money and sex.

All of our targets are external. We blame everything and everyone but ourselves and our own arrogance.

At the risky of sounding preachy, I sense we're lacking outrage at a small but significant trend in our society.

America increasingly operates with a kick-butt mentality. We teach it to our child athletes. They break huddles before games or during time-outs with the holler: "Kick Butt!"

We teach it to our managers. "Johnson, we're sending you over to sales to kick some butts." My own profession of journalism gives a special place of veneration to the newsroom manager with a reputation for "kicking butt."

CEOs are often known for their skills as "hatchet men," a corporate corollary to one who "kicks butt."

We send our soldiers to foreign lands with weapons of destruction and strategies that essentially call upon them to "kick some butt." The stereotypic infantryman is happiest when he or she is assigned to "kick some butt."

Then we wonder why our high school students almost without exception claim to having been bullied at school.

Are we encouraging bullies? Are we teaching our children to solve problems by kicking butt. Too often, we call upon our own civil forms of violence to deal with the violent ones among us.

We haven't learned, except perhaps in our distaste for corporeal punishment of our children, that kicking butt may bring immediate results, but in the long run it is more likely to foster animosity, revenge, anger, disloyalty, irresponsibility and lack of productivity - not to mention aggression and failure.

Running alongside this kick-butt mentality is a smart-mouth mentality that thinks the greatest laugh in the world comes from denigrating or degrading someone else.

I know such mocking banter can be great fun among close friends: "We only mock those we love," I've often said to a friend after I've jokingly made fun of him.

But the put-down has become the number one weapon in the American social arsenal, spearheaded by television's comedy writers and in that medium's "kick-butt" action-adventure offerings. The smart-mouth modus operandi has boiled over to the general population's way of handling confrontation and crisis.

Blame it on "M*A*S*H"; blame it on "Cheers"; blame it on "Home Improvement"; blame it on "Frasier"; "The Simpsons"; "Beavis and Butthead" or "Ellen." Most of all, I suppose, we should blame it on Archie Bunker or even "The Honeymooners."

Whoever started this trend for one-liner put-downs is irrelevant; it has grown to epidemic proportions. In television's line-up of comedy hits, the put-down reigns supreme.

Don Rickles may have begun the revolution, but now his insulting smart-mouth ways have been inherited by every coy child star on television.

If nations were comedy teams, Americans would be Abbotts to the world's Costellos, we'd be Martins to the world's Lewises; we'd be Fred Flintstones to the world's Barney Rubbles.

Are we enroute to becoming Cains to the world's Abels?

The put-down hides our need for self-aggrandizement and our prejudices. Social scientists tell us dehumanization is at the root of discrimination. The seeds of dehumanizing bias may hide in our tiny put-downs.

A recent study indicates that television for children is admittedly non-educational. Instead, it fills gaps for advertisers with action, adventure, fantasy and - you guessed it - smart-mouth, kick-butt mentalities.

It may seem a distant stretch from the smart-mouth and kick-butt responses to Columbine and Kosovo, but it's a long way from an acorn to an oak as well. Distance doesn't negate reality.

The butthead in our path at home becomes the enemy in our scopes at war.

In our passionate search for explanations of how we could become a nation of teenaged, gun-toting murderers or surgical, missile-releasing commanders, we perhaps need to begin monitoring our mouths and our mocking minds.

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