That happens to be the title of my favorite Gerry Mulligan album, but it has taken a completely different meaning after last week. A week ago Sunday The World-Herald did a feature story on "The End of Innocence" for the 50th anniversary of 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather's murder spree with his 14-year-old girlfriend across Nebraska into Wyoming, beginning on December 1st, 1957, ending January 29th, 1958, 11 deaths later, generating an enduring popular culture fascination, partially because "Nebraska was an unlikely place for such a rampage," "the heart of 'Ozzie and Harriet' country." (How do you make a musical, "Love Kills," out of this? Six movies, a TV miniseries, Springsteen's "Nebraska"--originally titled "Starkweather"--but a musical??) Stephen King kept a Starkweather scrapbook, uses Charlie as a villain, and is quoted: "The very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. . . . He was like an outrider of what America might become."
Seven months older than this brutal murderer, I was a junior, in Tom Osborne's class but not his league, at Hastings College in south central Nebraska and remember well the excitement of possibly having the couple pass through on what became a violently bloody road trip, road trips sacred in our culture, whether Kerouac's "On the Road" or "Smokey and the Bandit," "Dude, Where's My Car?" "Thelma and Louise," and dozens of other "road" movies. Rumors were abundant in a traumatized state, and we deliberately hung out at a different cafe than usual, on Highway 6, because that was Starkweather and Fugate's most likely route through, as it truly was.
The newspaper pictured all the victims with short biographies, ran a sidebar on the 1950s, wrote about the burgeoning passion for cars and car culture with teenagers, even resurrecting James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause." Starkweather represented himself as "alienated," so a professor who studies serial killers was quoted, "a boy feeling oppressed and downtrodden with no chance of making it, and he takes the violent way out," (As I remember the period, the existentialists such as Camus and Sartre were very popular then, alienation a key word among them, though Charlie Starkweather was hardly any kind of a reader--or thinker--in his murderous resentment.)
Of course, three days later on Wednesday, December 5th, after splitting up with his girlfriend and losing his job at McDonald's, 19-year-old Robert Hawkins used an automatic rifle in a posh department store to slaughter eight Von Maur employees and Christmas shoppers and then himself. It took only six minutes of terror to generate national media frenzy and add Omaha to the national list of gun massacres.
Tonight, December 10th, The World-Herald ran an article about the gory violence of video games, opening with "Graphic scenes of gunshot victims spurting blood and a man urinating into a prisoner's cell . . . ." I've hated such video games since my nephews were little and killing nasty little video creatures with battle axes, automatic guns, and lasers, and I had saved a November 2nd story about the new "Manhunt 2": "In the game, the player guides two people who escape from an insane asylum and go on a killing spree with a variety of implements, including axes." But this is the culture of the "Saw," "Hostel," and "The Hills Have Eyes" series, not to mention Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger stalking into our nightmares.
As the newspaper editorialized about Hawkins' slaughter: "An alienated young man . . . deciding to strike a pose by laying his hands on a commando-style firearm and then killing innocent men and women in video-game fashion. . . . The pain of the situation was heightened, too, by so many press organizations, local as well as national, that rushed forward breathlessly on Wednesday with unsubstantiated claims, misleading rumors and incessant, repetitive coverage rather than reporting professionally and responsibly." The W-H later demonstrated its responsible, professional behavior indeed by "not reproducing the suicide notes" to avoid a model for similar sorts and because "The notes contain vulgarities. One is insulting to the people who were killed." That was true, but, of course, I easily found the notes verbatim (and just as the W-H described) on the Internet, today's Celebrity Gossip Asylum.
My sister phoned from our home area in northeastern Nebraska to check on all the Omaha family, but I, as mentioned often enough, don't watch TV news and was, in fact, at a late-afternoon matinee of "Beowulf" out of English-major dutifulness, and didn't get home until around 7:00 to her voice mail. I discovered the "horrific"--much used but aptly--news from calling her back, after which I switched on the TV, terribly saddened and deeply depressed. Coincidentally, I had been contemplating forcing myself into joining the many mall walkers at Westroads, which even has special early walking hours, because I need the exercise.
The blanket media coverage by the three local stations inched forward over the two days or more of relentless, fatiguing, finally irritating repetition on the same order as the election ads already airing, the saturation called--bad word choice--overkill for good psychological reason. Consequently I resigned myself to losing all regular programming (including my very favorite "Life") and to watching other, unaffected channels, which I generally do anyway, though the situation was much more intensely close emotionally, after all my years in Douglas County courtroom criminal proceedings, with my deeply abiding respect for the police and fire departments. But I was thrown back to the endless, frustrating, boring saturation of O.J.'s SUV wandering under news helicopters and the monstrous 9/11 horrors that reduced me to sobbing so that I could not watch. The disservice of saturation media coverage over such terrible events actually is unhealthy ugliness to contemplate at any length. I'll have to deal with the gun later.
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