CinemaCat's Blog

It's Not ME, It's The Rest of the World That's Crazy

2

Comments (0)

A curious incident at Rutherford High School in Panama City, Florida, revealed a rather tenuous connection to the world of anime. Dakota Gates, age 14, was arrested on suspicion of making terroristic threats to classmates after police came into possession of a coded note that documents plans to kill about 10 other students. Gates and another unidentified student were known to frequently communicate through messages in code. Gates' mother, in a defense of her son's actions, told Panama City's WMBB News that her son's odd behavior was influenced by his fondness for the anime series Naruto, currently running on the Cartoon Network. Mrs. Gates' chain of logic is faulty at best: Naruto is a program about an adolescent ninja with ambitions of making a name for himself and one day becoming the leader of his village. There is very little in the series that can be interpreted as likely to inspire a student's plot to kill classmates, but it is an odd and quirky series featuring a lot of personal combat and character motivations that may seem bizarre and opaque to people who are not familiar with the conventions of anime storytelling. Instead, Naruto features many of the tropes that are common in a typical shonen (boy's) anime: a misfit hero who embarks on a path of personal betterment through hard work, practicing his craft and remaining true to his ideals. Similar elements can be seen in anime programs such as Bleach, One Piece, Dragonball and even Pokemon. It's protagonist, Naruto Uzamaki, is a goofball, a klutz, and as dense as spent uranium, but he's also fiercely loyal to his friends, has an unshakable code of honor, and a never-say-die attitude of the type that seems to have fallen out of favor in the normal groupthink agitprop that one normally finds in American children's television. But because the show is "violent", and "foreign", it nearly became a scapegoat for Dakota Gates' strange behavior. See the link below:

http://www.wmbb.com/gulfcoastwest/mbb/news.apx.-content-articles-MBB-2008-02-08-0009.html

However, the police investigation of the incident seems to have squelched the dubious Naruto connection in favor of painting the incident as another potential Columbine-type crisis. And this is where it becomes even more problematic for me. In Panama City, police can hold Gates, a juvenile, for up to 21 days without formally charging him. But for what? Writing messages in code? My friends and I used to do that all the time. Fantasizing about the death of other students? Hell, I'll cop to that, too. I never acted on those thoughts (that's my story and I'm sticking to it), but I had them.  When did we start mobilizing Thought Police to monitor our kids' emotional downturns?
There are some reports that Gates may have done some things that could be interpreted as threatening, but most of these reports are coming from other students, whose judgement of a classmate's actions should be considered suspect in the best of circumstances. And local reports have stated that Gates, who took advanced classes at his school, was struggling with grades that had recently begun to plummet, which may be indicative of sudden emotional problems or some other deep distraction.

By itself, the story doesn't mean much. Cartoons in general and anime in particular have been among the favorite whipping boys of self-appointed cultural watchdogs looking for some excuse other than bad parenting on which to blame why some kids go wrong. But this is actually the fourth time in as many months that a conncetion has been drawn between a student's "hit list" and an anime program. And in the other cases, the connection is much stronger. In November of last year, a senior student at the Franklin Military Academy in Richmond, Virginia was suspended when it was discovered that he had written a list of names in a homemade "Death Note". Death Note is the title of another anime series, also currently playing on the Cartoon Network, in which a high school student gets his hands on a "Death Note", a notebook used by shinagami (death gods - the Japanese equivalent to the Grim Reaper). Anyone whose name is written in the Death Note will die, and the student uses it in a plan to create a utopia by eliminating the world's criminals. Composed of equal parts of dark fantasy, police procedural, and a prolonged battle of wits between the student and an eccentric detective, the series is one of the best anime shows to come along in the last decade. It is also, like most popular anime series, a merchandising bonanza. There are even some online stores specializing in anime- and manga-related goods that sell notebooks with the program's logo on the cover. So pretty much anybody can have their very own "Death Note".
Similar Death Note incidents have been reported at middle schools in Nashville, Tennessee and Milford, Massachusetts, both in December. The "perps" have been as young as 12 years old. The mainstream news agencies reporting these incident seem mostly unaware of the program's existance, but if more such incidents occur, it's only a matter of time before it's seen as a trend.
Unlike the Florida case, the connection between the three "Death Note" incidents and the anime series cannot be ignored. The idea of being able to kill someone just by writing their names is a seductive one, especially to young people who often feel helpless and at the mercy of a world that seems to have been created just for the task of tormenting them. And a disturbed student who embraces these fantasies, regardless or whether he has any intention of ever acting on them, will be seen as a danger to those around him. While you may find it admirable that the authorities are being proactive in stopping these kids before another school shooting occurs, I am profoundly disturbed at the direction this is going. We seem to be treading in an Orwellian scenario where a person can be jailed, or at least labelled a nut job, just for thinking bad thoughts. In none of the incidents mentioned above did the students take any violent action against anyone, and the police have failed to find any evidence that the students had intentions of living out their revenge fantasies. This type of revenge fantasy is as common as dirt; any kid in the world who has ever been bullied has dreamed about seeing his tormentor squashed by a truck. That doesn't make him a murderer, or even a psychopath; it's just the mind's way of dealing with feelings of helplessness. Everyone is ready to condemn the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, and rightly so, but few people remember that those students had been the target of incessant bullying by their classmates. Try as I might, I can't find a single news story documenting what role those bullies had in provoking the tragedy. It is far too easy to blame a tragedy on a TV show, rather than investigate the social factors that may have been the real cause.