Books: This Age of Violence

A SIGN FOR CAIN by Fredric Wertham, M.D. 391 pages. Macmmillian $6.95.

“There is not one scientific or scientifically oriented book in any language on the general subject of physical violence and its prevention,” complains Clinical Psychiatrist Wertham, 71, in the opening pages of this profoundly indignant inquiry into man’s inhumanity to man. A Sign for Cain aims at filling the gap. It tamps aphorism, anecdote and erudition into stinging whiffs of grapeshot that splay across the whole range of contemporary thought and life. Wertham’s thesis is that no murder, no rape, no senseless act of destruction is ever an iso lated, spontaneous event even when it is the product of a clearly psychotic mind. Always it “is linked by a thousand threads to the present fabric of our social and institutional life.”

Bomb Victims. Violence is as contagious as the measles, says Wertham, and far more prevalent. Children are sent early to the “school for violence,” where crime comic books are the texts and television dramas the instructors.

On one TV station in one week, the author found 334 completed or attempted killings, mostly during youngsters’ viewing time. The heroic figure in TV and movie drama is often the “victorious man of violence.” Toy manufacturers fill the Christmas counters with toy guns and war games. Even Superman is unhealthy fare: “the embodiment of racial superiority, race pride, race prejudice.” Explains Wertham: “No dark-skinned or dark-complexioned or not-so-tall-or-so-full-chested youngster, whoever he is or whatever he achieves,’ can measure up to the white Superman.” The adult, too, is everywhere assaulted by ideas that take violence for granted, that brutalize and desensitize Americans to the value of individual life. In this sense, writes Wertham, “we are the victims of the hydrogen bomb before it is ever used,” because its very existence forces society to contemplate genocide. Tobacco and alcohol advertising, he believes, also teach a subtle disregard for human welfare, as does the U.S. acceptance of the annual total of traffic fatalities—”vehicular violence.” Even patriotism comes under Wertham’s rebuke. Monuments to the Unknown Soldier “do not fulfill our duty to the victims,” but in fact feed the 20th century’s growing disregard for the victim as a faceless statistic.

Man as Insect. Some of Wertham’s most provocative fire is directed at the clinical cult in literature and drama, in which human suffering is viewed with such detachment that it becomes trivial. The tone of John Mersey’s Hiroshima and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood reduces violence almost to the level of natural catastrophes and impersonal acts, he says. The film The Collector, n which a young lepidopterist kidnaps a girl and keeps her locked up until she dies, is more than simply a sick parody of entomology: it adds to what Werham feels is the pervasive view of man as of little more value than an insect.

But for all his indictment of violence as the “cancer” in society, Wertham Believes that there is a cure. It is nothng less than a gradual change in nearly 11 of man’s ways of looking at life, at war, at himself. Poverty and racial rejudice are obviously powerful incitements to violence, but so, he says, is the lassie American emphasis on getting head. The individualism and selfishness inherent in an acquisitive society beget a climate of violence, as does hypernationalism. A Sign for Cain will give readers a healthy dose of “the dignity of indignation,” but it does not offer much hope that man will take the cure.