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"  How big is Cormac McCarthy right now? Never mind Oprah and the Pulitzer and the Oscars -- he&amp;#039;s so big that a Knoxville preservation society is trying to save his childhood home from neglect. That&amp;#039;s the ultimate achievement for a writer -- having the place where he learned to read and jerk off and stare out the window at strangers considered too valuable to let decay. His ascent from cult writer to Great American Novelist\u2122; isn&amp;#039;t his fault -- it&amp;#039;s not like his books have suddenly spiked in quality; they were always brilliant. No, his worldview has achieved maximum currency all on its own. From &amp;quot;The Orchard Keeper&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;The Road,&amp;quot; McCarthy&amp;#039;s theme has remained the same: Men share an innate violence that can be contained for a while but eventually spirals out of control into mayhem. Everyone seems to get his point these days.  E.g.: One of the fastest-growing sports in the world is Ultimate Fighting, which began in 1993 with the motto &amp;quot;There Are No Rules!&amp;quot; and has added only a few since (&amp;quot;no throat strikes,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;no attacking an opponent on or during the break,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;no kicking to the kidney with the heel&amp;quot;). The first time I watched, years ago, a man caved in another man&amp;#039;s cheek with his knee; the eye was just hanging there; it didn&amp;#039;t look much like a sport. But lack of restraint is the point, much more vital to UFC&amp;#039;s appeal than any display of skill or athleticism. All the other, more conventional sports have been compromised by cheating -- match-fixing in soccer, drugs in baseball, blood doping in cycling, espionage in football, and on and on. We crave a true contest. With no rules comes no cheating. The result is a spectacle of purifying violence.  Purification through violence has always been one of America&amp;#039;s central political mythologies, created and nurtured by figures as diverse as George Washington, John Brown, Malcolm X, and Dick Cheney. It&amp;#039;s the necessary inheritance, perhaps, of a revolutionary nation&amp;#039;s birth in blood. American art follows the basic tenets of the myth, from &amp;quot;Moby-Dick&amp;quot; to Charles Guiteau&amp;#039;s assassination ballad to &amp;quot;The Godfather&amp;quot; to Snoop Dogg. Obsessed with violence and terrified of sex: That&amp;#039;s practically the definition of American culture. As Jack Nicholson reportedly said, &amp;quot;If you suck on a tit, the movie gets an R rating. If you hack it off with an ax, it will be PG.&amp;quot; Censors only grow upset when they don&amp;#039;t understand the background to the violence. Nobody complained when Johnny Cash from Arkansas sang about snorting coke, killing his woman, and fleeing the law, but when Dr. Dre from Compton starts singing, Congress holds hearings.  With the fourth installment of Grand Theft Auto, the series has finally achieved cultural normalcy -- at least none of the usual hypocrites has started whining yet. The game is a perfect expression of violence without restraint, a magnificent mechanism for involving the viewer in a completely enrapturing simulation while doing away with all boundaries. You don&amp;#039;t have to kill the hookers in GTA, but if you don&amp;#039;t kill hookers, you&amp;#039;re not going to play the game for long. The first, or possibly the second, question players entering the game will ask themselves is, Can I hit the jumbo jets with the rocket launcher? The answer is no, you can&amp;#039;t, but you can go into the game&amp;#039;s version of the Met with the rocket launcher and blow up the dinosaur exhibits; the bones careen off the walls; it&amp;#039;s hilarious. Whereas UFC creates a savage spectacle, Grand Theft Auto IV turns violence into a big laugh. The experience of losing yourself in GTA is &amp;quot;potus et exlex,&amp;quot; being lost to yourself and outside the law, a description of comedy that goes back to the poet Horace in the first century B. C. Grand Theft Auto is comedy purified: a safe alternate world in which to break the law as profoundly and as often as you like. It&amp;#039;s the up-to-the-minute form of a primordial joy, a kind of digital Valhalla. Kill with nobody dying. Steal with nobody losing. Repeat for eternity.  I hear my mother asking, &amp;quot;Why must our paradises be so violent?&amp;quot; Cormac McCarthy has an answer. From &amp;quot;Blood Meridian,&amp;quot; McCarthy&amp;#039;s masterpiece: &amp;quot;War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. . . . That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.&amp;quot; We can choose to sublimate violence through sports or confront it through fiction or turn it into comedy through video games. Violence remains. Always. This kind of mayhem may be ancient -- it may even be permanent in the human condition -- but it&amp;#039;s new to America. With September 11, Americans&amp;#039; basic political myth of liberation and purification through violence shattered. That day was an encounter with violence not in the hinterland, as in the Mexican War or the Wild West, not a liberating violence, as in the Revolution or the Civil War, but blind, pointless, utter mayhem. The war in Iraq, so often compared to World War II or Vietnam, depending on who&amp;#039;s doing the comparing, has no accurate precedent in American experience. It has been a long, horrific lesson that the mayhem is within us as well as beyond us. Americans torturing innocents at Abu Ghraib and Guant\u00E1namo Bay. Terrorists training children as young as nine to be suicide bombers. And for what? The mayhem is foundationless and cornucopian. There&amp;#039;s no bottom to it, and there&amp;#039;s no top to it. Art and sport are just trying to keep up.  Any success can only ever be partial. The modern Olympics, under way this month in Beijing, might at first appear to be the opposite in every way to Ultimate Fighting, an idealistic way to contain or at least mollify our inner demons. In the ancient Olympics, the most honored sport was the &amp;quot;pankration,&amp;quot; a form of all-in wrestling not so different from the mixed martial arts of the UFC -- except that it was done nude, and competitors sometimes died rather than surrender. The Greeks paused all war for the duration of the games, but they also understood that violence can only be bracketed, and only briefly.  The same people who invented tragedy knew that even within sacred and peaceful circles where war never intrudes, we need to see a fight. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4812/media-violence-0808/>