VIOLENT WAYS SCHOOL SHOOTINGS REFLECT THE CULTURE AT LARGE.

Byline: STEVE SALERNO

RECENT weeks have presented America with two more mass shootings whose wider meanings we can now debate. First, seven died at that Wisconsin party; then came the Cleveland student who wounded four before committing suicide. We've also learned of a potentially catastrophic school plot thwarted in a Philadelphia suburb.

I find it interesting that the Cleveland episode failed to get the coverage generated by other school shootings. One surmises that the carnage was simply insufficient to make it worthy of the usual wall-to-wall media. Carnage = coverage. Certainly that was the case six months ago in Blacksburg, Virginia, when Cho Seung-Hui opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing 33 people including himself.

It behooves us to ask: Are these periodic massacres really unrelated acts committed by random madmen? Or is there something in the culture (besides the availability of guns) that might explain all this?

Consider: As dawn broke over Blacksburg on Monday, April 16, the top-selling DVD in the land was "The Departed," a tour de force in mayhem that, tellingly, won an Academy Award for Martin Scorsese, who has a tradition of making violent, highly commercial films ("Goodfellas," "Gangs of New York," "Taxi Driver").

The previous night, HBO had aired the latest installment in the most acclaimed show in cable history, "The Sopranos," which lifted TV's ceiling for violent content to new heights.

Again this year, ultraviolent video games rank among the best-selling ones: "Hitman," "Mortal Kombat" and "Dead or Alive." Several popular musical genres describe and even advocate, sometimes in chilling detail, atrocities perpetrated on women, cops and other symbols of authority and harmonious living.

It is an exercise in self-deception, then, to speak of Columbine and Virginia Tech as if such tragedies fall outside the "normal" rhythms of American life. Quite simply, we celebrate violence in America.

We despise the tragedy that visits our own house, of course, but there is no denying the visceral stirrings we feel when it occurs outside our personal orbits -- on TV, at the cinema, in the news. Oh, we flinch at first. Then we peek. Then we stare. We'll applaud the propriety of networks that broadcast just the first few seconds of the Saddam hanging or the Daniel Pearl decapitation -- before we go hunting for the unedited versions online. (This is one reason why crime films based on true stories always tout that fact. Audiences want to know that this terrible tragedy did, actually, occur. It heightens the impact.)

We can never admit this to ourselves, so when the worst happens, we posture and inveigh. As is also true with sex, we demonize those who give us exactly that which thrills us so. Intellectually, we know that we should reject violence, and morally, we want to live up to that noble standard. Thus when the killing starts, we discuss how to contain it, prevent it. That's the rational side of us talking. Meanwhile, that other side waits in breathless anticipation of the next time.

Even in our most rational moments, one can't help but notice how selective we are in our distaste for the macabre.

We're outraged when our enemies methodically behead a handful of Americans, but think little of the hundreds or thousands of foreign civilians who are haphazardly dismembered by our bombs and mortar fire. When it suits us, we're a culture of methodical violence in our own right: the last of the world's great democracies to condone the death penalty, as well as the only nation ever to use atomic weapons against other humans.

Is it not arrogant and hypocritical to assume that we -- among all peoples -- are entitled to decide when slaughter is apt and when it isn't?

This much seems certain: Violence begets violence. And in America, we're heavily invested in our violence.

When death came to Columbine and Virginia Tech, we sat glued to our screens because, we told ourselves, we were witnessing national tragedies. We sighed, and cried, and said, "My God, those poor families." In both cases, however, we kept watching long after there was anything new to see. We watched the parade of grisly, now-familiar images as if in a trance, cycling through the range of emotions that we count on violence to provide. We watched, in the end, because we find these things engrossing and -- dare I use the word? -- entertaining.

Here, I'm mindful of the Russell Crowe character's shouted taunt to the masses after he summarily dispatches his Coliseum foes in another memorably violent Oscar-winning film, Gladiator: "Are you not entertained?"

Whatever singular personal pathology drives any given mass murderer to kill, they are, collectively, the ultimate creatures of a violent culture -- an outre reflection of a people who crave violence, subsidize it, and even dress up in fancy clothes to give it awards. If we are consumers of death, then the Klebolds and Harrises and Cho Seung-Huis are our retailers. Like the season's hot new grinder flick, they give us what we manifestly want.

One sensed in the tortured materials Cho mailed to NBC that he saw himself as the antihero in some formulaic Scorsese film, his campus orgy of bloodletting serving as the final, inevitable act. It was art imitating life imitating art imitating life. And death.