What we see, we do: violence and the media.

Monkey see, monkey do, correct? The fire-setting and burning of a subway tokenbooth clerk in New York City replicates in real life a movie incident in a recent action thriller. Scores of such copycat crimes are regularly reported.

Violent images on TV or in the movies have inspired people to set spouses on fire in their beds, lie down in the middle of highways, extort money by placing bombs in airplanes, rape people in particularly disgusting ways, and who knows how many other kinds of shootings and assaults.

Can anyone still honestly doubt that violent and criminal images in the media or in music incite aggressive behavior? Only those making mints of money purveying violence to the great American public even try to defend the practice.

Granted, some civil libertarians who are worried about the dangers of censorship will admit we have a problem, but stoutly maintain that the price of curbing "free expression" is too high. In another part of the forest, similar arguments go on among feminists about the effects of pornography.

Defenders of the sorry state of our media will usually claim that (1) real life is violent, so why not be honest and show it; and (2) only a few vulnerable aggression-prone persons will be negatively affected, so why keep everyone else from the innocent entertainment of having a few thrills--whether of an aggressive or sexual nature. Is it the media's fault if unhinged people get set off on some rampage by what they watch or hear?

Most psychologists who have studied the question of how aggression operates are convinced that everyone learns violent behavior by seeing it enacted, ready or not. Children will beat Bobo dolls into the ground if they have seen grown-ups do it first, and even those children who do not immediately enact the aggression learn the behavior and remember how it's done.

The more prestigious the person modeling aggressive behavior, the more likely it is to be imitated by observers. Imitation, after all, is an indispensable way that an intelligent species like ours learns.

Children do it. Teen-agers do it. Grownups do it. Mindlessly we automatically imitate and follow the leader. Fads sweep societies--from slang to games to foods to clothing to intellectual paradigms (and the use of words like "paradigm"). Who hasn't found herself repeating phrases recently heard? Or humming mindless TV commercials? Athletes will watch videos depicting images of excellent moves to increase their own proficiency.

Anything we notice and process gets put into the information programs in our minds and memories. When the input (horrible word but highly infectious), consists of a violent or sexually shocking act, two lessons are learned at once. One is the behavioral sequence, how, for instance, to go about setting fire to a vagrant sleeping on a park bench. The second lesson is more subtle: one learns that this kind of behavior exists; it can happen here; and it is permitted in the universe as we know it. There's the act and then there's the permission to do the unthinkable. Taboos lose their inhibitory force. And if good guys are doing horrible things in order to fight the bad guys, then the behavior is all the more permissible. Homicide rates increase in a country after its wars, whether it's a "just" or "unjust" war.

So what to do when your culture is being corrupted and poisoned? Recently I was mulling over this question and meditating on possible nonviolent campaigns or applications of Saul Alinsky's tactics. I began to wonder whether Catholics couldn't be organized in order to collectively boycott the offending media and thereby exert social pressure.

Suddenly it hit me: Good grief, you're trying to reinvent the Legion of Decency! What an irony! We used to loathe and despise being commanded to stand up in church and repeat an oath not to go to immoral movies. Eventually I mustered enough courage to endure the torture of social nonconformity and remained seated in protest. In the Joe McCarthy era, liberal Catholics hated being pressured into loyalty oaths like a bunch of obedient puppets.

But on second thought, why not rehabilitate his church effort to influence the media by using the more acceptable method of petition? Signing petitions and protest might make a difference. If we just passively stand by and don't try to do anything, we are surely guilty of letting our country decline and fall without a struggle.

So what if conservatives would have to be allied with liberals in this enterprise? Can't liberals and conservatives cooperate as fellow each other's total platforms? I'm with the radical feminists on the pornography question, even if I'm ardently prolife and they ain't.

At this point I am willing to risk the dangers of censorship because I'm absolutely convinced that what you put into the imagination creates the person. Saint Paul writes to the Christians at Philippi, "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

What we pay attention to, becomes us, as surely as we become what we eat. Good images and good thoughts and benevolent feelings become good deeds. And alas, the opposite is also true. Maybe even truer since we may have a built-in tendency to regress into infantile rages and paranoid anxieties. And why the human fascination with blood, gore, and violence in the first place? Saint Augustine noted sadly how eagerly people were drawn to view mangled corpses, and how easily his noble and good friend Alypius was first persuaded by peer pressure to go the Coliseum and once there, became addicted to the murderous displays of gladiatorial combat. These "games" were the thrilling entertainments of that pagan culture.

When we are bombarded continually with images of violence, brutality, sexual immorality, and betrayals of trust, our minds and spirits suffer. As the brainy heroine of Norman Rush's great novel Mating puts it: "The conviction that the world is secretly corrupt is dangerous to certain temperaments because it rationalizes cutting corners and being selfish, an impulsion I was not in need of." And who is?

Our only hope may be in the fact that altruism is also innate and can also be imitated easily. Heroic rescuers just plunge into action without a second thought. Often they don't even want to accept praise or reward afterward because their altruistic behavior seemed to them "the only thing to do." Of course, their sense of what was "obviously necessary" had been nourished by countless prior acts of attention and good behavior. So modest altruists do deserve their medals.

Well now, thinking of all these things, what's to be done?