Bang bang (or slash), you're dead. OK, now get back up....Hey, get back up....

Hitchcock directs the farmhouse scene

There's a farmhouse scene in Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain" where Paul Newman's character and a farmer's wife try hard to silence an enemy agent by killing him. 

Problem is, nothing seems to work. They try banging his head with a shovel, strangling him with a telephone cord, even forcing his upper half into a gas oven. Nothing quite does the trick.

Hitchcock has said in old interviews that he wanted to shoot that scene to show just how difficult it really is to kill another human being. The will to live is strong and turbulent within the human spirit.

A perverse intimacy
This afternoon I'd just gotten off the phone with a client who asked me to make a presentation about workplace civility when a Tweet came through from the New York Times breaking news desk. I sent the link: "You're not going to believe this," I told him. "Talk about workplace civility...!"

Recently fired, an Oklahoma man attacked his co-workers and beheaded one of them before police took him down. People who hate Muslims will say the problem is all Islam. I think the problem is, in part, that our mental health system is filled with as many holes as our gun laws (even though no gun was used in this attack). 

Beheading another human being requires such a perverse intimacy, I can't imagine a rational human having the stomach for it. You have to look into your victim's eyes and watch them suffer—for several minutes—the most barbaric pain one human can inflict on another.

We Americans understand violence in all ways but one—via reality. Rampage shootings notwithstanding, we don't have 'round-the-clock gunfights in most of our streets, where going to school includes dodging bullets. Thanks to superb moviemaking, we have an idea of what happens when a body explodes with dozens of bullet wounds. I've lived in countries where violence wasn't so sparse, where even young children became somber but matter-of-fact when another body turned up in the gutter. The first time I did see a gunshot wound up close, a grim-faced trauma unit prepared itself to save the woman's life. Watching the thoracic surgeon create an intentional wound to inflate the victim's lung was painful enough. 

We admire her style, but most Americans forget Jacqueline Kennedy was herself a victim of extreme violence on 11/22/63. 

We see the news, not the consequences. The violence to which we're accustomed isn't just "of the moment." Survivors of violence suffer decades of emotional trauma, not because they're wimps but because the human mind struggles to comprehend such experiences by reliving them. It's a hard thing to shut off. The loved ones of each victim suffer decades of bereavement. 

We can't afford to become the thing that desensitizes us. The rest of us become steadily inured—so long as it's not happening on our streets, in our homes, then it's just the stuff of TV drama. But if you think it's utter folly to hold your hand over an open flame, or to have your spouse stick a red-hot poker through your ribs, then probably you realize our national acceptance of violence could kill us from the inside out more effectively than any foreign enemy.