PERSPECTIVE ON VIOLENCE : America Is Still Shockable--Barely : Someone is sure to film Jefferey Dahmer’s story. Can we be outraged if we don’t support thoughtful entertainment?

It has come to this: It takes a Jeffrey Dahmer to horrify us. Not just your regular serial killer, like the Hillside Strangler, who merely raped and strangled his victims. Not just your regular gang member, who is able to murder a 12-year-old girl in cold blood. Not the casual accidents, in which a 15-year-old boy takes his father’s .38 and shoots his 11-year-old playmate in the head. Stupid, accidental violence merges with planned, systematic violence, and we are left to be shocked only by the cannibalistic cruelty of a madman.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes are of a kind that put him in his own lunatic league, and there is no point using him either to lament the extent of violence in America or to illustrate the theory that all of us share, to some degree, an innate capacity for killing. What we can learn from the Dahmer case lies in observing our reactions to it.

We can predict, for instance, that our entertainment industry stands ready to coopt our horror and sell it back to us for additional thrills. I’m sure that as I write this someone is thinking up ways to produce “The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” for TV or movies. Of course, the resulting film won’t actually tell us anything about Jeffrey Dahmer, psychopathology or the mechanisms of hatred and loneliness that warp the human soul. More likely, it will be a vehicle for gore, an excuse for audiences to watch grisly acts of dismemberment and for critics to deplore how violent our society has become.

Many observers have identified the ways in which violent fictional images in popular culture--television, movies, rock lyrics, comics, video games--both reflect and inspire acts of real violence. I share their worry. How may images of “blowing the enemy away,” of exploding bodies, of hatchet murders, of detailed tortures, of death made dazzling by special effects, can a child see without becoming numb? Judging from the epidemic of emotionally deadened teen-agers, such as the gang that robbed and murdered a pizza-delivery boy and then calmly ate the pizza, I’d say: not many.

But my fear about the effects of violence in the media goes beyond their content. Grisly ghost stories and fairy tales are, after all, the oldest plots in civilization; And, although I detest the Terminator-style films that make jillions of dollars, I’m always glad when Indiana Jones blows away the Nazis.

My worry is not entirely with what children and adults see in our entertainment media, bad as it is; it’s with what they don’t see. There are few if any counterbalancing stories of what used to be called character. Television and movies rarely produce stories of real people--the kind who know each other longer than two minutes before they go to bed or commit murder with chain saws--and audiences apparently no longer have the patience to watch them. Violence is the market, but the violence rarely is explained, rarely has emotional consequences, rarely has meaning. This is why we can watch “Bambi” and be moved to tears by the death of a cartoon deer, whereas the slaughter of hundreds of bad guys--in film or war--moves us not at all.

The real indictment in American culture, the crime that sits before us and that we do not see, is that television and films no longer demand that their audiences think. No empathy or understanding is required. Are the bad guys bad? OK, kill ‘em. In this respect, one-minute political commercials, advertisements that posture as news stories, and the blurring of troubling news reports with amusing tales (so as not to disturb or offend the viewing audience unduly) commit the real violence to our minds.

It is human and normal to eventually become numb to the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer and to the random murders on our own city streets. No one can sustain the high pitch of shock and revulsion that the first news of such deaths evokes. Yet if we truly want a less violent society, we must think seriously about the changes that will get us there.

We can make sure, for example, that there is intervention and treatment for children who are aggressive and sadistic, the surest precursors of adult violence, and we must demand this as noisily as politicians currently demand more jails.

We can demand the reregulation of television, our most powerful medium, in order to ensure, as we once had in this country, a basic level of public service programming, thoughtful political coverage and debate, and explorations of complex issues (none of which would currently win a ratings competition).

We can insist on honest language for all acts of violence: War, whether we support it politically or not, means killing individual human beings by the thousands, not “inficting collateral damage.” If we worry about the failure of empathy among teen-age gang members, we must worry equally about the national failure of empathy in wartime.

And we can say, for ourselves and our families, “Enough!” Enough of gratuitous and exploitative mayhem calling itself entertainment. Even if the special effects are awesome.