In the wake of Littleton, Col., there's been plenty of media blather about America's culture of violence. Such stories are standards after tragedies -- first blame the Second Amendment, then blame the First -- and they are certainly more predictable than enlightening.

   Accepting as fact all the cyberbabble about the impact of violence on the culture, it's not much of a stretch to believe the rising level of what it takes to shock (The St. Valentine's Day massacre had seven dead, "Natural Born Killers" 52) is directly related to the death of outrage.

   The death of outrage was a phrase kicked around a lot by right-wing moralists during Monica's 15 months of fame. This makes sense because they have standards, and the very definition of outrage is that it violates standards of decency or morality. For the relativist, non-judgmental, situation-ethics crowd, outrage is rare and its causes are multiple, personal and politically splintered.

   Outrage, a close cousin of passion, gets things moving, gets things done, and its disappearance from modern life, and by extension, modern media, is most lamentable. What would it take to get the masses marching in the streets nowdays? I have no earthly idea.

   We know for certain it's not Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans. My current outrage at our turning a low-grade conflict into a sweeping disaster is a pretty lonely one. I have to look hard to find any kind of media coverage with any passion in it, the passion so necessary for change. Bill Clinton is lucky very few Americans realize that the way we wrote the end game for both Iraq and Kosovo made any ending impossible. We might have well turned the south end of Iraq's no-fly zone into the 51st state.

   I like being a passionate person, in work, in art, in life, so maybe I'm just projecting, but it seems like we're a people leveled out by some sort of national media Prozac at a time when some outrage is needed. American business culture is based on filling markets, and apparently there's not much of a market for outrage.

    We're getting war coverage via official handouts and video-game pictures; we're getting a super-simplified version of things that Milosevic is evil and we are saints. What we're not getting is the fact we started this mess and that our bombing has done nothing to help the fleeing Kosovars. What we're not getting is how many Rwandans got butchered because we didn't care about their genocide. What we're not getting is how the Balkans may be the greatest defensive terrain in the world, and how the prospect of a land war is a useless outrage that must be stopped before it starts.

    The tide turned in Nam when Walter Cronkite turned sour. This war awaits its Cronkite, and I'm not laying bets on Dateline NBC turning advocate any time soon because they could lose their Pentagon access. I'm pleasantly surprised at the level of Congressional reluctance, but then again, a presidential election is looming, so some posturing can be assumed.

    Posturing, of course, is a pale impersonation of outrage. And while the mainstream media could play a role in the rebirth of public outrage, the industry not only does not want to do it, I suspect the bean counters in charge don't know how to do it.

    You can't be outraged at everything or you're just a crank. You can't express outrage in a consistently partisan manner on made-for-confrontation TV shows. Outrage is not a sport, it's not a genre, it's a feeling, and by design, objective media reporting deletes feeling. If news carried more passion, perhaps more people would be passionate about news.

    It's hard to be outraged at another government waste story after you've been reading them for 20 years. What starts as outrage sinks to bewilderment, and media-wise, tackling that bewilderment is an admittedly tough thing to do. I just wish somebody would try.

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