The first rule of fight club is that no one talks about fight club.

However, the first rule of groundbreaking films containing violence is that they must inevitably become the new cause celebrity for every politico trying to make a point about violence in our society.

Even former drug czar Bill Bennett got into the action recently on Larry King Live.

He denounced the film for its senseless violence even though King got him to admit that he had not even seen the film.

The Des Moines Register got into the action last Saturday when it reported on an underground boxing club for teens in Des Moines.

The members denied having seen the movie let alone being influenced by it.

Intelligent discourse is nearly as hard to come by in America as Cuban cigars.

But like a good El Presidente, one occasionally makes its way into the marketplace.

Susan Faludi, Newsweek contributing editor, wrote an intelligent piece on “Fight Club” in the Oct. 25 edition of the magazine.

She pointed out that there is much more to “Fight Club” than the violence which everyone is keyed up about.

The film is, in her opinion, a masculine version of “Thelma and Louise” that discusses issues of alienation, depression and meaningless affectation in a patriarchal world.

What is more to the point than all of the criticism and dialogue on all the news programs is how once again our society has gone looking for scapegoats wherever it can find them.

“Fight Club” is not the cause of violence in our country.

Neither is any other violent film that was ever made.

The violence in our movies, video games, music and television programs is merely a reflection of reality.

As a nation, we have barely begun to come out of our infancy.

We are still the ranting toddler of countries, kicking and screaming about our independence and what a big boy we really are.

Rather than blaming movies, perhaps we should look at the 20th century — the bloodiest century in the history of all humanity.

Biologically, we are barely out of the cave. There is virtually no difference between us and our ancestors who beat each other away from the watering hole with sticks and bones.

We are never going to evolve beyond the cave if we do not first attempt to explore our barbaric natures intelligently.

Violence in the media is a symptom of the real problem, and political finger-pointing is just another form of avoiding the issue.

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Iowa State Daily Editorial Board: Sara Ziegler, Greg Jerrett, Kate Kompas and Carrie Tett.