It happened again. Another angry, frustrated person resolves to shoot his way into everyone's consciousness. Have you seen his creepy smiling face in his mug shot? It's rather like the look on the kid announcing to his mother he just poisoned the neighbor's dog. "See what I can do", he seems to be saying. The only difference this time (as compared to Virginia Tech, Columbine, El Paso, etc) is he was captured before he could put the exclamation point on his stupid rage by killing himself.
It's news but did it stop anyone from their daily pursuits? Of course not because we've seen it so many time in the past 3-4 decades. It's all too damn familiar. Troubled childhood, rejections pile up, girls think he is weird, schools kick him out, throw in alcohol and drugs and presto you have your new nut job with a full metal jacket. I hope this time we fucking find out what he was or was not thinking. When these gunmen kill themselves they take their thought processes with them. We can't ask them, "what the hell were you thinking"?
Also, all the talk about how we've become an angry nation frankly makes me angry. We've been an angry nation for decades, but more and more people act out their anger in some sort of macabre reality show of their own. They see their violence as their "final statement" and their "piece de resistance". It's like they think well, I've added up to nothing and don't see myself as ever adding up to something so I'll go out in a purple haze of violence sure to get me in the history books. Didn't Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Billy the Kid? Lee Oswald (allegedly) did that with JFK, James Earl Ray killed MLK, Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy. But this type of random senseless violence is more reminencent of what CHarles Manson did with his followers: the drama, the kabuki theater of blood, the crazy reasons given as to why, the savagery. Is Loughner any less crazy or brutal than the poster boy of crazy Charles Manson?
It's not talk radio that's causing all this. I grant you political talk shows (believe me I've listened to them) are filled with stupid comments, irrational ideation, and drama. Most of that talk is angry to be sure but our forefathers understood (with the first amendment) that you have to let people rant, talk, get their frustrations, fears, stupid as they might be, out so they DON"T resort to violence. Do you really think smiley Jared Loughner listened to radio at all let alone political talk? Did the Virginia Tech killer react to Glenn Beck? I don't think so and even if they did 99.9% of the people don't. It's just talk. If you are so weak minded that anyone or anything can talk you into calmly shooting a cute 9 year old girl then you are beyond talk show censorship.
I think it's interesting that with the advent of Political Correctness where everyone is expected to self edit / regulate their behavior and speech we've become an angrier nation. The more we pretend civility and hide our true thoughts and feelings the more frustration and rage grows. The forefathers gave us the freedom to speak so please people stand on the corner and shout, blog til your fingers bleed, smack your pillows at home but get it out. Rant all daynlong if you want but leave the rest of us alone.
Final two points: Our mental health facilities and law enforcement agencies are letting us down tremendously. Jared Loughner had a long history of weirdness, he'd been told to leave college and not come back until he had a letter from a therapist indicating he was normal again. What more do people need to know he is a ticking bomb. We always think, "well, they wouldn't do that"! Here is a big clue everyone ..."That is exactly what unhinged people do"! They do it also because they know their smiling crazy face will be plastered all over the world news. Jared Loughner goes from an anonymous deranged man to a famous deranged man in the span of 24 hours. We have to get these people off the front section of the newspaper,off TV and put into institutions.
That leads to my final point we can't afford as many prisons and mental health institutions it would take to keep all of us safe. So we all just "take our chances" when we go out. As the so called deranged news reporter Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) in the classic movie NETWORK (1976) so eloquently said, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore". Apparently,and sadly in real life many others share his fictional sentiments.
Anti-semitism is a very serious problem in America and around the world. Conservative white males who are often the perps for these sort of shooting sprees often harbor some form of anti-semitism. Glenn Beck has said some pretty serious anti-semitic things. Here is a list of very scary, fire and brimstone, and anti-semitic, things that Beck said in 2010:
ReplyDelete• Beck likens himself to Israeli Nazi hunters: "To the day I die, I am going to be a progressive hunter." 20 January 2010
• Social justice is a "perversion of the Gospel, not what Jesus was saying". 11 March 2010
• "Charles Darwin is the father of the Holocaust." 20 August 2010
• "We have been sold a lie … that the poor in America are suffering." November 20 2010
• Beck mocks President Obama's daughter Malia and questions her "level of education". He later apologises. 28 May 2010
• Uncle Sam is a "child molester" who is "raping our wallets … and destroying our families". 16 April 2010
• Beck said the prime goal of his coverage of the midterm elections was to "make George Soros cry" which was hard to do as Soros "saw people into gas chambers". 2 November 2010
• "Women are psychos". 20 January 2010
• Putting the "common good" first is the kind of thing that "leads to death camps". 28 May 2010
• "God will wash this nation with blood if he has to." 25 August 2010
This stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. I would never advocate censorship.) And I'm not even saying that there is a direct connection to the shooting and right wing political commentators. But I think that there's an important parallel. What one says has an affect on the mindset of the people who listen. It often--if they are easily influenced--shapes their reality. This doesn't make anyone legally responsible. But it does make companies ethically responsible.
It's important for political leaders to distance themselves from this kind of rhetoric and to point out instances of racism, anti-semitism and flat out falsehoods about government, law-making and socialism. Frankly, I'm not seeing that happen enough. And that includes President Obama, who always wants to be a peace maker. It would do him (and us) some good to make a few enemies for the cause of peace.
Check this out. It's Glenn Beck talking about Gold. And God. And Guns. The three Gs, as he calls it:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOynBwfpOMU&feature=related
And here's Loughner talking about something very similar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHoaZaLbqB4
Notice at the end he talks about currency and how he won't live under a government that isn't back by gold and uses mind control. This echos a lot of the things that Glenn Beck and other political commentators have been saying. And listen to Beck here, when he talks about Sarah Palin. Notice how he uses arcane language--language that sounds like it's from the American revolution and remember that Loughner was connected to a white supremacist group called The American Renaissance that advocated a kind of white supremacy based anti-government insurrection within America. (Just press play on the video player on the article page):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/10/glenn-beck-emails-sarah-p_n_806802.html
Let's not forget that Giffords is a woman in power (check one), that she voted against the immigration bill in Arizona (check two) and that she is a Jew (check three.)
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