I struggled with whether or not to post that roundup of the Right’s use of militaristic and eliminationist rhetoric on Saturday, I really did. I actually deleted it for a little while. Anyone with as abysmal a track record as I have when it comes to writing publicly about politics is behooved to watch his step in the heat of the moment. But when I got the sense that some people who read this blog would get, and in fact were getting, something out of the roundup, I put it back up, and there it is. Right now, though, it seems the fairest characterization of shooter Jared Loughner is that he exposed himself to a hodgepodge of rebellious books as a teenager without much of a throughline beyond “fuck the system” (I knew many liberal Ayn Rand-reading kids in high school and I bet you did too), then subsequently drew from a broad set of conspiratorial and anti-government ideologies more or less clustered on the extreme right — visible from the Tea Party fringe but mostly not in the Tea Party fringe, gold-bug stuff excepted — to formulate a personal, idiosyncratic worldview driven mostly by mental illness. In that light it was unfair of me to imply that Loughner’s actions were of a piece with those of Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, Joe Manchin and so on, and I apologize. Clearly the potential for political violence has been much on my mind — otherwise that round-up of posts in which I used the exact same description of it seven times over the past year wouldn’t have been possible — and I’m sure that clouded my judgment somewhat.
Meanwhile, Adam Serwer correctly points out that the establishment and even anti-establishment far Right, much as they flirt with eliminationist rhetoric time and time again, stops well short of actually celebrating when their political opponents are murdered. (For the most part; doctors who perform abortions are an exception, and I imagine Julian Assange would be as well.) That’s a big difference between America today and societies that were and are genuinely torn by political violence — heck, it’s a big difference between America today and America stretching from the slave days all the way through the overturning of Jim Crow. And that’s something to be grateful for.
Something else to be grateful for, though, is the real outburst of disgust and opprobrium directed toward violent and eliminationist rhetoric by the Right that arose from this atrocity. It’s long overdue. I still say this, even though it seems unlikely that Loughner was anything but lightly or indirectly influenced by people like Angle or Allen West or that “gather your armies” guy, for a couple of reasons. First, fans of the “Overton window” concept, as are many on the Right, should be able to understand that the rise of violent, eliminationist, and militarized rhetoric and imagery in the Republican mainstream — Senatorial candidates, ex-VP candidates, the most popular talk show hosts, and so on — legitimizes those ideas in such a way that the extreme can shift even further, and in such a way that those on the extreme, particularly the mentally ill who all too often drift in that direction, feel that they’ve got the zeitgeist on their side on some level.
For another, Loughner actually did, in practice, what way too many members of the Tea Party right have nudged-nudged-winked-winked at in speeches and statements. Loughner really did “pursue Second Amendment remedies” for his grievances with the political process. Loughner really did do with bullets what ballots could not. Loughner really did attempt to thwart a government he felt was destructive of his liberties by any means necessary. Ultimately, it’s beside the point whether he was following the proverbial marching orders of these noxious figures or the less direct statements of others, just like, say, making light of rape has nothing to do with whether you actually raped anyone. The point is that when you see the stuff they’re jawing about in action, it’s not patriotic and brave and all-American, it’s not cute or passionate or funny or just red meat for the base, it’s a fucking horror show, and it’s not okay at all. Moreover, to counter the kinds of people who say “Aw c’mon, now you sound like the people who want to ban videogames,” I would say first that I don’t want to ban anything, and second that these aren’t fictional characters in a comic or movie or video game — they’re real people, real leaders or would-be leaders in fact, talking about the potential awesomeness of using violence to eliminate one’s political opponents and advance one’s agenda. Loughner’s actions cast this in stark relief, and will hopefully give people pause before acting as though that sort of rhetoric is appropriate.
Anyway, I gave up straight-up political blogging long ago, much to the relief, I imagine, of everyone who’s ever read my blog. For years now I’ve kept everything filtered through a horror or arts-specific lens, which has meant focusing mainly on human, animal, and civil rights abuses, speech and drug issues, and anything that looks like a page from a near-future dystopian science fiction novel. I may scale back even further, because I’m frankly embarrassed by my own writing on the topic and I can’t imagine anyone comes here looking for my thoughts on the issues of the day, unless it’s New Comics Day and you literally mean “issues.” But I wanted to get this all down in public, in part as a clarification/correction/apology of what I posted yesterday, and in part to explain why it worried me so horribly and why I hope it will now stop.
Tags: real life
Well said, I spoke my mind about some political issues too for the first time on my blog. I agree with you.
This, to me, is the key part: “Loughner actually did, in practice, what way too many members of the Tea Party right have nudged-nudged-winked-winked at in speeches and statements.” It might not be fair to blame them for it, but it’s damn well fair enough to ask them if they’re happy now. I like how Andrew Sullivan put it: “There is a distinction between guilt and regret. Sarah Palin is not responsible for this latest excrescence of violence. But if Sarah Palin does not regret the fact that she put a gun-sight cross-hair on a public figure who was subsequently shot in the head, then she is telling us something important about her moral character.” That’s essentially what I was going for in this post.
I think that we need more people to publicly stand against dangerous rhetoric and right wing lunacy, not less.
We do need more people to stand up against dangerous rhetoric. We need people within the parties that are saying it to stand up against it and let these representatives or figureheads know that it’s not okay and does not represent them as citizens. I was actually very happy that Elisabeth Hasselbeck spoke out against Palin’s crosshairs map and the way some Republicans have been dealing with healthcare. The idea that Palin and her loudest supporters are not admitting that this map or her accompanying gun-toting speech might have gone too far is very disturbing to me. What is so wrong with admitting this and saying that going forward they will be more careful with what they put out there? To err is human. But to not even be able to admit to error? What is that? Palin is human. She’s fallible as we all are. But people treat her almost like she can do no wrong. It’s very disturbing to see this come from her supporters because I fear that important lessons that we CAN learn from this event will not be learned.
I know you didn’t write this to get your readers to contradict your own statements on your shortcomings as a writer on politics, but the above quote is incisive and bracing enough on its own to justify (at least) your current level of output on Real Life Horrors. I appreciate the way you use those links and small doses of commentary as an occasional counterpoint to the other things you write about.
You’re smart and you write well, on all subjects. Don’t sell yourself short (but that was a really wicked pun on “issues” at the end, I must say).