We've seen this movie before. Sarah Palin is boldly going to a gun show in Arizona to play up her (purely political) love of guns, gun fans, and the gun money they bring. For the short-of-memory, she's reading from the Charlton Heston script from after the Columbine High School Massacre. Charlton Heston appeared at a gun show and gave an impassioned speech in defense of unfettered access to guns. We can certainly expect a speech from Palin using the phrase, "From my cold dead hands."
This reminds me of two other stories recently. Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh accused everyone in attendance at the Tucson massacre memorial service of engaging in a "Pep Rally." This slur was used first to describe the memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone in 2002. His campaign jet crashed days before the election, killing him, his wife, and his daughter. Republicans attacked his memorial service as a political pep rally because a couple speakers touched on Senator Wellstone's passion for grassroots organizing and people-powered politics, urging people to commit themselves to participate in the upcoming election. Limbaugh recycled the slur against President Obama yesterday, ostensibly because he too called mourners to rise above their grief to build a better world for their children.
The other story that this reminds me of is the Cordoba House debate. Conservative bloggers attacked the project as some sort of triumphalist jewel in the caliphate's crown for its location in lower Manhattan. Of course, Imam Rauf is a steadfast supporter of more humane and modern Islam than the Wahabism which underlies global jihad's rhetorical basis, and commonly criticized the radical anti-Western strains. In any event, I recall the argument that because the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center had something to do with Islam and that the Cordoba House project had something to do with Islam, that it was simply too soon, too close, or otherwise too--something.
One of the more apt metaphors commonly referenced was, 'this is like putting a gun store near Columbine High School.' The project was stalled amid vocal opposition from morally outraged bloggers, who were ostensibly outraged by the insult to the families of the victims. These bloggers displayed a terrific sympathy with the victims of tragedy. So where are Pamela Geller and her ilk now? Sarah Palin is essentially cutting the ribbon on a gun store down the street from a national gun violence tragedy. Isn't this kind of like exactly what conservative bloggers detest?
The media is missing the larger Loughner-Palin connection, which has very little to do with the eliminationist rhetoric that Palin uses about her political opponents. We are certain that Loughner was interested in the question "What is government if words have no meaning?" the dissolution of society via the reinvention of grammar. Loughner reported to his friends in 2007 that he had asked Gabrielle Giffords this question and was disappointed by her answer. However, in Palin, we find a champion for his cause.
Sarah Palin's debut (and last) interview consisted of unintelligible ramblings. The responses that made literally no sense to simple questions (e.g. "What newspapers do you read?" "All of them.") are a clear attack on the ability of the populace to create and enact consensus policies. It has long been noted that Republican bills tend to say the exact opposite of what they do. George W Bush's Clean Skies Act made the air dirtier than the status quo. The Leave No Child Behind act forced the closing of thousands of programs that interested children in school. This year's "Repeal the Job-Killing Health Care Law" bill would kill between 250,000 and 400,000 jobs each year over the next ten years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Where Palin sets herself apart in the destroy-English-grammar-and-meaning agenda is that she appears to do it for fun. Today she is misusing the term "Blood Libel," which is terribly insulting to Jews. She's adopting a heinous justification for persecution to dismiss serious complaints about her attitude towards politics.
The Palin attack on meaning is quite involved with the Blood Libel instance. Palin has been caught defending against the possibility that her (and other eliminationist) rhetoric contributed to a climate in which Loughner more easily conceptualized and rationalized his assassination attempt and act of mass murder. Blood Libel is the rhetoric of accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children to bake their bread. the Blood Libel is heinous not just because it is untrue; it is particularly heinous because its rhetoric created a climate which fostered anti-Semitic attacks. Sarah Palin is, in an attempt to unlink her rhetoric from others' violent acts, dredging up the the history of rhetorically-caused attacks.
If you believe Sarah Palin's ultimate defense, her acknowledgement of the history of Blood Libel robs that history of its meaning. Palin's use of the Blood Libel in the same utterance as the argument that rhetoric cannot cause violence destroys the cautionary tale of the Blood Libel. Jews remind their children about the Blood Libel not because it was a weird and archaic rumor about their ancestors, but because it is a story with an important moral to a minority group: beware hate speech. The rhetorical attacks on a group may be nonsensical, they might be elliptical, but they contain real danger. Palin is attempting to undermine that lesson and the meaning of the Blood Libel.
Even if Jared Loughner hadn't been influenced by Palin before, his hat is probably off to her attack on meaning now. Or maybe Palin is taking the post-modernist page out of Loughner's book.
The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ 08) has prompted a lot of commentary across the media landscape ranging from the thoughtful and sincere to the predictably partisan. Because of the history of attacks against Democrats over the last two years, and the specific history of intimidation against Gabrielle Giffords, many commentators fit the assassination attempt into the long-developing narrative of escalating Republican rhetoric. A window in Gabrielle Gifford's campaign office was shot out this summer. There has been, among the right-wing a concerted effort to push back against the theory that extreme violent rhetoric has anything to do with extreme violent actions.
Too much of the criticism of this narrative is defensive and self-serving. These (uniformly self-identified Right wing) articles rush to announce that because Loughner is insane, "mentally disturbed," or possibly suffered from schizophrenia that his actions are a result of a mental disorder and have nothing to do with the political world surrounding him. This line of attack is deeply wrong. People suffering from schizophrenia are not more violent than the normal population. Insanity does not simply produce violence, despite the pseudoscience beliefs in biological criminality. Mental illness does not mean that a person is operating in a reality that is totally their own; it means that the persons interprets reality in aberrant ways. Sometimes these paranoid interpretations can have violent outcomes, but mental illness hardly causes violence per se. Other triggers are usually present which push the paranoid schizophrenic into planning violent acts.
Ben Smith manages to put his fingers on three interesting topics in two sentences, and spin them all the wrong way:Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube and MySpace pages don't offer much evidence that he was drinking from the main streams of American politics. The obsession with the gold standard and the hostility to the federal government resonate with the far right, the burned American flag with the left, but the discussion of mind control and grammar sound more like mental illness than politics.
Diagnosing the psychological, political, and personal (like their separable anyway) states of someone from their social media footprint is like trying to diagnose the health of a coma patient via video. (Not that it stops even The Silly Season from trying.) Attempts to explain a distant patient are more likely to reveal truths about the speaker than the subject.
Ben Smith's basic point is quite right: partisans are likely to see their opponents in the motivations and actions of the deranged. That's why partisans fight against the opposition; the enemy is deranged and is likely to hurt the American public. Any serious threat is categorized alongside the imagined or hyped threat in order to justify the partisan rancor. More importantly, the left-right divide as the media likes to analyze politics does not explain the motivations of normal voters, much less mass murderers. Aberrant violence definitionally does not fit into established narratives about mainstream political thought.
In clumsily getting to that point, Ben Smith offers us a fascinating picture of either his world view or how he believes a journalist must behave. These are the three interesting points that he touches on:
1) The Left hate America. When someone advocates burning or defacing American symbols, they can be categorized as being on the Left. In fact, only someone with Leftist political ties would ever think to burn American flags. Want to burn American flags? You're a liberal, now go sit on that side of the spectrum.
Besides that (and the word of an estranged classmate who hasn't spoken to Loughner in 3 years), there is so far little to tie Loughner to the Left unless you count Brave New World or the Phantom Tollbooth or whatever his list of books includes. But then again, he's also Ben Smith, serious journalist, probably only includes that weak connection in order please the Journalistic gods.
2) Seek balance at all costs. People have drawn the connection between the gold standard stuff and right-wing thought because unlike flag burning, the gold standard is a live issue with a defined group of politicians and their supporters. There are no liberals who want to return to the gold standard. There are conservatives who want to return to the gold standard. There is a visible group of people who supported Ron Paul and run a lot of the internet infrastructure for the tea party who support the return of the gold standard. It would appear very odd to me for a person to independently develop an interest in the gold standard without contact with right-wing thought. A huge chunk of Glenn Beck television and a broader range of talk radio programming is also dedicated to a return to the gold standard. The individualist creation of your own currency, as Loughner's video suggests, is in response to the government making "a secret currency" to undermine the normal economy. The paranoia over the gold standard is ripped from the pages of Glenn Beck's book. But of course, he also wants to burn American flags, so it's probably equal money that he's a pro-health care liberal.
3) Ignore all evidence and context. "... But the discussion of mind control and grammar sound more like mental illness than politics." I agree with Mr. Smith here. Those are outlandish claims that sound like the ravings of a lunatic. But they also sound exactly like Conservative rhetoric over the last three years. Remember when President Obama gave a televised address to school children urging them to focus on their studies and do well in school? And do you remember when conservatives claimed it was indoctrination, brainwashing, and fascist? FOX News advised parents to keep their kids out of school that day. No sane person could believe that American schools are brainwashing children, so Ben Smith's point is well taken. The Right has been espousing sentiments "more like mental illness than politics." The Right has been engaging in high-visibility, publicized mental illness, becoming indistinguishable from Loughner. For what it's worth, the opening paragraph of Glenn Beck's book:“They're changing the books so that in a generation from now almost nobody will remember what this country used to be. They've got the economy set up to fall like a house of cards whenever they're ready to tap the first one at the foundation. They've got the controlled media all lined up and ready to carry out their PR campaign. And they've got people so indebted and mind-controlled and unprepared, they'll turn to anybody who says he's got the answer…They're going to stage something soon to get it all started.”
Ben Smith is right. That does "sound more like mental illness than politics."
The paranoia and anti-centralization sentiments that are evident in Loughner's writing are, however, not unique to the modern Conservative tea party crowd. Hysteric paranoia is as American as apple pie. The original silver-standard populist, William Jennings Bryan, almost rode a wave of anti-banker-Washington paranoia into the White House in 1896. That's what makes the American Political Tradition such a great read. The explicit calls to arms from all corners of the political spectrum (though, honestly, have you heard any calls to arms from the Left in the past thirty years?) are unacceptable. They normalize violence, inviting a gunman to bring a pistol and two loaded extended clips with him to a political gathering, indiscriminately firing into a crowd of fellow citizens. By the way, news reports now suggest that as heroic men tackled Loughner to the ground, he wasn't retreating; he was reloading.
In the wake of the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ 08), the question "what kind of man would do this?" must be answered. The man not only put a gun into the face of a woman and fired, but then injured 18 additional people, killing a reported 6. Police, the media, and political establishment are all having their say.
The most basic evaluation is: a mentally disturbed man. Internet sleuths have uncovered his facebook page which simultaneously lists Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto as favorite books without apparent irony. Mr. Loughner, while attending his local community college last year was often a disruption in class and in the library, coming to police attention as a nuisance in the school. His rambling youtube manifestos do not suggest coherence or an ability to present a cogent worldview.
At the same time, his writings certainly seem to be informed by a particular anti-government conspiracy theory revolving around a secret currency. A little internet digging reveals that this 'secret currency' stuff is stock and trade for anti-semitic fringe 'experts' who suggest investing in gold coins. You know, that old goldline scam that Glenn Beck has been milking via sponsorship money. It seems that Jared Lee Loughner, while mentally unstable, was dipping his intellectual quill near Glenn Beck waters, which may be purely coincidental. In any event, his time spent on the internet (and possibly in front of the tv) seems to have been spent absorbing conspiracy theories relating to the big bad federal government.
Jared Lee Loughner also seems to be quite the student of philosophy. His belief that the government practices "mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," seems odd, certainly, but not outside the (loosely defined) bounds of critical postmodernism. His videos are obsessed with control over language, economy, and social interaction. He expreses a desire to splinter away from the English speaking community, the dollar, and reality. This certainly fits into the "mentally disturbed" storyline, though as was the lesson from the Terry Shiavo case, it's probably a bad idea to diagnose patients via youtube videos.
The videos' tropes of superiority compared to the rest of the American population (e.g. "The majority of the American population has never read the American population... You're literate, listener?") certainly hit the same scale as Glenn Beck's rants (e.g. "You can live the E4 system... or you can live in ignorance and anger" Glenn Beck Program 1/07/2011 3:09:00), and the repetition of rhetorical questions ending in "... listener," implies a familiarity with talk radio, though I don't know of any particular radio host who insists on being quite that annoying. We're left with the impression of a socially isolated man who received most of his information from talk radio and the internet. One thing we do know about Loughner's frame of mind: he was focused particularly on his Congressional district, mentioning the "illiteracy" of citizens of the 8th District in one of his videos. This certainly suggests that he processed the world around him through a political lens, lining up with the circumstantial links between his videos and right-wing rhetoric. His unstable mind acted like a prism, refracting and focusing conspiracy theories into an assassination plot on his Congresswoman.
Except that turns out not be entirely right. Police are searching for a second suspect, a middle age male who transported Jared Lee Loughner to the Safeway parking lot to assassinate the Honorable Gabrielle Giffords. The nature of the man's relationship to the shooter is still murky, as is whether the driver knew of Loughner's plot beforehand.
What we do know is that Loughner has been keeping silent while in custody, steadfastly claiming Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. This is not the trademark of the mentally disturbed post-rampage suspect, who often is either prepared to face the consequences or is not inhibited from forfeiting testimony. Perhaps the silence is designed to protect his accomplice and is part and parcel of a larger conspiracy. The New York Times briefly reported that a suspicious package was found in Gifford's Tucson office today, though the scene was eventually cleared after the bomb squad detonated the package in a controlled blast. Either Loughner was connected to the bomb and possibly a larger conspiracy, used as a pawn by an ideologically driven cell, or he was simply one part of a continuing violent milieu supported and egged-on by internet groups, radio talk show hosts, and Fox News. I hope the answer is the conspiracy explanation because honestly, that's a lot less troubling.
Just as a note, as I was tagging this blog post, I was shocked by how many tags are applicable from previous blog posts. This incident has been long in the making with years of inciting, enabling speech coming from a multitude of sources. This attack is certainly an outcome of the violence-tinged political culture that Fox News, talk radio, and the far right have fostered. Sheriff Dupnik said it best:"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government," he said. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Mr. Dupnik said it is time for the country to "do a little soul searching."
He added: "The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business ... This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in."
Later, he said: "It's not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included. That's the sad thing about what's going on in America: pretty soon we're not going to be able to find reasonable decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office."
Midday on Saturday, gun shots interrupted a public meeting between a Congresswoman and her constituents in Arizona. The suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, shot 18 and killed at least 6 outside a supermarket in Tucson. Among the dead are a 9 year old child and a federal judge, John Roll.Ms. Giffords was speaking to constituents in a supermarket alcove under a large white banner bearing her name when a man ran up and began firing. He then tried to escape on foot but was tackled by a bystander and taken into custody by the police. The Saturday event was outside a Safeway supermarket and was the first opportunity for constituents to meet with Ms. Giffords since she was sworn in for a third term on Wednesday.
FBI chief Robert Mueller is en route to Tucson to lead the official investigation. There may be accomplices to the assassination. Pima County Sheriff Dupnik has confirmed that investigators are searching for a second suspect, roughly 50 years in age who transported Loughner to the "Congress on your Corner" event. A check of Jared Loughner's online presence suggest a deeply disturbed man (what a cliche) caught up in anti-government propaganda and anti-immigrant sentiment. His main focus seems to be the Ron Paul-like fascination with gold-backed currency. His final video ends with the statement, "In conclusion, my ambition - is for informing literate dramers about new currency; in a few days, you know I'm conscience dreaming! Thank you!" The video was posted three weeks ago.
The media is treating the shooting as an assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08), who is currently in critical condition. As a congresswoman, Ms. Giffords is a much more public figure than Judge Roll, though stories note that both have received death threats recently. It is unclear whether these threats are connected to Saturday's attack. Giffords was famously included on Sarah Palin's infamous "Don't Retreat-RELOAD" map which used gunsights to designate Democrats targeted during the election. Perhaps this is why I feel so uneasy reading the NYTimes sentence, "Ms. Giffords was part of the Democratic class of 2006 that swept Democrats into the majority and that just turned over this past Tuesday to the Republicans. She narrowly survived a re-election bid in November."
