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 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.
