It's like the Arizona shooting, and the aftermath with all the talk of violent political rhetoric, never happened:
State Sen. Scott Beason said he's been flooded with phone calls since saying at the end of comments on illegal immigration Saturday that Republicans need to "empty the clip, and do what has to be done."
Beason said he was not urging violence against immigrants, but using an analogy.
"I did say that but it was completely taken out of context," said the Gardendale Republican. "Look, I'll take my beatings when I mess up. But no way was I urging anyone to do harm to Hispanics or illegal immigrants. I would never do that."
Er, no, of course not, never. But his excuse is not just lame but, well, an expression of violence that hardly vindicates him:
Beason said the quote stemmed from a story he told at the beginning of the breakfast.
"I began telling the story about a family visiting a big city when some guy with a knife or gun jumps out from behind some bushes and comes at them," Beason said. "The story talks about how a Democrat handles the situation, I think I said the Democrat tells the guy he'll put together a charity basketball league or something to raise money to help him. The second family, that father has a gun but takes only one shot. The third family, and that father also has a gun, but he empties the clip. He solves the problem."
Solving problems was one of the themes of Saturday's speech, Beason said.
"I think we face a lot of problems and we need to tackle them with everything we have, with all of our brain power, our imagination and with courage," Beason said. "That's what I meant by emptying the clip."
First, it's a ridiculous straw-man argument against Democrats. If a Democrat were to be confronted by "some guy" with a gun, he'd "raise money to help him"? Please. That's simply idiotic.
Second, even as an analogy, Beason is still saying that a legitimate solution in some cases is to shoot someone to death with reckless aggression. (You kill someone by emptying an entire clip? Really?)
Third, yes, fine, taking that figuratively, the idea is to respond to problems with "everything we have," but then why not just say that? Why the violent, gun-loving analogy?
I'm not for censoring political speech, but a certain amount of responsibility is in order, especially from elected officials who are widely quoted and who have a great deal of influence.
Benson's right-wing (and mainstream Republican) views themselves are abhorrent. But he should have known better to express himself in such a way -- except that he expressed himself like so many on the right do, with just the sort of violent, gun-loving rhetoric that is so much a part of the problem in a violent society that loves guns.
I hate thinking about Glenn Beck. I hate watching him on television. I hate reading his crap on the web. I hate writing about him. But the truth is that he is such a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the right in America that it is impossble to ignore him, despite the fact that he continues to be an idiot.
Many have been making the point that those on the right railing about the extent to which Obama and progressives want to destroy America run the very serious risk of making their political opponents targets of violence. Beck and others so consistently make the absurd claim that Obama and his political allies have a plan to take away our freedom, our money, our guns, our very way of life, you name it. They work so hard to create a wildly paranoid right-wing culture and then claim surprise that people might respond irrationally.
It doesn't matter if this is what happened in Arizona. If it isn't, it will happen soon enough somewhere else if these bastards continue on this path. (Oh, sorry. Was I being disagreeable while disagreeing?)
Beck's duplicity and hypocrisy know no bounds and I am getting tired of stating the obvious. But as long as he and others like him continue to lie about their political opponents and deny the consequences of such lies, let us have the strength to challenge them, every day if necessary.
And, by the way, the poison is in the lies that feed paranoia, not the excitable tone or unpleasant character of the words used by the speaker. That is what should concern us. The target symbols and talk of second amendment remedies or of locking and loading are really only an issue because of the lies that manufacture such paranoia.
So we are left talking about rudeness as if that were the point. It's not.
Anyway, have a look at the Meyerson piece. It says it all for me.
The pattern is sadly the same. A horrible incident occurs with people being killed by a single person. The media coverage saturates everything, spreading out like rising flood waters. In the initial minutes and hours no one really knows any answers so they grab the slightest bit of speculation and put it on the air to fill the space between the re-running of the initial reports and endless video loops of flashing lights at the scene to cautious -- and often wrong -- rumors, including false reports of deaths of the victims.
As the situation begins to solidify and the facts become known, the hastily-called press conferences begin with updates from the hospital and the police and new names are added to the American lexicon. The cable news networks have come up with a concise title for the incident and even put up somber music and graphics to go with it. Special broadcasts are scheduled for later that evening, giving the producers time to call in their analysts so the first round of speculation, navel-gazing, and finger-pointing can begin.
Meanwhile, the news media is trying hard to fill the time, so they are interviewing everybody, even themselves. If the suspect has been caught, the police are leaking information about the person, apparently in the hopes of shaking something loose, such as background or motive; the public can always be counted on to come forward and tell what they know if it gets them on TV. The friends and neighbors invariably report that the suspect was a kind of quiet person, always kept to themselves, never gave much of a hint of trouble, but they always knew there was something a little "off" about him. Thanks to the social networks, the suspect will have posted subtle warning signs about his plans; it is hard to resist the need to let the world know, however cryptically, that they were planning this for some time. And the sketchy and incoherent image of a tortured soul comes forward. But for now, he is as quiet as the dead; it won't be until a trial that we hear anything from him again... assuming he did not turn the gun on himself.
The political framing is already taking shape. Each side has pronounced their horror and outrage -- on that they are equally firm -- but already the posturing is being framed for the inevitable contest of soundbites that blame one side or the other, or, most maddeningly of all, both sides equally. The political parties will instantly search their databases to determine if there was any connection between themselves and the suspect, and the one that comes closest will immediately gulp and then issue a defiant statement condemning the action and, at the same time, disavow any connection, knowing full well their opponents are focusing on them. (Meanwhile the conspiracy theorists are seeing a vast connection between both sides and the CIA.) Within 24 hours all the resources have been mustered to air a special round-table broadcast of all the best pundits, including the fringe types just to keep in interesting, and the inevitable spokesperson for the gun lobby will confidently report that guns don't kill people; people kill people. With guns.
Everyone will scratch their chins, shake their jowls, nod their heads at the profound prepared off-the-cuff remarks, and then, after they have all decided what the incident portends for everyone involved -- the president, the political parties, and anyone that happens to be there, including the heroic people who got their moments in the spotlight -- the networks and the blogs, including this one, will return to the status quo, and the regularly scheduled programming already in progress will be rejoined.
Within a surprisingly short time, most of the details of the incident will be forgotten. By the time the seasons change, the names of the dead will have faded from our short-term memory; the only reminders will be the trial of the suspect, but that will be the fourth or fifth story on the news, just ahead of the update on a celebrity in rehab. And the only people who will remember this with the clarity and pain are the victims; the families of the dead and the survivors who, even if they recover from the physical trauma, will never be truly healed.
Worst of all, we will immediately seek to absolve ourselves of any culpability. One person did this; one "lone wolf," with serious mental problems, we're told, as if that is a way of comforting ourselves that we are not to blame. It wasn't anything we did; maybe it was the other guys, and when the other guys are confronted, they turn back and say, well, you had something to do with it. And then everyone agrees that if we all had something to do with it, then nothing can be done about it.
As I said, the pattern is always the same; Dallas 1963, Memphis and Los Angeles 1968, and, more recently, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and on and on. It devolves to a single name to cue the recollection; this past weekend will be known as "Tucson." We follow the script because that's the way we process the information, and we try to put it behind us and move on because to dwell on it would not make it any better; the healing -- such as it is -- could not happen. But it rarely changes us. No profound shift will come to our national psyche; no deep assessment and re-evaluation of our social make-up will occur; it didn't after the murder of a president or the countless number of other rampages since then. It is both the blessing and the curse of our collective mind that we have the ability to move on; it is a sign of optimism, but it also means we give up much of a chance of learning anything. The pattern takes hold.
Hope died this weekend, at least one of the faces of hope – that of Christina Green, whose life was taken by a gunman at a political event in Tucson Saturday morning.
The 9-year-old Christina, who studied ballet and had just been elected to student council, according to news reports, was one of the children featured in a book titled, Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11.
The gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, took the lives of at least six people and injured 14 others in an attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). Giffords, a known foe of the Tea Party, was shot point blank in the head. Miraculously, she is in critical condition but recovering from surgery.
If I am guilty of heartlessly "politicizing" a tragedy by commenting on the attempted assassination of a politician, then so be it. Loughner shot a politician. It doesn't get more political.
We do not yet know the motives of the shooter. We know only that he was obsessed with the gold standard, a regular Glenn Beck talking point; that despite his attempts he was denied from serving in the Army; and that he was regarded by neighbors and former classmates as rather odd.
We also know that the past several years have been some of the craziest, politically, in decades.
After the shooting, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said this: "When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government... The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in 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."
Dupnik is correct, but he's wrong to fault Arizona. This is not Gov. Jan Brewer's fault, just as it is not the fault of Beck or Sarah Palin. Putting Congresswoman Giffords in the political "crosshairs" during a heated election campaign was thoughtless and irresponsible. But it has not been cited as Loughner's motivation for murder. Neither is there any indication that Loughner killed simply because Palin advised "commonsense Americans" to "RELOAD."
He killed because, in his mind, killing was the logical next step to all of the radical talk of revolution that is now commonplace in the media. He was putting rhetoric into action.
No, television didn't kill Christina Green, and it is not solely responsible for the moral decay of one man, just as guns are not solely responsible for violence in general. But no one can deny the conscious and subconscious influence of the images we absorb on a daily basis, the violence, the hatred, the scandals, the anger, the pointed political rhetoric and the accusations of treason, of domestic terrorism, of socialism, of Marxism against anyone who thinks differently, believes differently, and lives differently than the media celebrities we tune into throughout the day.
If we are still wondering how such hatred is allowed, we need not look any further than our own bathroom mirrors. The programs and media celebrities who spread this hatred are given airtime because we tune in, blindly, faithfully, daily.
We have devolved into a nation of TV-obsessed spectators, where the average American spends two months of every year tuned in to a box of lights and wires, as Edward Murrow once put it, that seeks no longer to educate and enlighten the people of a great nation, but to polarize it.
And it has succeeded, again.
Earlier this year, a New Yorker slashed the throat of a Muslim cab driver at the political peak of a weeks-long media blitz surrounding the "Ground Zero Mosque." Every day, the news talked about the "terror dollars" funding the "terror mosque," how Sharia law was taking over the American judicial system, how the president of the United States was a Muslim, a Kenya-born colonialist, a racist!
We tuned in and drank it down without pausing to reflect on the effects of this political passion and the influence such lunacy could have on the morally malleable among us. And then a man nearly died. Not five months later, a 9-year-old face of hope did die.
Have we learned nothing? Will we learn anything from this tragedy? Will we tone down our political discourse even a notch? Will the murder of a child make it clear just how sick we have become?
It does not appear so.
Here is a small sampling of comments made on several major news networks covering the Tucson shooting:
Unfortunately people lose their lives violently every day in our country. The root cause of most of this evil is liberalism.
There’s a reason behind all this. Maybe (Giffords) pissed Reid off.
GOOD RIDDANCE!!!
Was this a “second amendment solution” to a political problem?
THIS IS A GREAT DAY IN NATIONAL POLITICS. TEH BIMBO SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE KITCHEN, BAREFOOT AND PREGNANT. THAT’S WHAT WOMEN WERE MADE FOR.
Caligula. JFK. Anwar Sadat. Martin Luther King, Jr. Medgar Evers. Benazir Bhutto. John Lennon. Bobby Kennedy. Sam Cooke. Abraham Lincoln. Marvin Gaye. Indira Gandhi. George Tiller. Malcolm X. All killed by a crazy person.
What a waste, especially since there are so many good targets still out there. Take Keith Olbermann. In the wake of yesterday’s horrific shooting of a young congresswoman, the Devil himself who walks among us in the form of a TV "journalist" has decided that Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are responsible and is spreading his usual vitriol.
Please, won't somebody stop him?
UPDATE: I have just discovered that the Rouda blog post has just been deleted. Fortunately, it is preserved here and at at least one other site (Mediaite), if for no other reason than to serve as a reminder of just how inhumane humanity sometimes is.
In the wake of yesterday's deadly shooting in Arizona, the assassination attempt on Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, with fingers being pointed (justifiably, I think) at the likes of Sarah Palin (and the Tea Party, as well as much of the Republican Party), much of the talk today is about political speech:
Do Palin and others deserve any of the blame for what happened yesterday? More broadly, what is appropriate and what isn't?
At Slate, Jack Shafer defends "inflammatory rhetoric and violent imagery," criticizing those, like Keith Olbermann, who are calling for American political rhetoric to change. Shafer writes:
Only the tiniest handful of people -- most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds -- can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts. Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.
At The Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz, another media-focused pundit/apologist, takes a somewhat more balanced approach, noting that such violent rhetoric, while "highly unfortunate," is hardly new. He writes:
Let's be honest: Journalists often use military terminology in describing campaigns. We talk about the air war, the bombshells, targeting politicians, knocking them off, candidates returning fire or being out of ammunition. So we shouldn't act shocked when politicians do the same thing. Obviously, Palin should have used dots or asterisks on her map. But does anyone seriously believe she was trying to incite violence?
To a certain extent, Kurtz is right. And it isn't just in politics. How often do we hear military terminology used in sports? Take the NFL, where winning the war in the trenches is part of every game. But to a certain extent, he is also deeply naive. Palin may not explicitly have been trying to incite violence, but the reality is that words have consequences. This is hardly a new observation, but it bears repeating.
(Update: I realize I'm being way too nice to Kurtz here. His piece, like Shafer's, is appallingly smug. For a sound critique, see Sullivan.)
When you whip up a frenzy and try to mobilize the mobs who follow you unthinkingly, as Palin did during the '08 campaign and again last year, you plant seeds in the minds of those who may not quite get what you're doing, who may not appreciate all the various nuances of political speech. Even if we give Palin and others on the right the benefit of the doubt and allow that all they were doing was trying to rally their "troops" to vote, the possibility, if not the likelihood, remained that one or more of those "troops" would misinterpret the message.
Palin may not have been talking about killing Giffords when she put her in the crosshairs, but it's hardly a stretch to think that others might take her literally. And when you add to that the obsession with guns that animates so much of the right, including both the Tea Party and the Republican Party -- think back to the guns that showed up at health-care town halls a couple of years ago -- what you end up with is a cauldron of potential violence just waiting to explode.
In a perfect world, or at least in a world of universal rationality, Shafer may well be right. We should all be mature enough to understand the context of political speech, including that which is inflammatory and violent. But we don't live in such a world, and the fact remains that all is takes is one person with a gun, or whatever other weapon, to turn whispers or shouts into a bloodbath.
What's more, this isn't just about speech but about ideology as well. It's not just that Palin put Giffords and others in the crosshairs, targeting them, or that military terminology is prevalent specifically on the right, but that conservatism today, as reflected in both the Tea Party and the Republican Party, is exceedingly violent. It isn't just about limited government, it's about conspiracy theories rooted in anti-government, and specifically anti-federal government paranoia. It isn't just about the right to bear arms, it's about owing guns en masse, carrying them in public (whether concealed or right out in the open), and flaunting them (and also using them) as political protest.
All of this, too, is in that cauldron, and it's threatening to bubble over for years. From time to time it has, and what happened yesterday was just the most dramatic incident so far. It could very well get even worse.
As I do not in theory disagree with Shafer and Kurtz, I do not necessarily disagree with Olbermann (see his comment below) and others who are calling for political speech to be more responsible. I certainly do not want this to be yet another Janet Jackson moment, with a single incident (however tragic, in this case, unlike the mere exposure of a nipple) leading to gross over-reaction. Remember when 9/11 was supposed to have been the end of irony? Of course it wasn't. People moved on. And there will continue to be violent political rhetoric even after this.
No, what I worry about is not so much political speech itself but that speech, when violent, combined with a similarly violent political ideology, as we find on the right today. That's when it gets dangerous, and when, as we have seen in the past, long before yesterday, it can get literally violent.
No, let's not over-react, but let's not just dismiss what happened yesterday as merely the violent outburst of an insane individual acting alone, haunted by demons disconnected from political reality. The context and the discussion need to be broader, absorbing not just political speech on its own, which can usually be justified, but the context of that speech, the ideology behind it and the climate in which it is expressed.
It may still be far too early to pin the blame on anyone or anything in particular, but it's pretty clear, I think, if we do consider speech alongside ideology, that our fingers ought to be pointing at Palin and all those like her on the right, which is to say, at much of American conservatism today, including the Tea Party and the GOP.
We must not allow them to get away with what they're doing. And they should not be allowed to get away with claiming that they had nothing to do with it.
