Another shooting, and the media are gearing up again to make the shooter the Most Important Man in America. Who is he? What were his political motivations? Is he just a kook?
As always, it doesn’t matter. He was an obscure nobody this morning, and now he’s an obscure nobody who will spend the rest of his life in prison. The celebrity he’s going to briefly enjoy from the profit-driven machines of the mass media is probably one reason why obscure nobodies pick up lethal weaponry and use humans for target practice; it’s a chance for the world to finally reflect what the voices is their heads have been telling them all along.
But that’s not the reason he did this. If he’s mentally unstable, then there is no reason why he did this; it’s beyond reason. If he’s moderately sane—and some sane people are capable of killing people—then we should care about his beliefs only in the aggregate, to prevent future attacks with sociology. He’s lost the opportunity to be treated as an equal in human society, so let’s not encourage the ghouls who seek to understand him on camera. No one seeks to understand the dead who just wanted to go grocery shopping, because in death they drive less viewership.
However, an interesting wrinkle has already shown up on the Internet, so it’s clear how this is going to go for a while. On the one hand, Giffords is a moderate Democrat who was put in the rifle crosshairs of Palin’s infamous target map, and Arizona borders on a state where the losing Senate candidate called for Second Amendment solutions to problems with government. On the other, a Telegraph article was cherry-picked to update Wikipedia with the information that the gunman is a radical liberal.
The same article also says that he’s obsessed with the armageddon of 2012, and his favorite books are Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. That, to me, isn’t a liberal; that’s a man who is neurochemically unhinged and will adhere to whichever political doctrine justifies extremist thinking. The sole source who called him liberal said she knew him in high school four years ago; perhaps then he was reading about the Sixties, and now he prefers the Tea Party. If Marx and Hitler are both on your preferred reading list, your political sensitivities can be expected to swing wildly.
That said: it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. This morning, he did matter as much as any American opinion does, but no longer. But as I expect to hear Glenn Beck et al. talking about his extremist liberal views and love of communism within the next six hours, it’s worth documenting now.
Which leads to another Beck, one Patrick Beck quoted in a Washington Post blog about whether Tea Party activism led to the shooting:
“You have to be very careful what you say. We live in a very polarized environment here in the United States, and while I do believe in the Second Amendment, no one should be referring to Second Aamendment solutions,” said Patrick Beck, president of the Mohave County tea party group in the northern part of the state.
It’s a shame Beck doesn’t believe in the First Amendment like he does in the Second. This is America, dammit. No one has to be careful about what they say. It was wrong when Ari Fleischer said it, it’s wrong now, and it will always be wrong.
However, as Americans, we should also be goddamn responsible for what we say. This is the crucial missing component, when political candidates and other leaders can get away with spewing out the worst kinds of bile, without being called on the carpet for their rhetoric.
I can forgive Palin’s use of the rifle targeting metaphor in her campaign ad, although personally I doubt she’s capable of spelling the word “metaphor” correctly without help. There is nothing metaphorical about “Second Amendment solutions;” that’s a specific call-out to American history, and the only vagueness is exactly what Angle had in mind as its exercise. Writing from Nevada today, I would like to think her supporters are somewhat ashamed of themselves, but I doubt it; if there is any rending of clothing going on, I haven’t observed it.
Re: Glen Beck and this guy’s high school friend – sounds like what you’re saying is it’s not important if the guy is a liberal or a reactionary, but it is important if the reactionary punditry *SAYS* he’s a liberal. Beck, Limbaugh, et. al should not be the story here, even if they become the story in order to prove how wrong they are.
As to free speech and responsibility, I’m with you, as long as we should be responsible for what we say, not fornwhat others do after we say it. Plain and Angle and everyone else have the right to speak, but they are not responsible for a shooting, even if the nut who did it says he was “carrying out their orders.”. He’s the asshole here, not Angle, not Palin, not Beck.
Free speech has consequences. It’s a cost of living in a free society. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak, even when the bills come due…
As an individual, the guy’s views aren’t important. But it’s worth knowing whether they reflect something that’s happening in the aggregate; i.e., if there’s a larger group of people who believe that it’s valid to solve political questions with gunfire. Doesn’t matter if we’re discussing radical Tea Partiers today, or SDS in the sixties.
I disagree with you about responsibility though. It’s correct to say that Palin is not responsible for the shooting, if you want to phrase it in binary black-and-white. But she bears some responsibility for the atmosphere which led to this particular shooting; in the absence of hers and others’ rhetoric, I think the shooter probably would have eventually gone crazy elsewhere. But it’s probably inaccurate to say there’s no link between the two—crazy people look for signs and signals in the world around them, and it’s not a stretch to assume that this was one of them.
Update: seems The Onion agrees with me.