Good Luck Talking Down Shrill, ‘Blood Libel’ Victims
Armed To The Teeth
By Robert S. Becker
13 January, 2011
Countercurrents.org
What a fierce fusillade of national verbiage erupts after every creepy assassin strikes. Unless well-intentioned blather confronts the following, nothing will change: 1) the ceaseless, badly-monitored salvo of gun sales, 2) flocks of armed, unhinged extremists at large, and 3) security to insulate officials from being sitting ducks.
Perhaps satirists will propose electing only ex-soldiers or police skilled in self-defense, modern day replicas of 19th politicians who marched to work armed for “vigorous exchanges.” Maybe such action shootouts could be the next survivor’s show TV hit.
Certainly, the worst nonsense so far bubbled up from Sarah Palin’s cauldron, resetting standards for political irony. The Shriller from Wasilla dared scold others “who embrace evil and call it good . . . who mock [our] greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.” Doesn’t that shrill last phrase, “imagined insults,” capture Palin in a verbal crosshair?
What a leader. Never apologize, whether bad judgment or bad timing -- never retreat or surrender, just toss on the fire more inflated invective and clinical narcissism. With the phrase, “blood libel,” her set-speech on murder in Arizona ends up making HER the victim. She outdoes even her model of ignorance, blind to specific historic context, whacko beyond words considering Rep. Giffords is Jewish. “Blood libel” refers strictly to slandering minorities, especially Jews, for murdering Christian children in a ritual blood sacrifice. “Death panels,” begone. If the coarseness of “blood libel” doesn’t torpedo Palin’s future, what will?
Of course, any such demise signals the first positive outcome from horror.
Words don’t matter, only “blood libel”?
As Dylan Ratigan on Msnbc remarked, how can Palin claim words don’t matter and individuals are solely responsible for their crimes while going apoplectic when others opine that violent rhetoric facilitates violence. Or that her outrage might push the "disturbed" to obey her “don’t retreat, reload”? Crosshairs, anyone?
No such talk won’t make us safer, nor will “calls for civility” by politicians, nor minute retelling of the perpetrator's miserable life. For once I prefer slow closure and the enduring memory of slaughtered innocent to drive enough Americans, even rightwing Christians, to rise up and say: “Stop. No more repeating hand pistols, the perfect match for mass murder.” Where are calls not for civility but civilized medical responses (and wider coverage) to unmonitored and/or unmedicated lost souls.
“Glock Sales Surge After Shooting” blasts Huff Post’s headline. At $499. each, the price mocks recession as rabid gun owners rush on, fearful that celebrity will inhibit access. Why? I hear no major politician gunning for gun controls. There’s an anti-war group in the Democratic Party but no constituency defying the NRA and its glorious triumph, the creation of the most dangerous, insane gun fetish in the western world.
When Talk Dissipates Action
Empty talk may be worse than nothing, giving the illusory assurance attention is paid to the growing crisis when Tea Bag paranoia overlays politics with gun violence. Does hunting up every granular detail of the murderer’s life, as if one guy’s psychotic episode informs the next shooting? Curiously, if the Arizona rampage gets reduced by the right to unpredictable, unsocialized mutations by one crazy, why then do religious, gun-loving, anti-evolutionists gag at the notion God relies on chance, as in random mutation that kicks off natural selection? Separate universes.
I live in the American West, along with the South and key urban centers, a nexus for violent rhetoric, radical individualism and murderous gunplay. More of us need recall lines from The Magnificent Seven, on the limits of violence: “We don’t deal in solutions, friend, we deal in lead.” And blood and spilled guts, and instant, simplistic responses (guns are sacred, the more the merrier) that worsen complex problems.
I despair that any culture that worships radical individualism, defining truth as faith alone (“every man a king”) and violent revolution as our national birthright, will hold together as coherent community. Self-expression is a civilized version of individualism; taking man’s law (or God’s) into your own hand tests strictures of our common ground, of living a life withour horrendous disruptions, close or far. If anyone’s “rights” are first divinely-ordained, then open solely to self-verification, won’t “law and order” dictated by less righteous, less Christian people thus obstruct “sacred God-given freedoms”? If murdering lawful abortion doctors is justified as moral, then what forbids a whole range of anarchy or extremism? If the south seceded, why not Alaska or Texas or Arizona?
Watershed -- or Disintegration?
The Rapture isn’t the only looming apocalypse, as strictures which have bound us together, albeit with rough edges, unravel. More population, lacking historic, tension-relieving social and economic mobility, means more “disturbed” loners descending to more “Second Amendment solutions.” Fully arm outraged, authoritarian personalities with high-powered pistols, add to their personal grudges the 24/7 media onslaught (from violent movies, songs, talk radio, cable TV, the internet, or video games), and more bloodshed will splash across headlines. When hard times exacerbate joblessness, family abuse, addiction, and poverty -- high markers than “mental illiness” for inciting public violence -- who’s surprised neither the center nor the edges hold?
If simply alleging that incendiary, missionary calls to arms rife, with dog whistles (and amplified by technology unknown a generation ago) produce the overwrought malignancy of “blood libel,” then anger will bury compassion or understanding. As long as shock jocks, or besieged, craven politicians, forever “up the ante,” earning fame and fortune by mudstirrring, by what logic do we expect a different future, or fewer Arizonas?
Eventually, enough rampant violence may induce public understanding that social systems have limits, and that the language of militarized, political assassination is self-destructive. My solution is simple but impractical: end the multiple wars and acknowledge serious crises plaguing all but the rich. Then fund education with half the intensity applied to anti-terrorism -- invest in jobs and treating abuse, identifying addiction plus mental illness. That could stop disorder. How about a civilian, no-gun-sale hiatus for three months -- let’s see if crime goes up or down? Or whether Armageddon comes. Just talking won’t do it, nor letting every corner gun store owner or clerk judge which oddball or insurgent gets to take home weapons of mass destruction.
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