(Yet Another) Rumpus Lamentation:
It’s a sunny winter day in Tucson, Arizona. There’s an event being held in the parking lot of a supermarket called Safeway. The local member of congress, a woman named Gabrielle Giffords, is meeting her constituents.
Among them is a young man with a gun who runs toward Giffords and shoots her in the head. He turns on the crowd. Before he can be wrestled to the ground, six people are dead, a dozen more injured. One of the dead is a nine-year-old girl recently elected to her student council. She wanted to see what a real political event would be like.
*
There’s a moment, in the beginning, when the enormity of the violence feels genuine. We’re compelled to wonder: How did we get here? How did we consent to live in a culture where an unstable 22-year-old can acquire a sophisticated weapon with such ease? Where his disturbed passions are not only tolerated, but reinforced, enlarged, given shape?
He didn’t just wake up one day and decide to murder a politician. He made a plan.
*
But remember: it’s just a moment. It dissolves.
Then we’re in America again and it’s all moving too quickly – our eyes, our screens, the facts. Someone says lone gunman. Someone says crosshairs. A surgeon in a strange hat announces that the bullet fired into Giffords’ head passed “through and through” and, after a moment, we understand what he means.
It’s like watching Kabuki theater, a saga of contrived sorrow and recrimination, the voices of a thousand news people sounding grave because it’s their job. After a while, we realize that we’re not just watching the Kabuki. We are the Kabuki.
*
An entire industry of madness has arisen to comfort lost souls, to relocate their anguish in the world at large. What begins as a personal crisis of mental health is transmuted into an annihilating rage.
It happens over and over.
A man blows up a federal building. A man flies a plane into an IRS office. A man enters a church and shoots a doctor. We’re supposed to act shocked. That’s our role. It reminds us of our own sanctity.
*
Sure, there were demagogues back in the olden days. But they enjoyed the latitude of a nation whose virulent forms of hatred were still sanctioned. White men were unquestionably in charge. They were allowed to discriminate, spared the anxieties of a true meritocracy.
Then came abolition and war and suffrage and civil rights. The bigotry had to become clannish, covert. The feelings didn’t disappear. They migrated. They had to go somewhere.
*
The central issue of the emergent mass media was how the airwaves were going to be used.
Because they were both public and limited, the Federal Communications Commission adopted the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, to ensure that licensees devoted “a reasonable amount of broadcast time to the discussion of controversial issues,” and that they did so “fairly, in order to afford reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints.”
In 1987, during the age of deregulation, the FCC did away with the Fairness Doctrine. The result was a talk radio (and later cable TV) industry, which gave voice to the unresolved psychological and emotional grievances of an increasingly insecure white majority. You couldn’t slaughter redskins or lynch niggers. You couldn’t even use those words. But you could still fantasize.
*
And so a new world is created, a universe of projected hatred, in which sadistic impulses are viewed not as pathological, but perfectly natural and indeed inevitable responses to the nation’s moral progress.
The democratic election of a president whose father was African becomes the portent of white slavery. Men are paid millions of dollars to appear on radio and television and play act how one might murder a member of congress, or burn a person alive. They joke about hanging elected officials in effigy, or driving stakes through the heart of the President. A presidential candidate jokes about rape. Another declares that members of congress should be tarred and feathered.
Freighted within these histrionics is a steady flow of disinformation about the nature of our national predicaments and their potential remedies. The rich and powerful (who seek merely to protect their profits and fortunes) are benevolent patriots besieged by the true lurking evil: Government.
The balance of the fourth estate – desperate to remain solvent – serves not as a filter, but an amplifier to this sadism, till it seems we live in a dark weather of paranoia, every sin and fear and indulgence cast out of us and onto the dark forces of Government.
*
The young man with the gun put it like this:
I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications. The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.
*
On the morning of the assassination attempt, my family received a letter from our insurance company informing us that we would no longer have to pay for a host of preventive services. It will save us a few hundred dollars a year. This was owing to the health care reform law passed last year, for which Giffords voted, and for which she was reviled by people who interpreted her support for a more egalitarian system of medical care as an assault on their freedom.
I remain in a state of bewilderment.
*
Giffords’ opponent in the last election, a veteran of the invasion of Iraq, put it like this:
Get on Target for Victory in November
Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office
Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly
*
In initial reports, little mention was made of the fact that Giffords was Jewish. Then speculation arose that she might have been targeted because of her religion.
I keep thinking about how little we think about the religious right anymore. The church of the disenfranchised can now be found in the mass media. Its pulpits are bright studios with cameras and microphones. Its fire and brimstone preachers are entertainers who brag openly about market share.
In the Europe of 60 years ago, things got bad when anti-Semitism migrated from the Church to secular culture. The rhetoric of competing salvations became the propaganda of a political and economic movement.
*
Kurt Vonnegut believed the human race was doomed if we failed to engage with acts of imagination, because we would then become incapable of imagining the suffering of others.
Vonnegut was one of the few human beings who lived through the Allied bombing of Dresden. He was a POW cowering in a slaughterhouse as planes flew above, dropping bombs on people and buildings.
This was how America fought Fascism.
*
The historian Robert Paxton, who studied Europe during World War II, defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
America is not a fascist state. We still enforce ethical and legal restraints on our population. These do not include preventing mentally unstable people from purchasing semi-automatic guns.
*
Spencer Giffords, the father of the wounded congressperson, when he was asked if his daughter had any enemies, wept.
*
The author David Neiwert doesn’t believe America is a fascist state, either. He believes there is a pervasive mindset which “always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself — unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated ‘enemy’ as vermin…”
*
Jim David Adkisson, who walked into a Unitarian Church in 2008 and killed two people and wounded six others during a children’s musical, and who was an ardent fan of talk radio, put it like this:
Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contribdutes to the downfall of this great Nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is Kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather.
I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just Kill yourself, do something for your country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
*
A self-described veteran, upon reading an editorial I wrote in 2009, put it like this:
GET OUT OF AMERICA,
YOU ANTI-AMERICAN, NO GOOD, SCUM SUCKER!!!
I am sending your article in the Boston Globe to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan … Lot of our men and women from Massachusetts are there now, and they are looking forward to meeting (finding) you! GET OUT OF AMERICA!!! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT LIVING HERE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF MEN AND WOMEN OF HONOR AND RESPECTABILITY WHILE YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A LOWLY, COWARDLY, INSECT!!
*
We will hear much talk in the weeks to come of the Lone Gunman, an archetype useful to those of us who wish to absolve ourselves.
Sober news people will soberly shrug their shoulders and whisper into microphones about the mysteries of the human heart. It will be as if there was no motive for the crime, as if the murderer were a machine that malfunctioned rather than an American who mistook sadism for an expression of his beliefs.
The more hysterical reactions will come from those who feel themselves implicated, who fear the great con of their professions exposed. They will react with absurd rituals of denial, as if, after all their violent agitation, they are the ones being fired upon, the victims of some vast and unending conspiracy.
This operatic indignation is what I meant when I spoke, a few months ago, about the American descent into a shame culture.
It has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the capacity for moral self-reflection. What happens when a large and well-armed portion of our citizenry can no longer apologize? When humility becomes another form of humiliation? Their heroes exhort them: Never retreat. Reload.
*
The young man with the gun, in a final note to friends, put it like this:
Please don’t be mad at me… I cannot rest
He seemed to recognize that he was going to do wrong. But he couldn’t stop himself.
He was not merely following orders. He was attempting to construct a world in which it was bearable to live. When this became impossible, he sought to die for a noble cause.
*
William Butler Yeats, surveying the ruin of the First World War, put it like this:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
*
Violence – whether in word or deed – is both an inevitable human impulse and a failure of the moral imagination. That’s the business we’re in, as artists.
We can pretend we live apart from this compact and sickening drama. But we don’t. We’re a part of this world: our actions, our stories, our conviction. When the trains arrive with their cargo of human sorrow, we refuse to turn away. We’re the fools in charge of forgiveness.
**
More from Rumpus Politics.
37 responses
“The bigotry had to become clannish, covert. The feelings didn’t disappear. They migrated. They had to go somewhere.” This is a conversation I’ve had many times before, about how the way we measure “progress” has to change since the variables have all changed.
Incredible insight here, Steve, as usual.
– Melanie
Stay strong, stay vocal. We’re gonna win this.
wow. wow. wow. steve, we have been civilly discussing this topic on TRBC but not nearly as eloquently and succinctly as you have put it down here. i love how in person you are like a guy with a built-in mini trampoline but on paper you are honed and focused and really a pleasure to read. i mean, you are a pleasure in person, too, but, well, see, this is how it is. thanks for writing this. nailed it.
this is such a heartbreaking story. the pictures of the victims, that little girl, in the new york times…
it’s tragic how the young man “couldn’t stop himself.” i once interviewed a forensic psychologist who works with juvenile delinquents, and she spoke about how young men like this (like Jared) are very, very much like suicidal teens, teens with self-harming behaviors, eating disorders, etc. she said, “two sides of the same coin,” the former externalizes anxiety and the latter internalizes it. it’s like, violence out or violence in.
so, so sad…
Damn. Thanks for putting it all down in a way that, even if it still doesn’t make perfect sense, at least seems to be approaching something that resembles cogency.
As a resident of Tucson I cannot adequately express the love and respect we have for Gabby or the devastation we are now feeling. She consistently made us proud and provided a voice of sanity in an area of the country that feels increasingly gripped by madness. The recent election was particularly and unnecessarily mean-spirited. Out-of-state money poured in and our airwaves were inundated with an unprecedented number of attack ads. Gabby, who shunned inflammatory rhetoric, was savagely and unfairly demonized by both local interests (right-wing radio jocks, conservative business leaders) and national figures (Palin’s notorious cross-hair map being a nauseating example). Her own colleagues across the aisle, John McCain and Jon Kyl even lowered themselves (if that’s possible) into launching assaults against her character. Tucson has grown considerably in my lifetime here, but has always managed to escape the poison infecting the national dialogue. That is now gone.
Tucson weeps.
Steve, this is a fantastic piece and one of the clearest examples of the need for “moral imagination.”
I’d like to see Rep. Gifford’s miraculous recovery and subsequent election as President in 2012.
Thank you for marching this out, Steve. Beautiful piece.
Thank you for this insightful and articulate piece. It’s always comforting to know that others still believe in the power of the imagination. Thanks for bravely exploring our complexity, and reminding me that the answer is not to blame but to listen, and try to understand.
What they said. And. I admired the way you divided this piece into jagged fragments, each fragment refracting the problem differently yet all of them focusing on to the centre. Since part of our national illness is a kind of malignant fragmentation, which you are documenting here.
Killer structure as well as content.
Minor point from an older grammar pedant: how HEALING it is to read someone who uses “enormity” the old fashioned (I would say, correct) way. I’m sad that there was an event that warranted its use but: events like Tucson are what the word enormity WAS DESIGNED FOR. So I’m going out to buy another of your books in simple gratitude.
I haven’t read social commentary this powerful since Joan Didion’s The White Album. Thank you for your insight and your unflinching eye.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
This statement hits the target exactly! It describes just what I see in our society, with the media encouraging good people to have no sincere, strong convictions at all, except “Well, everyone is right, to themselves…”
A powerful piece.
Thanks, Steve, for writing this. I’m just sorry that circumstances required you to.
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TFS THE FORTNIGHT SHOWCASE.
What is insane to me about those who hate the Congresswoman over the healthcare bill is that there notion of government or socialist heathcare
in the bill. I don’t like Obama either but PRECISELY because there IS NO
SOCIALISM or even PUBLIC CENTRICITY to his policies. That bill gave the
INSURANCE companies and drug companies a massive gift but STILL the nutcases
scream SOCIALISM where there is NONE !!
A point I am making on my site is that while HOLLYWOOD LIBERALS wil denounce
the Arizona Tea Party FOX inspired violence they themselves have no ethical
qualms in making trucks loads of money out of pushing TRUE GRIT. Where is the
mentality difference between the glorifying mythology pushed by the Coen brothers and the crap pushed by FOX or the TEA PARTY ? Its all saying the same
thing it is all reinforcing the idea of Americans with guns standing alone.
the missing L in healthcare typo
Your desire for more empathy amongst humans is well put. And well nigh universal. Only a deranged soul would choose worldwide violence, pain and death over the more attractive counterparts.
But where you lose me is your placement of culpability for murder on inanimate objects…in this case guns. You might as well lay blame on the field of chemistry, since without it the gunpowder fueling the bullets wouldn’t exist; and what about the laws of physical science?; do they not enable the projectiles to achieve the necessary velocity and trajectory to do their dirty work?
Dismissing the long series of influencing/enabling factors, the only culprit in this horrific tale was an electrical impulse generated from the twisted mind of a maniac. Pointing the blame anywhere else is pointless.
Brilliantly written.
What I thought made this piece even all the more special was how it manages to address the incident and issues at the same time. It addresses the micro and macro levels, connects them, and never comes across as preachy.
Well done Steve. Well done.
It is a sickening society we live in now. It’s been a 40 year study for me and I have stumbled on a GREAT insight. Please google “Political Ponerology” – a book written by Polish psychologists under Communist rule. The study of evil turned to political purposes. It is an exact explication of sociopathy (not psychopathy) – it’s many manifestations and it’s effect on quite normal people. People with poor critical thinking skills (or none) are easily ‘spell-bound’ by a sociopaths ability. I highly recommend readers checking out this book as it leads to a very deep understanding of this phenomena in our Western society. A great many of the problems (maybe most of them, actually) we face are rooted in this mental illness.
Maybe this is the revelation…. how in thrall we are to ponerological associations (political, social and especially religious).
It’s a great article, and I couldn’t agree more. Would just like to add, you talk about “the unresolved psychological and emotional grievances of an increasingly insecure white majority” without pointing to the economic insecurity caused by the greedy rich and associated right-wing economic policies. The economy has been getting harder and harder for the poor, working and middle classes — and the harder it gets, the more people retreat into fear and conservative politics that prey on fear, and the more likely we are to demonize innocent others, rather than see the true source of the problem — the insatiability of the predatory elite.
This is an exquisite piece of writing, a hauntingly beautiful meditation on the entire nation’s collective responsibility for what “went down” in Tucson.
Yes, there was a “lone gunman,” and he was crazier than shit. But he did not act alone. The hand that fired the gun did so on behalf of an entire nation whose majority population has projected its shadow side – generally upon a series of “darker others” – for far too long. We have now worked our way all around the circle, and the face we see in the mirror is our own.
We’re out of time. There can be no more blaming “others†for “what’s wrong with our country†or “what’s wrong with our government.†There really aren’t any more “others†to whom we can point for the sick feeling in the pits of our stomachs that says that something awful has happened to this country, and we’re not exactly sure of how to go about fixing it.
Every one of us shares just a little bit of the collective blame for the sickness in this nation’s heart – either for things we actually did ourselves, or for things we stood by and watched others do, while saying nothing. We have real enemies, but they are rapacious corporations and broken systems and a sick culture – they aren’t “each other.†The “blame game†that says it’s the immigrants, liberals, Muslims, gays, the godless, etc. – this has to stop.
Some of us may have been trying our level best to keep the peace – but perhaps not quite hard enough. But going forward, what it’s going to require is that every single one of us make a commitment to look the person next to you in the eye, see that individual as a brother or sister, and make a commitment to take care of one another.
Please let’s begin the work before any more 9 year old children die for our sins, and while we still have a handful of public servants left with the courage, moral compass, and integrity of Gabrielle Giffords. Let’s become the people, and the nation, that Gabby Giffords and others that died this last weekend in Tucson believed we might actually be.
I have been thinking about this since I first read it yesterday; thank you, Mr. Almond, for articulating so clearly the full context of what happened and its implications. Tragedy is not exculpatory– not for the politicians and talk-radio bloviators of the right, nor for all of us as Americans, a part of the society that sanctions such acts. I’m out of Eugene, Oregon, and was in high school when Kip Kinkel took an automatic weapon to teenagers and staff at Thurston high school one morning after killing his parents. It’s come to feel that the public condemnations are a kind of celebration, a chance to ‘come together’ and feel good about the fact that at least senseless murder is wrong. We are this society and culture– we’re culpable.
An excellent essay. I’m sorry there is no mention of the Godlessness in this young Atheists life. Atheists can certainly be moral but it seems the idea is more comfortable with a nihilist and fatalist viewpoint which contributes with teen angst and the need for celebrity to culminate in these actions. Also
the liberalization of mental health laws which makes it so difficult to deal with disturbed people. Above all else we must as parents teach our children the strong morals necessary to be a good citizen. The Greeks understood morality better than anyone since. They did it without looking to superstition or deities. Teach your children well!
What puzzles me is why this gunman is not described as a terrorist by the American government or press …
@mahendra singh: It’s because he’s not brown or Muslim. That’s pretty much it.
Loughner is not considered a terrorist because he isn’t one. It has nothing to do with his race or religion. He had no agenda other than mayhem and murder. He is not political, he is deranged. All the talk of the climate of hate are really beside the point. Sarah Palins “target Giffords” post had nothing to to with it either. If someone takes a shot at some conservative politician because they believe the government is controlling peoples minds, the democratic sites featuring targets on republican districts will not be to blame either. For gods sake people, look at any campaign run in America since the revolution. Politics is a contact sport,as it should be. I want AnthonybWeiner and Michelle Bachman arguing their points, with vigor. Republican democracy never suffers from vigorous debate.
Actually, Loughner probably did have a political agenda. Most of us just don’t speak the same language he did. Read up on the sovereign citizen movement.
I guess what I’m saying here is that while he may be some level of crazy, that doesn’t negate the possibility that he had a plan that made political sense to him, even if it doesn’t make sense to us. And if that’s the case, that his attempt on Rep Giffords’ life had a political motivation, then he is by definition a terrorist.
The problem is that the easy story is that he was just crazy, because if he’s a lone gunman, then the media doesn’t have to dig for a story–it’s right there for them, cheap and easy. And our 24-hour news cycle loves nothing so much as cheap and easy.
Beautiful piece, just beautiful. And Yeats’ poem that you quote was actually one of the first things I thought of when I heard about the shooting; it ends thus – “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born?” It is called The Second Coming, and is one of the best descriptions of our society at present. Sad, so sad.
I am not convinced, after his quote of an historian’s description of “fascism”, that Almond is right to say “America is not a fascist state. We still enforce ethical and legal restraints on our population.” Yes, but do we enforce them on our government, or on our corporation? I’m quite sure that even in the depths of nazism they still enforced the laws of civil society on ordinary people in ordinary situations– even while their government–and their corporations–did the unspeakable.
A quick reminder of our comments policy: Your first comment on the site is moderated. After that, comments are unmoderated. Sometimes we will delete a mean posting, but not always. Not if it’s well thought out and the poster is not anonymous. But if an anonymous poster leaves a mean comment we will delete it.
I feel profound gratitude for Steve Almond’s insights, his eloquence, his humility–yeah, I’m baffled, too, about how the far right convinced America that making sure there are no caps on a child’s medical costs is un-American–and his literary/cultural memory. We need Vonnegut and Yeats right now the way we need clean water and air. I just wish we could replace the braindead megaphone with a big Almond megaphone. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say after Palin’s idiotic “blood libel” comment.
Beautiful prose, but grossly lacking any objective examination of the facts.
Pray, enlighten us Steve.
I’m disappointed that the national conversation is not focused on gun control. I can see how the violent anger of the Right has created a dangerous political climate, but the current media cycle, in both progressive and conservative corners, seems fixated on assigning blame to the other. Progressives are decrying the violent rhetoric of the Right, the Right is playing the victim and accusing the Left (see Palin’s just released video re: “blood libel”).
But both sides are being ridiculous. As if political punditry is what caused this killing– as if everyone cares that much about the media blowhards. There is a certain weird arrogance and insularity to the politicos on both sides assuming their rhetoric must have triggered the killings. Hello? Have you seen this guys videos? I’m pretty sure he was certifiably crazy, and whatever political ideas he had were probably so far out and personal (what’s with all the weird “grammar” ramblings?) that they can’t be fully synced to either Left or Right ideology.
Point being, the real tragedy is that this guy was able to buy a 30 round semi-automatic Glock at a sporting goods store. Imagine if Sirhan Sirhan had used that weapon to assassinate Bobby Kennedy. Everyone in the hotel kitchen would have taken a bullet. We can’t stop crazies entirely but we can at least rein in the amount of damage they inflict. The high capacity 30 clip magazine used by Loughner was banned until 2004, when the NRA cowed lawmakers into not extending the ban. If those lawmakers had a little courage, Giffords would probably still be in the hospital but maybe Loughner would have run out of ammo before he could murder the 9 year old girl.
Let’s not engage in another round of useless partisan bickering or finger pointing. That is only good for Fox News ratings. Let’s focus on gun control!
If ever a characterization of the living nightmare that has been the reality of the last few days when insanity became a human being with a gun, the eloquence with which the author of this article spoke was with amazing articulation and sensitivity to the nature that can authentically be abstractly called the contemporary American. Not that all Americans are of the same stripe and most certainly not of the same political bent. I cannot say how much better a review could have been written of these horrid events or their implications for human life from now on out for The Duration. I am encouraged there are some clear seers in the journalistic world after all.
I don’t think Steve Almond was as interested in an “objective examination of facts” as putting those pitiful acts in Arizona into a moral perspective. This event has been examined under a magnifying glass for days on end now and the results are easily found if one really wants an objective examination. An objective examination will continue to go on until some comfortable level of understanding arrives. Frankly, I am more than tired of the objective examination, I am weary. I want to get to the deep heart of the matter of why things like this happen? What twist of emotions enables the kind of action that takes a degree of humanity away from being human.
Its time now to look at Gabrielle Gifford’s policies and it is a mixed bag.
On the War on Terror she is no different than Bush-Obama she does not seem
to comprehend the war crimes or how drones that she has been photographed with at an airbase slaughter women and children. Sadly she also repeats the crap about 9/11 being an attempt “to destroy our way of life”. No Gabbie the Patriot Act and Homeland Security voted by both Reps and Dems is what is destroying your way of life along with corporate bail-outs and corporate health-care and no obligations to big industry to serve the public interest.
On the good side she is outstanding on SOLAR ENERGY !!
She wants Arizona to be a solar energy powerhouse.
The Silicon Valley of Solar as she puts it.
Why is it time to look at Giffords’ policies? Are you suggesting that her stands on various issues had something to do with the attack on her? As far as I can tell, this attack had everything to do with the world as it existed in the shooter’s mind and very little to do with Giffords herself outside of the fact that he lived in her district. Proximity, not policy, was the reason she was chosen.
No I am just showing caution of the impulse to turn every servant of the system who is a victim of violence into a saint.
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