Heroes without guns

We Americans privilege our warriors with the label hero. Maybe this follows the long course of Western civilization from the ancient Greeks to Rome's dominating (yes, and pacifying) violence, through the English (never mind the costume dramas of Masterpiece Theatre and the BBC) and the Celts. Maybe it's just ours, born of prison colonies and the scapegrace sorts who needed a fresh start, rather than the devout Pilgrims and their dream of a the city on the hill. But they executed Quakers.

America is a martial, violent culture. In our nation's history, we've gone to war over and over again, so often that it seems to be a cultural necessity. Instead of one night a year for unpunished mayhem, as in The Purge, we think we need a war every few years as catharsis against the savage violence that lives inside us all - or all men, anyway.

Digression: A Greek connection I hadn't known, crypteia, precedent it seems for the killing of Michael Brown. Is my liberal problem that I'm searching for Athens in Sparta? At least, I live in the Athens of America.

Back to heroism...

Heroes speak to me. To be valiant, to be stalwart, to be known as a stand-up guy, these are all in the myths I want to live.

This doesn't require a gun. The New York Times today reports on heroes in the so far losing fight against ebola in West Africa. 

Ms. Sellu, the deputy nurse matron, is a rare survivor who never stopped toiling at the government hospital here, Sierra Leone’s biggest death trap for the virus during the dark months of June and July. Hers is a select club, consisting of perhaps three women on the original Ebola nursing staff who did not become infected, who watched their colleagues die, and who are still carrying on.

“There is a need for me to be around,” said Ms. Sellu, 42, who oversees the Ebola nurses. “I am a senior. All the junior nurses look up to me.” If she left, she said, “the whole thing would collapse.”

These health workers have little to no effective support from their own communities, from their governments, or from the world at large. There are a few western aid agencies, some religious, some secular.

Here at home in America, we celebrate the survival of our fellow Americans. But there's no groundswell of support to save the thousands of Africans who are infected or will be. Why is it that we can't see them as just as human as we are?

Why, too, does a Facebook friend of mine post support for Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown? What lack of human sympathy leaves behind only tribal sympathy?

It's your fault if a bullet kills you

Not enough dead yet.

Run 26 miles on their day off until their nipples are raw - for fun

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Don't tread on me.

Not called the authorities for nothing

I had thought of collecting the videos of police violence against the Occupy movement. Joshua Holland at AlterNet beat me to it. Beat. Ha.

There are sobering lessons to learn here:

• The police choose violence to enforce order.
• The police serve power, not the citizens.
• The police don't give a shit about Constitutional rights, only about authority.
• The police handle teabaggers much more gently than they handle Occupiers. Teabaggers can carry firearms without being beaten. Unthreatening Occupiers get attacked for their resolute non-violence.
• The police are trying to provoke a violent response from protesters - and sometimes they succeed.
• Power is restrained by ever-present video, not fully but often. A few cops are too stupid to realize their actions are going to wind up on YouTube. The rest mill around, unsure what to do.
• The big media, who should be all over these videos because they're vivid TV, mostly aren't playing them and will never play them in the sort of heavy-handed rotation Fox uses when it can illustrate one of its spin points. (You can bet they'll loop - out of context - any protester violence).
• Of course, we already knew that big media serve their corporate masters.
• Net neutrality is essential to showing the world what's true. A corporate-controlled Internet would be a censored Internet - hey, those crummy little videos use too much of their precious bandwidth.

Can you imagine how different the Vietnam War protests would have been with guerrilla video? Or the coal country union wars?

Thank god

Thank god we don't have any armed lunatic wingnuts here in America.

Police identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.

Hmm, lots of familiar grievances... Unemployment, however, is below 4% in Norway and not part of Breivik's grievance list. Damn socialist economy!

Will this attack damage Norway's social democratic consensus, as 9/11 and the Bushists' exploitation of it did ours?

Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.

It's worth noting that 93 dead (known so far) from a total population of under 5 million has close to twice the demographic impact of 9/11. In their awful grief, Norwegians now have the chance to show resoluteness or panic, just as we did ten years ago. Most likely, they will show a mix, just as we did.

Sex rated R, violence a lovely PG-13

Think of the graphic, frightening violence we permit in our entertainment and our foreign policy. But a penis is out of bounds. That's the wrong kind of first person shooter.

Again, I'm not defending what Anthony Weiner did or the complete foolish narcissism of the way he did it. I just think, as Glenn Greenwald does, that our response to Weiner's peckerdilloes should have been derisive laughter and an immediate move to the next topic. Instead, moving on is what we did on behalf of Bushists who openly admitted doing things that in all previous circumstances had been war crimes. Ho hum, we said.

Waiting for FDR

Through my disappointment, I still support President Barack Obama.  I wanted a new FDR.  I didn't get one.

Obama has proven time and again that he has been captured by economic orthodoxy that serves first the wealthy and then, if there's anything left, the rest of us.  In other words, he's a Republican, although a Republican of thirty years ago, not one of today's current crop of crazy Ayn Randed Republicans, for whom a tax cut is the answer to every question (every question that doesn't involve a chastity belt, anyway).

So unemployment remains viciously high.  Persistently, degradingly high.  People who've worked hard all their lives are being reduced to destitution that they will never escape except by dying.  They may get that final relief rapidly.  Republicans want to phase out both Medicare and Social Security in ways that will allow only the wealthy to live their retirement lives in anything other than desperation.

And no one in power cares enough to do much of anything:

Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills.  ...

Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs.  ...

[S]omeone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is ... a grotesque abdication of responsibility.

Elite policy that fails to respond to the legitimate concerns of the population eventually engenders violence.  Hopeless people burn down buildings.  They riot.  They attack other people.

This violence hardly ever targets the real villains.  Voters failed completely to discern the real enemies of the middle class in 2010, and they had time to come to grips with it.  It's impossible to expect enraged mobs to think clearly.  This easily predicted violence will almost by definition be senseless.

I see the current waste of human beings and the coming even worse waste, and it depresses me.

Just a lone wolf

Crazy wingnut convicted of first degree murder...

Oh, not a lone wolf.  She had a gang of crazy wingnuts.

But they delivered summary justice to a drug criminal (alleged).  His 9-year-old daughter, also murdered?  Collateral damage.

Yet there's no conservative thirst for violence.  We all know that if we listen to the media apologize.

(h/t Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice)

Sic semper insanus

Political assassins are very often loners and losers, alienated borderline personalities on a quest to prove they're not as small as they feel.  And often to die in their attacks and finally to quell their sense of worthlessness.

Jared Loughner is cut from this cloth.  His writings look, frankly, crazy.  They give a whole new meaning to warp and woof.

Is it enough to leave it there?  To alibi that the shootings in Tucson are simply an unavoidable tragedy?

No, of course not.  We have made choices - political choices - that make political murder more likely.  We can unmake these choices if enough of us think it's important enough.

First off, we live in an open society.  I've been struck by Representatives saying in response to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords that they need free access to us, the citizens, and of course we need access to them.  They're not aristocrats.

Maintaining an open society is far too important to surrender, even to a succession of lone wolves.  An open society is what we have democratic politics for.  If we were not going to control movement and public access to our elected officials after 1968 or 9/11, we shouldn't start now.  That doesn't mean we can't provide more security for judges and Congresspeople.

Second, we have decided, both for freedom and to save money, to mainstream people with even large and obvious mental health deficits.  It's not surprising that a few of them span the fuzzy borderline between weirdness and malevolence.

I doubt very seriously that there's any new rule about mental health interventions that would have blocked Loughner consistent with personal freedom for people who are not actually coming apart.  What if we made a national choice to have coverage parity for mental illness in our health insurance system!  Private insurance companies won't cover anything out of the goodness of their hearts, so this would take law-making.

Oh, right, Giffords voted for exactly this sort of requirement in the passage of Obamacare, and that's one of the two major reasons the teabaggers hate her (the other being her opposition to the Jan Brewer profile-a-Mexican act).  Repealing mental health parity is what the Republican caucus in the House wants to do.

Third, we have decided that wide access to guns is a vital political right.  Few places have taken this decision further than Arizona. Loughner could easily buy his Glock semi and, apparently, at least three extended clips, each holding 30 bullets.  He could legally carry it concealed without any vetting of his mental health.  Without any review before the fact.

The Arizona legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer enacted the right to concealed carry in 2010.  In 2007, when Loughner previously attended a Giffords event, had he been carrying his Glock, he would have been subject to arrest long before raising his coward's arm to the back of her head and inflicting a wound roughly the magnitude with which John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln.

Arizona is a place where the law is extremely pro-gun.  A bar or restaurant that chooses to be a gun-free zone must post its ban:

Otherwise, bring your Glock on in with as many extended clips as you can carry.

Last, we choose to protect free speech right up to the edge of incitement to violence and maybe even past the edge.  (h/t Digby)

Free speech is not only a First Amendment right, it's a core value of Americans.  We don't want to be told we can't say pretty much whatever springs to mind.  Loughner, even, holds this value, insanely wanting the right to call the number 6 "eighteen."

Legally, incitement to violence has a high bar and is seldom prosecuted.  That's as it should be.  Nearly all the hysterical teabagger statements have been protected speech, even when they coarsely and immorally revel in fantasies of violence.  (I include Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh among the sick purveyors of political violence porn.  They're not the worst, of course.)

But there are other responsibilities than legal ones.  We live in a society that has grown enured to vicious, ugly political rhetoric, almost all of it from the right wing.  As a society, we need to do something about this.

Not outlaw hate speech, of course.  Sanction it socially as outside the polite norms of society.  Express our disapproval in no uncertain terms.  Make the malcontent cranks and liars look like ... the malcontent cranks and liars they are.  Treat them like a turd in the punch bowl.

Social norms matter immensely.  The reason wingnuts hate political correctness so much is that it constrains the slurs they can use.  They'd never admit it, but they have substituted their own much more restrictive PC for the social consensus that they've been attacking for 25 years.  Suddenly there are rules against cheering at memorial services that the wingers hope will excuse them from listening to the content.  And, of course, every manufactured social norm of the right comes with an IOKIYAR get out of jail free card.

I've been spending a lot of time recently mocking, rebutting, and defending against the usual array of know-nothing wingnuts on the MetroWest Daily News.  It is continually amazing how strongly they prefer to be ignoramuses.

Still, it's important that they not go unopposed.  There are too many others reading who are easily led astray if all they hear is bile and illiberal bullshit.  Roll up your sleeves, pick a site, and start tearing down the haters.

Note:  I wrote nearly all of this on Jan. 9 but didn't think it was finished.  Today, I added seven paragraphs to the end (which really wasn't finished), took out some blank spaces where I had intended to go on longer, and hit Publish Post.

Fun with guns

If Rush Limbaugh doesn't realize that he's been at least up to the edge of the abyss (actually floating zeppelin-like his own gasbag self well beyond the edge), why did he take down this billboard not far from the Safeway where Gabrielle Giffords was shot?

He knows.  It's his job.

Personal responsibility

For conservatives, personal responsibility means they're not responsible for anything:

Though such extraordinary self-pity may seem from the outside depressing to live with, it has its advantages. It gives the sufferer's life purpose and meaning. Since he's always the victim, he never has to step up and accept responsibility for anything. In short, being a conservative means never having to say you're sorry, which makes it ideal for people who are fundamentally incapable of admitting they ever have anything or anyone besides themselves to be sorry for.

Even Katrina, not their fault!!!  (Petulantly...)

Oh, I know the wingers think personal responsibility is not blaming anything larger than the person connected to the trigger finger, and that's a good definition for the rest of us.  But fundamentally they won't ever accept blame for anything.

Something I wish I'd said

Winston Smith of Philosoraptor fame (and deserving of more) limns right-wing responsibility for their own rhetoric:

Many people--including politicians and influential media figures--on the right now commonly say things which, in effect, constitute an argument for the conclusion that violence ought to be used against liberals and Democrats in general and the President in particular. You can deny that you are advocating violence all you want, but if you say that liberals are evil, that they are intentionally ruining the country, that they are trying to turn the U.S. into a totalitarian "socialist" state (and succeeding), then you are building a case for the use of violence against them, intentionally or not. (And this is not to even mention claims to the effect that the President is illegitimate and, perhaps, the Antichrist.) If you say such things, then you are trying to convince people of things such that, were a rational person to believe them, he would have to consider using violence in response. I can guarantee you, were an actual totalitarian movement actually on the brink of taking power in America, I would be contemplating violence against it. You would--and should--do the same. Add to the above some rhetoric about "Second Amendment remedies," and there is no rational way to deny that the right has sidled right on up to advocating violence.

Brilliant, clear, apt.  It's only three paragraphs.  Read it all.

So many lone wolves

You'd think it might be a movement:

For the last two years we have seen a rise in acts, and threats, of anti-government violence. At the same time, we’ve seen an eruption in dangerous, often violent, anti-government rhetoric embraced and mainstreamed by the right-wing media in America.

But it ain't "Alice's Restaurant" they're singing!  Anti-massacree?  Are you kidding me?!

At a time when Republicans are desperately encouraging the media to pretend that the left and the right are equally culpable in fomenting violence, it’s important to look at the facts. And the facts are clear: The violence has come entirely from the right.

There's a reason why the media screamers on the ignoramus right are straining so hard to pretty up their ugly record on threats and incitement:

Much of the culture and thinking of the American right - the mainstream as well as the fringe - has descended into paranoid suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president. This is not to say that the left wing doesn't have a paranoid fringe, too. But by every available measure, it's the right where conspiracy theories have exploded.

They know they're guilty in general even if the Giffords case is more ambiguous.  But they're seeking the cover of false equivalence and busily trying to make themselves out to be the victims.

(h/t Kos)

You tawkin' to me?

Click image for full Matt Bors cartoon.

Marinating in hatred

Jared Loughner didn't get the memo that the threatening rhetoric of the right is all theater.

When the GOP didn't have the votes to stop healthcare reform from passing, their strategy -- and it almost worked -- was to scare Democratic elected officials. That was the point of telling everyone to shout themselves hoarse at the town halls: to terrify House members. Convince them that their constituents were incensed.

Alex Pareene has a lot to say.  Read it all.  I think he's a bit eager to let the teabaggers off the hook, but he's right about this:

Jared Loughner ... most likely is ... some weird politically incoherent amalgamation of extremist beliefs tinged with paranoia.

Violent cultures beget violent acts.  Our culture started off a violent one, and the right wing - yes, including so-called mainstream Republicans - has made it more violent.  Arizona, in particular, has yielded to extremism on guns and eliminationist rhetoric.

Second Amendment remedies?

I don't know whether the shooter of Rep. Giselle Giffords (D) in Tucson, AZ, had political motives.  I hope not, but given the tenor of the times, it's a question that has to be answered - and soon.

Assassin Jared Loughner could have had a grudge against the federal judge that he did kill outright.  He could simply be crazy and in love with the power of a 9mm Glock with an extended magazine - the power to make him less useless and impotent.

A couple of points:  Open carry of firearms, which is the law in Arizona, utterly failed to deter or end this attack.  Eighteen people were injured, and the shooter was not apparently one of them.  Showdown at the O.K. corral did not turn out to be an effective crime-stopper.

The media is making a big deal about the lack of security for Congresspeople.  As if they didn't know before.  Maybe they're just channelling the ignorance of the public, who don't go to events at which Representatives or Senators show up without any security at all.  During this past election season, I saw my Congressman, Jim McGovern, many times - even at a local Tea Party event - and he never had security.

Update (1/10):  Not only is open carry the law of Arizona.  Concealed carry without a permit of any kind is also the law.

Also, the attack was cut short - not short enough - by unarmed citizens.

If we can't win the election, maybe we'll start shooting

A wingnut offers his plan for electoral defeat:

Republican congressional candidate Stephen Broden stunned his party Thursday, saying he would not rule out violent overthrow of the government if elections did not produce a change in leadership.

It's not just the lone nuts who lust to refight the Civil War.

Threats from the mainstream right

A successful Republican political consultant adds his twitfulness to the wingnut chorus fantasizing about violence against their political opponents.

Later, they'll claim that they had no idea their words could incite actual violence.

Under siege but not alone

[F]alse belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

Why aren't members of the "flat-earth wing" of the GOP angry at their propagandists for such bald lies to them? Because they prefer those lies to the real truth.

The question I see in this: Are these wingnuts going to wake up with a wicked bullshit hangover some day soon, or will our nation grow more polarized to the point where they believe they need to prove their favored lies by force?

Poverty and violence

I've long thought that a key source of sectarian peace in Northern Ireland was the economic boom in all of Ireland. This resurgence of violence suggests I was right.

How does this matter for America, other than engaging our sympathy (and possibly, negatively, our sympathies)?

The perennial avarice of the wealthy class in this country for a larger and larger share of the pie leads to privation, and that eventually leads to violence, as it always has. It won't matter whether the maldistributed GDP is bigger if the people have empty stomachs.