A few observations about the Tucson massacre:
One of the smartest things I heard from one of Keith Olbermann's guests last night was that it is often enough a false dichotomy to suggest that mental illness cannot coincide with political motives. I do not know whether Loughner is mentally ill--and I am VERY reluctant to attach this term to him unless he really qualifies for it. We are entirely too quick to use this language to describe the character, demeanor, habits of those who do not conform as "nuts."
Having said this, however, even if it turns out that Loughner is rightly--clinically--describable as mentally ill, that in no way means that he is not (a) politically motivated and/or (b) culpable for his actions. The two issues--is he mentally competent? Were his actions politically motivated? must be treated separately--and any answer to one is NOT an answer to the other. Moreover, it seems quite clear that even if he suffers mental impairment, it is NOT like that of, say, Jeff Dahmer.
There is also the very interesting question of what we mean by "politically motivated." This has many possible aspects. The evidence is clearly very murky here so far, but it seems that we can say this much:
1. Little evidence (so far) supports the claim that Loughner was motivated by the obvious hot-button issues like health care or immigration directly. But several of his claims (youtube, etc) Do seem to support the claim that he was profoundly disaffected as a citizen, and some of his language at least indicates that he spent time on radical far right websites (conscious dreaming, for example).
2. That he was not directed to perform this massacre by a group or organization implies (VERY much like the Hasan case) that he cannot rightly be described as a terrorist (note the hypocrisy in our assessments here), but this does not mean , again, that he was not politically motivated. And, like the Hasan case, he may very well be suffering from mental illness AND culpable for his actions.
3. The possibility that there was a second person (shooter? Something else?) strengthens the possibility that there were political motives in that it implies that this was planned more thoroughly--by a cooperation of two people in agreement about some set of motives, not just one--and that they at least considered one another to be sane enough to complete this objective. Who that second person of interest is will, I think, shed much light on this case--not necessarily a light that suggests a political objective, but this seems highly plausible. After all, Giffords was clearly the primary target. This was not a random shooting. And Loughner had approached her before.
4. What constitutes a political objective is a very important question. But I am willing to go to the mat for this claim: Whether or not Loughner had a specific objective in mind whose longer range consequences are explicitly political--like destroying the Congress or fomenting a revolution--is irrelevant. I think it's enough to call it "political"--as opposed, say, to personal, or aesthetic (for example if he imagined himself the Joker) if his objectives were to send a shock wave of anxiety through our elected representatives--if that was his aim, or to send the message that our representatives are precisely the targets Sarah Palin says they are.
Whatever Loughner's specific aims--however he is or isn't psychologically stable--I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the staggeringly violent, vitriolic, dismissive, arrogant, shrill, ignorant, and woefully disconnected from facts rhetoric of GLENN BECK, SARAH PALIN, MICHELLE BACHMAN, BILL O'REILLY, SEAN HANNITY, RUSH LIMBAUGH, ANN COULTER, JAN BREWER, MIKE HUCKABEE, MITCH O'CONNELL, MICHAEL SAVAGE, and many others almost entirely from the FAR TEA PARTY RIGHT aids, abets, encourages, and condones precisely this kind of explosion.
To be clear, I am NOT arguing for anything like censorship. I am as hawkish about free speech as anyone you'll ever meet--but this crazy fucked up idea that speech is "free"--that it hasn't consequences--is one we MUST rethink. SPEECH HAS CONSEQUENCES. DEATH IS ONE OF THEM. THIS YOUNG MAN MURDERED A NINE YEAR OLD.
Loughner may well be psychologically unstable, but my money is on the claim that even if so, his instability had to be channeled down some avenue of violent rhetoric/ideology/fear-mongering to produce THIS action. In some sense, he too is thus a victim--a victim of a climate where we celebrate the lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance and fascist ideological motives as if that was the meaning of "America."
Showing posts with label Ann Coulter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ann Coulter. Show all posts
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Friday, March 21, 2008
Race-Baiting and the Far Right: The Obscene Assault on Barack Obama
It’s both astonishing and telling that among the questions far-right pundits like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Don Feder, David Horowitz, and Ann Coulter fail to ask about Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright is whether Wright isn’t in fact right with respect to some of his claims about race relations in America.
So preoccupied with the opportunity to reign in Obama’s popularity through guilt by association, so stupified with indignance at the suggestion that African Americans still face racism in “our” America, so thrilled at the possibility that McCain could beat Clinton if she’s the democratic nominee, these self-appointed profits of righteousness are tripping over each other to trash Obama.
It doesn’t matter to the pundits whether Wright’s claims are true; all they needed to be was critical of the government, or of five years in Iraq, or of the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor—all they needed to be was about the racial divide that still exists in America—and it was as if they’d been handed a noose. Ugly image? You bet; as ugly as it’s true.
More than merely reprehensible, the glee with which the far right has participated in this political lynching reveals just how opportunistic the conservative-controlled media like FOX “news” really is. And worse: their remarks exemplify the very bigotry which accrues to the willful forgetting of history in the interest of insisting that the playing field has been leveled. They know it’s not, and they know we needn’t return to slavery to substantiate it—the Bush Administration’s tardy and inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina’s quite convincing. Perhaps the pundits need to think that they’re victims of “reverse discrimination” to preserve the myth of their own entitlement. What’s certain is that when Sean Hannity implies that an Obama presidency is tantamount to having the Black Panther Party in the White House, he’s race-baiting.
No doubt, some of Wright’s claims are false; the Reagan administration, for example, surely lacked the competence to have created the AIDS virus to commit genocide. But the falsity of some of Wright’s claims is not the discrediting of them all, and we need look little further than our own local paper’s 30 Seconds to discover, for example, the ease with which a middle name can be deployed as a weapon when the candidate’s a black man.
It’s no accident that the firestorm over Wright comes on the brink of the Pennsylvania primary, but it’s hypocrisy at its most loathsome. John McCain accepts the endorsement of John Hagee who claims, among other absurdities, that Katrina was God’s punishment for sexual sin in New Orleans and that it’s a mandate of Islam to kill Christians (www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/02/28/hagee/index). Why aren’t the pundits condemning McCain? Is Hagee’s hateful god their god? Is it irrelevant whether Wright speaks truth to justice so long as the party of war, government corporatism, and religious fascism remains in power?
Whoever your candidate come April 22nd, Obama’s eloquent response to this calculated assault on his character exemplifies not what a Hagee or Coulter would do, but rather what a Jesus would do, namely, decency. Rising above the race-baiting, Obama spoke of his church’s ministry to the poor; he spoke as if we cared about justice; he spoke of his family, his pastor, his country. Obama knows as well as do his critics that what he represents is an America whose face isn’t one color, one religion, one language, one sex, and this must scare the “begeebers” out of those who think they’re discriminated against when they don’t get to have it all.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
So preoccupied with the opportunity to reign in Obama’s popularity through guilt by association, so stupified with indignance at the suggestion that African Americans still face racism in “our” America, so thrilled at the possibility that McCain could beat Clinton if she’s the democratic nominee, these self-appointed profits of righteousness are tripping over each other to trash Obama.
It doesn’t matter to the pundits whether Wright’s claims are true; all they needed to be was critical of the government, or of five years in Iraq, or of the ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor—all they needed to be was about the racial divide that still exists in America—and it was as if they’d been handed a noose. Ugly image? You bet; as ugly as it’s true.
More than merely reprehensible, the glee with which the far right has participated in this political lynching reveals just how opportunistic the conservative-controlled media like FOX “news” really is. And worse: their remarks exemplify the very bigotry which accrues to the willful forgetting of history in the interest of insisting that the playing field has been leveled. They know it’s not, and they know we needn’t return to slavery to substantiate it—the Bush Administration’s tardy and inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina’s quite convincing. Perhaps the pundits need to think that they’re victims of “reverse discrimination” to preserve the myth of their own entitlement. What’s certain is that when Sean Hannity implies that an Obama presidency is tantamount to having the Black Panther Party in the White House, he’s race-baiting.
No doubt, some of Wright’s claims are false; the Reagan administration, for example, surely lacked the competence to have created the AIDS virus to commit genocide. But the falsity of some of Wright’s claims is not the discrediting of them all, and we need look little further than our own local paper’s 30 Seconds to discover, for example, the ease with which a middle name can be deployed as a weapon when the candidate’s a black man.
It’s no accident that the firestorm over Wright comes on the brink of the Pennsylvania primary, but it’s hypocrisy at its most loathsome. John McCain accepts the endorsement of John Hagee who claims, among other absurdities, that Katrina was God’s punishment for sexual sin in New Orleans and that it’s a mandate of Islam to kill Christians (www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/02/28/hagee/index). Why aren’t the pundits condemning McCain? Is Hagee’s hateful god their god? Is it irrelevant whether Wright speaks truth to justice so long as the party of war, government corporatism, and religious fascism remains in power?
Whoever your candidate come April 22nd, Obama’s eloquent response to this calculated assault on his character exemplifies not what a Hagee or Coulter would do, but rather what a Jesus would do, namely, decency. Rising above the race-baiting, Obama spoke of his church’s ministry to the poor; he spoke as if we cared about justice; he spoke of his family, his pastor, his country. Obama knows as well as do his critics that what he represents is an America whose face isn’t one color, one religion, one language, one sex, and this must scare the “begeebers” out of those who think they’re discriminated against when they don’t get to have it all.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
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