All new Murder Monday!
So, do you think that temple in Wisconsin was screening The Dark Knight Rises? Hey-Ohhh!
What, too soon?
Sorry for the gallows humor, but with these slaughters happening more frequently in our Exceptional Homeland than in the suburbs of Damascus, I have to find some way to balm my soul. But I renounce my shameless lachrymosity, as displayed in my post of two weeks ago over that marvellously theatrical display of all-American carnage in Aurora, CO. This week’s victims aren’t even human! They are something called “Sikhs”, who we now know (thanks to the diligence of every news outlet in creation) are often mistaken for Muslims.
 |
| Illustration from a Danish pamphlet titled Perspįkt don Sikh Rødenkt (“Learn to Recognize the Sikh Rat”). |
This may explain why the President and his alleged challenger will not be flying into Oak Creek, WI for a ceremonial hugfest. Neither side wants to be seen as courting the Muslim vote, even if it is out of pure confusion.
Now, I know that a little background about Sikhs may be relevant to the story, insofar as the attack took place at a temple and the shooter may have had bigoted motives, but pay attention whites. Real white supremacy flows from the TV screen, not the barrel of a gun. Just by the coverage, we have been made collaborators with the murderer in perceiving Sikhs as “the other”, even as one traditional “other” sits in the Oval Office and another Other seeks to claim the same throne.
Did anyone check the religious credentials of the victims in Aurora? We know that they all had something in common akin to a religion, i.e., they were all Batman fans. Shouldn’t the news have made some mention about how superhero fans are often confused with sci-fi fans, though there are distinct gradations in the genres?
In other words, what does it matter that Sikhs are often confused with Muslims? They weren’t killed because they were Sikhs or Muslims, anymore than the people in Aurora were killed because they were Batman fans! The shooter, who it is suggested was some hate-mongering terrorist (and therefor semi-rational) actually proved to be more insane than the guy who thought he was the Joker! At least that fellow, armored as he was, had a survival instinct, and even chose to surrender rather than be chopped to bits by SWAT. Â This asshole in Oak Creek had no plan at all! He just threw a dart to pick a day on which to commit suicide in the most spectacular fashion he could think of. But because the press can paste a semi-political motive on him, he is given more credibility than a person with dyed-orange hair.
This harkens to the Major Hasan case, in which a Muslim member of the US Army went postal/Columbine/movie theater/Sikh temple on his fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood in 2009, killing 13 of them. Hasan is a poster child of the right wing, a way to keep the flame of 9/11 burning in their breasts. Since Cuckoo Bananas in Oak Creek was a vet and may have played in a white power rock band, will we now ask when and how he was radicalized Who taught him to believe that people in turbans were the enemy of America? What imams of the white power structure did he listen to on the radio? Was he a devotee of the prophet Glenn Beck, perchance?
It is funny bit of logic, but the second slaughter always diminishes the first, makes it easier to swallow, even though the net tragedy has increased. Did I call Aurora a blip on the radar? This massacre will be lucky if it rates being tonight’s “Moment of Zen” on The Daily Show.
And though we can’t know for sure that this shooting would not have happened without the inspiration of the  Aurora theater massacre, what we can be certain of is that Wade Michael Page, the Oak Creek killer, didn’t live in a bathysphere at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. He knew about Aurora, and knew also what was going on in his own rotten brain. If you have mass murder on your mind and you see someone else in the media getting glory for living the dream, that could very likely budge your needle.
So I don’t consider this to be its own incident. This is an Aurora copycat. Trying to find the murderer’s unique motivation after a shooting spree is a tired and fruitless exercise, just as trying to categorize Wade Michael Page, Nidal Hasan and James Holmes as white supremacist/Muslim radical/plain lunatic is a delusion and a lie. Like the Sikhs and the moviegoers, these killers were all-American. In America, our terrorists don’t have political motivations (except perhaps to live out the First Amendment through a sensational freedom of expression.) We have alienation, which leads to making aliens of others, and that is jihad enough.
If only he shot himself on stage while masterbating to a picture of Adolph, we would just call it bad art. I would pay to see that. A Sikh bodygaurd killed Indira Ghandi, perhaps he was her reincarnated. Ach tung beeatches. captcha our showslog
Hasan appears to have been a disturbed jihadist. Political correctness run amuck, (yes, even in the military), explains why his rants against ‘infidels’ during presentations about psychiatry got him promoted, rather than institutionalized.
Time magazine once had an article that pointed out that in good times, people in effect merely jostle one amother to enjoy the benefits. But in bad times, they assume their poor situation is due to some other group benefiting at their expense, which, in addition to racism may explain the Wisconsin killer’s alienation and actions. The big O’s policies aren’t exactly creating an economic boom.
As for the ‘other’ in the White House: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313242/obama-never-never-land-victor-davis-hanson#emailpopup
Teamster-
Thanks for the link. Wow! If there is an opening in the punditsphere for babbling incoherence, then move over Tom Friedman, there’s a new sheriff in town!
Is Davis Hanson (was he named by a snake or something?) quoting Obama when he says
I mean he appears to be, but there is no attribution. This is in service of painting Obama as an unmoored “postmodernist” to whom truth is just so much sea foam, and yet the author refers to torture as merely “too harsh interrogations”, while leaking details about the Bin Laden hit appears to him to be somehow more Nixonian than outing the secret identity of one of your own CIA agents to get back at their husband.
The paragraph about our shifting attitudes towards Al Assad and QKGhaddaffi borders on cranksterism. Wasn’t Saddam Hussein our friend before he was our enemy? Wasn’t Libya’s dictator our enemy before he became our friend, before the Arab Spring gave us the mandate to shift gears again? Fuck, I don’t like Machiallvellian foreign policies either but at least I comprehend the logic.
The entire piece is a puddle of cranial diarrhea, something Hanson just emitted rather than wrote. So politicians refer to the Individual Mandate variously as a “tax” and a “penalty”. So what? Does this guy think that Obama invented spin?
And yet people get paid for opinions like these. What am I doing wrong? This guy didn’t even end his editorial with a clever Captcha gag! And Dus; Iccanot.
HOLY WORD SALAD, BATMAN! Give that man a job at Fox!
In a speech, Obama did refer to ‘Polish death camps’, when they actually were Nazi camps
To TA, the media ignores Barry’s gaffs, while jumping on Mitten’s comments to minimize Barry’s. Remember how many states there are in Barry’s world.
That’s because it wasn’t a gaffe. As was just explained to you. Stop drinking so much paint.
But yeah Jason, as previously stated we’re doomed to repeat these mass shootings until we can minimize the impact of the droolers that equate any talk of gun regulation with repealing the 2nd.
Jody-Norway is geographically isolated and has AFAIK, strict gun control laws, which didn’t stop a massacre. India, whose unarmed police were defenseless and unable to stop their mass murderer, also has strict gun control.
Major Hassan was at least a lonely neurotic, but he was and is hardly the first murderer whose motives were partly jihadist. I recall an Egyptian Islamist saying in 2005 that “in the last fifteen years, terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise.” Yes, I know of McVeigh, etc so that statement isn’t totally true, just mostly. As for Obama’s post-modern creds: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443537404577577193632921170.html
P.S Isn’t it time for you to apologize for misleading us saying how hard you were working on your cartoon business? After all, as we now know, “If you have a business, you didn’t build that. Someone else made it happen.”
T. America: lol thanks for the gun control fax. are those copy/pasted or something, because i don’t see a word about gun control in the post or the comments. are you on internet argue auto-pilot?
and yeah, i’m sure jason has benefited in some small way from years of education, sanitation, transportation, and a million other things from various entities (both public and private) in getting where he is as a presumably-self-sufficient artist. why is that something so horrible to admit? do you think he places some great personal pride on not owing anything to anyone at all in his life?
also re: why no one pays you for this shit. it’s because what you write doesn’t tend to be kosher for any particular party or industry, so you don’t get to float on the cloud of punditry where you get paid to write for decades and can get away with not learning another thing in your life. it sucks but whatcha gonna do
TA: They have had ONE massacre.
One.
We have them weekly.
You can’t really believe “oh sure, they have far, far less gun crime than we do, but it still happens, so clearly we can’t do anything about it” is a valid argument, can you? Srsly.