The massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is tragic, yes, but it’s also magic!
Posts Tagged shooting
So Obama has given us his bill of particulars for mitigating against the next mass killing spree, and New York governor Andy Cuomo has charged merrily ahead with assault weapons ban for my home state. I’m sure some of the ideas presented between the two of them (and with more certainly to follow from other politicians) will help make a difference, but in the short run they will probably not show results.
That is fine, since the problem of gun violence is a behemoth. It is the trajectory of the gun crimes that needs to change, and it would be foolish to hope to reverse course immediately. The difficulty, of course, is our national Attention Deficit Disorder which could easily thwart even these modest improvements. And, as was pointed out by he president, the spree killings we’ve seen of late are not even the main course of our feast of sorrow. It is the routine shootings and maimings that occur in their dozens every week that ought to be our focus.
What is interesting is the sop that Obama apparently felt compelled to throw to the NRA in order to stymie their “blame the video games” cannard. I have been watching a lot of C-Span’s Washington Journal call-in program, and the number of yee-haws who have gotten lost in Wayne LaPierre’s smokescreen is staggering. Does anyone doubt that if Wayne had targetted pinball machines during his infamous presser that half the country would now be demanding that Netflix destroy all it’s copies of “Tilt”?
And yet, one cannot fault the NRA for its gift at  spinning PR gold from bullshit. Here is a clip of Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, just one of many Republicans who have dutifully toed the line:
Diane Franklin, a Missouri legislator, is also playing the “blame the games” game. She has suggested taxing violent video games and putting the proceeds towards mental health treatment. Can you imagine if this twit had the nerve to tax guns for the same reason?
I thought I would use Diane Franklin as the final, “most outrageous” example of the GOP response to Newtown, but it actually gets worse! Martha Dean, a lawyer and recent (unsuccessful) GOP candidate for Connecticut Attorney General is–you guessed it–a “Newtown Truther”! Yes, there is a conspiracy movement afoot advancing the notion that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was staged! A video promoting the theory (and which this cuh…cuhhh…cooooonsenting adult links to from her Facebook) already has over ten million hits!
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Ol’ Painless: Sleep tight, kids!
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Now, you would think that all these right wingers nose-diving into their own vomit would leave  Obama free to let the video game meme eat itself. Instead, as part of his 500-point plan to prevent every fucknut in our galaxy from acquiring their  own replica of Ol’ Painless, the President seems to have taken the bait and has requested Congress authorize $10,000,000 for a CDC report on guns which will probe the connection between shootings and video games.
The joke may be on the NRA, however, since the real intent of the proposal appears to be to get lawmakers to undo a prohibition, in place since 1996, against the CDC investigating the causes of gun violence, a prohibition lobbied for by the NRA who feared it would lead to anti-gun propaganda.
It seems unlikely that at the end of the day the CDC will report back that the Super Mario Bros. are more responsible for events like Newtown and Aurora than Bushmaster is, but I look forward to watching the NRA reap what it has sewn. In the meantime, video games are poised to do to the GOP what rape did for them only a few months ago.
Update: Sam Harris has some sobering thoughts about the gun issue.
Wow! I didn’t even have to wait a whole week for the next “your world/my shooting gallery” tragedy! These are almost coming faster than the politicians can lose interest in the subject! Will the shooting in Washington, DC prove to be the proverbial last straw?
I am afraid not. Although Wednesday’s mayhem at the offices of the Family Research Center does have a sexy political angle, upping the ante on the Chik-fil-A/gay marriage controversy, not a single person died. And the one person who was injured remained hale enough to disarm gunman Floyd Lee Corkins II before he could draw another bead.
We thus have a clear, descending violence curve running from the Aurora massacre to this feeble attempt at carnage that may mark the end of this Summer’s slaughtertainment cycle. And if it doesn’t, well…. we’re gonna need something big to push the candidates and their SuperPAC ads off the air. Osama? We miss you, buddy.
The political angle of this story, (not surprisingly, the Sikh temple shooting has not received nearly the introspection it deserves) has evoked a little soul-searching on the part of pundits left and right, and this may in fact be the “conversation” we were waiting for. The issue, of course, is not about why yet another screwball was able to conjure a deadly weapon seemingly out of thin air to scratch his social itch, but who, if anyone, is pushing these shooters’ buttons.
The National Review Online’s Charles C.W. Cooke and WaPo columnist Dana Milbank are both fencing with pointed fingers in this regard. Cooke’s response to the FRC shooting was this editorial, excoriating those who would suggest that heated rhetoric could possibly have played a part in any of the acts of near terrorism of the past few years. He singles out Milbank specifically for once suggesting that Glenn Beck and his bretheren had tilled the soil for Jared Lee Loughner’s assassination attempt on Gabbie Giffords:
Dana Milbank — and his ilk — are fond of writing sentences such as, “It’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by people who watch his show†and then of adding an insidious “and yet . . . †immediately afterwards. There is no “yet.†The social compact does not allow room for violence against those with whom one disagrees, regardless of how worked up talk-radio hosts may get about a particular topic.
As Cooke puts it elsewhere in his article, scurrilous language has been a mainstay of the press since the Revolution, and if Jefferson survived slander from John Adams’ media stooges with nary a nick to his skin, then we should not even suggest that the 24/7 media onslaught environment we live in is having any effect on anyone. That would be like suggesting that the Founding Fathers, who lived in the age of muskets, had not divined that someday a weapon would exist that could mow down an entire British regiment in thirty seconds when they wrote the 2nd Amendment!
So words are powerless? Not so, says Milbank! Having not forgotten his charges against Glenn Beck, Milbank is happy to level blame for Wednesday’s shooting at The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has labeled the FRC a “hate group”.  And was shooter Corkins not filled to bursting with hate (as well as coagulated fat) when he shouted “I don’t like your politics!” (or words to that effect) before opening fire?
Bearing in mind that there is, at present, no evidence whatsoever that Corkins has ever heard of the SPLC, we are still comparing apples and oranges. If we accept that the English language is capable of evoking anger at all, we must consider the context most beneficial for that outcome, and throwing around the word “hate” is, of itself, hardly incendiary. To read the word “asshole” does not boil the blood at all, but to have it screamed in your face does. And as a surrogate, watching or listening to one person call another person an asshole is far, far more likely to evoke an emotional response from you than to simply see it written, or even spoken, in a non-confrontational context. This is why watching porn is more gratifying than reading it, at least if you are a dude. It is simply easier to project yourself into the situation.
This is also why yesterday, after watching a clip of Fox News blonde Laura Ingraham giving a typically Orwellian interview to a liberal opponent, I found myself pacing my apartment wishing I had a radio program  so that I could threaten the lives of Laura’s children. Yes, that is exactly how I felt. Because watching a fight physical or verbal, aggravates one on a physical level. This is the key to the success of right wing media: their disposition towards violence, to raise temperatures and to always find the quickest route to pissing the viewer off. The reason Glenn Beck was scrutinized for the Giffords shooting was not because he had singled her out, but because we all felt that thanks to the likes of Fox News, that was where the conversation was heading.
So Dana Milbank, middling liberal that he is, is trying to balance scales that are properly weighted against the obnoxious right wing. And Milbank has allies amongst conservatives as well, in the form of FRC President Tony Perkins. On the topic of the SPLC’s culpability in the shooting, Perkins, on Fox News, stated:
“Based upon the evidence which seems… that is part of the contribution of what  led Mr. Corkins to do what he did yesterday.”
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Floyd Lee Corkins II: Chick-fil-A’s anti-Jared |
Perkins is referring to the SPLC’s labeling of the anti-gay FRC as a hate group, sentiments which arose in the recent Chick-Fil-A kerfuffle. Corkins had a sack of Chick-Fil-A’s greasy, damp and oversalted sandwiches with him when he was arrested, a sign that the shooter probably intended to go down in a hail of gunfire, leaving the grub as his suicide note. But take a look at the guy! Why isn’t the press exploring the possibility that Corkin’s real message was “Chick-fil-A turned me into a pear-shaped effigy of Captain Lou Albano”?
“The notion that insane people will be pushed over the edge if those in the mainstream are uncivil toward one another is risible at best and an invitation for a cancerous self-censorship at worst,” Charles Cooke concludes in his NRO piece. But Cooke might want to consider the experience of his fellow conservative Tony Perkins, who just got a taste of the medicine the right usually dishes out to the left. I do not necessarily mean violence, but rather the feeling that your political enemies really don’t care about the consequences of the opinions they let fly, or the way they may be interpreted by our nation’s army of well-armed and unmedicated mental cases.
Cooke’s opinion, that words have no consequences, is as incorrect as Dana Millbank’s assumption about which words may have motivated Corkins. In the end, it is Tony Perkins who has found the nub of the issue: when rage is the national pastime, any one of us may find ourselves before the camera following  a shooting, trying to connect the dots. Rather than worrying needlessly about self-censorship, Cooke ought to be asking where all this speaking from the adrenal gland is getting us.
(Of course, if reckless, unfettered speech is the great fertilizer of liberty that the NRO thinks it is, I will pay real money for evidence that any of my readers have cyber-bullied Laura Ingraham’s kids into a bed-wetting phase.)
Creep Show
My goodness! Has another shooting rampage befallen our bleeding nation? How could anyone who has not lived in the United States for the past month have foreseen this??
Okay, in all fairness this barely qualifies as an America-level murder spree. We are used to space cases who think they are living in a comic book and rock n’ roll racists who want to live fast and die furious with their jackboots on. A garden variety mentally ill man with no colorful agenda should barely rate a mention in the police blotter of the  College Station Penny Saver. If this shooting hadn’t happened within the vicinity of Texas A&M we never even would have heard of it!
Still, Thomas Caffall did shoot four police officers, and the casualty count of four wounded and three dead (including Caffall)Â could qualify it for a below-the-fold story in a medium-sized metropolitan paper I guess, if Tom and Katie hadn’t had a blow up at a Starbucks that day.
The policemen were shot at Caffall’s address when they came to serve him with an eviction notice. It is always sad when an attempt to introduce a new mentally ill man into the ranks of the homeless goes awry, but what were the police  thinking  trying to evict this guy without a SWAT team? Just look at him!
Can’t you read the madness in that grin? I mean, we all remember Jared Lee Loughhner, right?
Look, I’m generally opposed to the police state, but a lot of needless bloodshed could be avoided if we started gathering biometric data from people’s driver’s license photos. How many more massacres must we endure before we start putting people with morbidly creepy smiles on a watch list?
Anyway, given the low body count and with the winner of the veepstakes hogging the headlines, I doubt the families of the dead will even get a consolation e-card from the President. Nope, no hanging of the heads and pretending to care about gun control over this one, people. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Ayn Ryan
The wait is over! The long-anticipated Republican VP candidate has finally appeared at the threshold and walked down the aisle to take his place beside Mitt Romney at the altar.
We all wondered which demographic Mitt Romney would suck up to through his pick. Would it be hispanics (Rubio)? Fatties (Christie)? Toxic Avenger fans (Jindal)? Or would he forego gimmicks altogether and roll the dice on his own charisma (Portman, T-Paw)?
Romney’s choice of Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan makes it official: the Tea Party is holding the shotgun at this wedding.
Don’t doubt for a second what a fantastic coup this is for the far right. After the eight year nightmare that was Bush/Cheney, the Republican establishment should have been looking for the least flamboyantly evil veep pick they could scrounge. But the double-talking, flim flam plutocrat who is Mitt Romney has still not caught fire amongst the Birthers who now constitute the popped kernel of the Republican base. No one believes Romney has the burning hatred for Obama that is the salient issue the Republicans have been running on since liquifying pumpkin Mitch McConnell committed the GOP to Obama’s ouster and nothing else. So, just as John McCain did to shore up his support amongst the crazies, Mitt has found his Mama Grizzly.
This pick is not likely to be a disaster the way Sarah Palin ultimately was. Ryan is apparently intelligent and won’t leave people wondering if his children aren’t the only ones with extra chromosomes. But his is a promise of disasters yet to come.
Ryan is best known for his calamitous “Ryan Budget”, which would slash money from Medicaid and  eliminate Affordable Care, tossing tens of millions of the too-poor-to-insure to the wolves. Medicare would be reshaped into something like welfare, with benefits no longer corresponding to what the People paid into the fund. Ryan was also behind the Republican effort to privatize Social Security, which even Dubya thought went too far (and that was before the Second Depression).
The Ron Paul wing of the Tea Party can also skeet, because Ryan is a devotee to Ayn Rand and her cult of the ego! I’m not sure if Rand’s “objectivism” has golden plates in its mythology, but the worship of money will at least help Romney and Ryan dance cheek-to-cheek. And Ryan is the Prince of Wisconsin, the Land where Labor Lost! Another bonus!
The Ryan pick allows Romney to briefly appear “bold”, even though in typical Romney fashion he is already distancing himself from the Ryan budget and its implications. But whether or not Mitt ultimately gets a “Ryan bump” Â from his theatrical ploy, Ryan ultimately doesn’t matter except as vacant symbolism. Traditionally, efforts to shore up a lukewarm candidate with a notable second banana do nothing or are counter productive (think Ferraro, Lieberman and Palin). Ryan is a sop to the extreme right which doesn’t tell you anything about how Romney will govern except, as we already know, as a two-faced asshole.
(I hope your Secret Service detail is on its toes, Mitt.)
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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.
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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.