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At the beginning of Terry Gilliam's film The Fisher King, a radio "shock jock" named Jack (and more or less modeled on then-celebrity Howard Stern) takes a call from a guy who complains that a woman he's fascinated by is ignoring him. After leading the caller on to ever crazier expressions of his obsession and his anger toward this woman, Jack gives him some "advice" about how to deal with the woman who is causing him all this pain. Obviously enjoying the sound of his own voice, and tickled at the thought of how edgy and "politically incorrect" he's being, Jack winds up his response by telling the caller to just "blow her away." A few scenes later, Jack is startled to hear on the news that in fact, the caller took his advice and went on a homicidal shooting spree in a local bar. When we next see him, Jack has lost his job and his apartment; he's sponging off his girlfriend, who works at a video rental store, and is pretty much ready to hit bottom. Back in 1991, when this film was made, Gilliam assumed that viewers would hold Jack responsible for the deaths committed by the lunatic whose delusions he fed for the sake of his ratings. Jack's guilt is taken for granted; the real question driving the film is whether or how Jack will find redemption.
How times change.
The film, of course, being a work of fiction, makes the connection clear by putting the media celebrity who spouts the violent rhetoric in direct contact with the lunatic who then goes and takes out a half-dozen people. In real life it is not often that clear-cut. No doubt Jared Lee Loughner never spoke to Sarah Palin. But she spoke to him--and so did Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan and all the other purveyors of violent right-wing rhetoric who have filled the public sphere with this poison. And if she is not responsible for the fact of Loughner's insanity, she and her ilk do bear some responsibility for the content of his delusions.
This is something that the GBLT community learned a long time ago: When you are designated by legitimate--or at least legitimized--politicians, religious leaders, and media celebrities as an acceptable target for hateful and violent rhetoric, that makes you a target for hateful and violent action. When you are repeatedly held up by supposedly rational indviduals as the root cause of every evil thing that afflicts this country, then people start to believe that they have a right--nay, even a duty--to kill you.
Sure, many of these people are mentally ill. It is in fact forseeable that a fair number of people who are legitimately mentally ill will in fact be drawn to this kind of "political" discourse--because it is itself fundamentally irrational. Whether it's directed at gay people specifically or at "liberals" in general, the kind of rhetoric that Palin, Beck et al. are now frantically erasing from their websites now is based not on logic but on fear and anger; and it often expresses itself in the form of insane conspiracy theories or the obsessive scapegoating of a particular group of people.
Of course one cannot be held responsible for the delusions of those people who choose to follow one. Unless, that is, one is cynically feeding those delusions because they happen to serve one's own political purposes.
I would not go so far as to say that the death of six people and the wounding of 14 was the *desired* result of Sarah Palin's little foray into the rhetoric of the bullet. But it is absolutely forseeable. The same way it is forseeable that right-wing frothery about "activist judges" has made them the targets of this kind of violence--again, often perpetrated by the mentally ill, but condoned and legitimized by our elected representatives. The same way that it was forseeable that the kind of anti-gay bigotry spewed by right-wing commentators throughout the Clinton years might create a climate in which beating up Matthew Shepard and leaving him for dead would seem to two guys in Wyoming like the right thing to do on a cold night in 1998.
These right wing mouthpieces will themselves never admit the connection, but that doesn't mean a thing. They're the party of the supernaturally autonomous individual. They never acknowledge the validity of this kind of indirect connection--unless, that is, they are engaged in constructing webs of craziness that link all evil everywhere to the passage of Obama's health care bill.
Someone forwarded me a piece months ago about the political threat Sarah Palin represented to the American public. I read it, and I said, this guy is wrong. Palin is still viable as a celebrity, but if you look at the results of the midterm elections, the candidates she actually promoted by and large didn't do too well. I think America has decided that they find her entertaining but that they don't want her governing, or determining who governs. Which, I said at the time, is fine with me.
Except that if she and her confederates are successful in creating a climate in which people are afraid to run for office against right-wing candidates because they are afraid of being shot, then she doesn't have to care what the American people think of her ability to govern. The bullet may do for her what the ballot didn't. We saw it happen with the shootings at abortion clinics. Roe v. Wade is safe--for now--but the number of doctors willing to put themselves at risk in order to perform abortions has gone down. It doesn't matter too much that you have a legal right to something if the people with guns have made it impossible for you to exercise it.
This has to stop. This shooting is one step on a path that leads to a very bad place. I don't know how we do that, exactly. My instinct is to say that the best approach is to render this kind of violence unprofitable to the political figures whose voices promote it. Media boycotts against particularly egregious commentators have had mixed results; but perhaps with this incident as a motivator something could finally be done to separate Palin et al. from their sponsors. All I know is that we need to make it impossible for one group of people in this country to declare it open season on another.
:scared:
The Plaid Adder
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