Grieving Giffords

Last Saturday's shooting in Tucson is of some concern to me, since I will be drawn into the public maelstrom -- at least to a minor extent -- within a matter of weeks.

I have no intention of trying to draw any "lessons" from this incident. You cannot extract rational conclusions from an irrational event. It's clear that Jared Lee Loughner is simply insane. From what I've been able to gather, Peter Pan, Napoleon the pig, and Adolf Hitler encouraged him to go out and punish people for illiteracy and bad grammar. Anyone seeking to derive a "lesson" out of this is welcome to try.

So there's little to be said for the furrowed-brow types who are furiously scratching their chins over this matter. It's pointless. There's no "there" there. There is nothing to be learned from this about guns, public security, or politics in general. Lunatics will go off, in the same way that tires occasionally go flat and lightning strikes where it's not supposed to. To suggest that there is anything concrete to be done about this is to suggest the absurd. Where do we start? Banning Peter Pan? How about Animal Farm? Or maybe The Communist Manifesto?

It goes without saying that those attempting to use this atrocity for political purposes are beneath contempt. Paul Krugman led the pack here with a diatribe, accusing everyone he ever disagreed with of complicity with Loughner, appearing within hours of the attack on the New York Times website. But there exists no shortage of others displaying a similar lack of tact and sense. We've been told that Sarah Palin, the Tea Parties, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and so on ad infinitum are actually responsible. (How AT missed getting on this list I cannot surmise. Maybe that's coming.) The fact that none of these figures and entities impinged in any way on Jared Loughner's pocket universe is simply thrust aside -- all of them, we're assured, are responsible for creating a "climate of hate" that somehow triggered the outrage. (Absurdity peaked on Sunday when Dick Durbin, Senator "American troops are the same as the SS and KGB," called for "toning down the rhetoric.")

The elder Giffords had no idea who the shooter was at that point. It's now clear that Loughner had no more to do with the Tea Parties than he did with the Ghibellines. (He was, in fact, more of a Daily Kos man; he is known to have commented on that site.) The Arizona Tea Parties, which share the admirable sanity and moderation of the movement, have displayed no particular animus against Giffords, who won a hard-fought campaign against a TP candidate last November. Not to intrude on Giffords' anxiety and grief (he's unlikely to read AT in any case), but his remark was a gratuitous swipe at innocent third parties, one that the media immediately picked up and ran with.

What to make of this? Such behavior has grown all too typical of the left in recent years. Back in 1987, in the midst of the struggle to free Nicaragua, Benjamin Linder, a "Sandalista" -- that is, an American working with the ruling Sandinista tyranny -- was killed in an attack by Contras, the democratic guerrilla force. In the U.S., an enormous uproar greeted news of his demise. Much was made in the legacy media of Linder's idealism and his desire to help the Nicaraguan people better themselves. In the end, it turned out that he had been involved in some unclear manner with the Sandinista military. He was killed carrying a Kalashnikov while accompanying a Sandinista patrol.

But the strange thing was the reaction of Linder's parents. A gentle-looking aging couple, they were widely interviewed in the ensuing months. In these interviews, nothing of the normal response to the death of an offspring was visible -- no grief, no regret, no longing. Instead, the smiling Linders simply sat repeating revolutionary slogans and accusing the Reagan administration of responsibility for their son's death.

A similar phenomenon was visible in the Rachel Corrie case. Corrie was killed while attempting to interfere with an Israeli bulldozer knocking down buildings used by Palestinian terrorists. Again, she was portrayed as a secular saint, in the face of considerable evidence revealing an uncommon level of political fanaticism. And once again, the response of her parents was atypical -- not at all that of a bereaved parent mourning a lost daughter. Instead, the Corries embarked on a continual and vicious anti-Israeli propaganda effort, much of it in cooperation with various Palestinian terror groups.

Now, as important as politics may be, it does not comprise the center of life. There exist things of far greater importance to the balanced individual -- the arts, health, religion, and certainly personal life: family, friends, and loved ones. When politics begins to encroach on these elements of life, it cannot be other than pathological.

It's no accident that totalitarian states deliberately encourage the expansion of politics into private life. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Castro all demanded -- and in many cases received -- the love and respect usually bestowed on an older family member -- a father or big brother. (This goes a long way to explain Orwell's insight.) And beyond even this, love of the state or ideology often replaced more natural sentiments. This was never more apparent than in the public behavior of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, arrested, tried, and executed for atomic espionage on behalf of the USSR. Whatever their other obvious failings, the Rosenbergs were a deeply committed couple. The few times they were together after their arrest, they immediately embraced and refused to be separated. But none of this was evident in their other communications. In notes and letters, they addressed each other as "comrade" and wrote in stilted Soviet-style apparatchik-speak, one bogus slogan following another. Even their final letter before their executions was phrased in this style. This may well have played a role in the public's indifference to their fate.

Similar elevations of political leaders into transcendent figures normally don't happen in a democracy, nor should they. As highly admired as FDR and Reagan were, almost nobody offered them the depth of feeling properly restricted to family members, nor did related political fervor, no matter how hot it burned, penetrate the core personalities of healthy individuals. While some media figures suggested that Obama deserved such emotional attachment, needless to say, this did not catch on beyond the fringe.

But today, we seem to be seeing politics, and politics of a very strident and hateful variety, beginning to supersede the private rituals of grief. It is truly disturbing to see individuals respond to the death or injury of a loved one by reciting political slogans -- and hostile, vindictive political slogans at that. This is not a good thing in all sorts of ways. (For one thing, Rep. Giffords' injuries have completely crowded out the actual deaths of a half-dozen other people, including Judge John M. Roll and a nine-year-old girl.) It suggests that the depths of fanaticism are yet to be plumbed by at least one segment of the American political spectrum.

"It's clear that Jared Lee Loughner is simply insane."

Remarks like that will help Mr. Loughner get off with a plea of insanity. Is that what this author wants?.....Mr. Loughner is fairly typical of what public school education in the US turns some people with a tendency to extremes, turns them into. Keep up the vitriol about his being insane and you will have him out on the streets in a few years.

I remember this. The author is right: leftists subsume everything into politics. That's how it was possible for the Communists to get family members to turn each other in, refuse to support each other, etc. If you violate the creed of Communism, no family relationship matters and can protect you. Or if your death can be perceived of as being useful to Communism, again, no family relationship matters and can protect your death from being exploited.

It was quite creepy that Gifford's father would come out and make such an idiotic statement, even allowing for what must have been his shock and horror at the moment. Why is politics always the first thing in the liberal mind?

A big slogan of the left in the 1960s was that the "personal is the political," and that is clearly embedded in the minds of modern leftists, even theoretically moderate ones.

Is it hate speech to wonder where the outraged media were, and Mr. O., when the rancher was murdered in Arizona along with his dog, for effect? There was no interest and passion
for turning over every stone to find and punish his killers by the aforementioned. Obama did not speak of going to the ends of the earth to find the ranchers killers, and as the Fort Hood shooting attests, the media lowers the volume to “mute” when they can not attribute it to “right wing whackos”. The hypocrisy is stunningly obvious and spells backfire on and against the Pivens-Clowers-Van Jones-Pelosi/Reid types.

Its not restricted to the Left. Some people on here in the wake of the tragedy were more interested in pushing a particular agenda than realizing that the affairs of the world can wait. There is nothing in life like being people being consumed by politics. We’d be happier without being obsessed with what politicians do. They don’t run our lives and this goes for Republicans as well as Democrats. You folks who think we need a health care vote THIS week, knock it off. Life will resume soon enough and we can all take the time to reflect on what it would be like if politicians were off our radar screens.

It’s not “vitriol,” it’s facts. The guy is clearly an example of adolescent-onset paranoid schizophrenia. The only thing the public school system had to do with it is that, perhaps, they tolerated his behavior too long.

However, he appears to have been fairly normal until about 10th grade, and then finally he dropped out of high school, so it’s not clear that the school could have done a lot more. Also, the community college he attended did ultimately ask him to go for a mental health evaluation before being allowed to enroll again. Instead, he went out and killed people. So the failure is probably more with the mental health system, because it is very, very difficult for parents or schools to get long-term involuntary hospitalization or treatment for teenagers who enter this crisis phase.

The determining factor with a person who is mentally ill (or mentally handicapped) is not whether they were mentally ill, but whether they knew what they were doing was wrong. I’d say he certainly did, although even if he convince the jury that he didn’t, I think he’s probably looking at involuntary committal for the rest of his life. If even California has secure hospitals for the criminally insane, I’m sure Arizona must have something similar.

Apparently Rep. Gifford’s father is unable to distinguish between a political opponent and a lunatic who wants to blow your head off. I am sure that she was asked much more pointed and heated questions at Town Halls than the one that Loughner asked, yet none of those people ever tried to harm her. In her father’s defense he has to be absolutely beside himself with grief.

I think you will find that most people here were horrified and it was only when the left - and people such as the sheriff and Giffords’ parents - started accusing the Tea Party or some other unnamed evil right wingers of being behind the shooting that people here felt they had to defend themselves. They also had to counter the charge that the left was all sweetness and light and the evil Republicans were stoking things, and I think that was behind the attempt to find inflammatory words and actions from the left (which is much more prone to violent rhetoric than conservatives).

I think we should go ahead with voting as usual, because this shooting was not politically related. The killer was nuts and it now appears that he had an obsession with Giffords dating back to 2007, when he had some personal contact with her. This is tragic, but it’s not a crisis and it’s no reason to shut down the business of the United States and let the media rant 24/7 about the supposed evils of the Tea Party. Letting them do that will genuinely bring us to a political crisis, and that’s exactly what they want. So I say - a brief time-out to respect the dead, as you would do after any random disaster (for example, if Giffords had been killed in a plane crash), and then back to business.

Agree entirely. There would be a few on the right who would have responded as they did without initial provacation from the left, but most of those raising the hypocrisy of the left are doing such for two reasons - this is just the latest example of the left ignoring their own bilous comments and the left immediately sought to pin the blame for this atrocity on the right before we even knew anything about the actual incident.

So those attempting to draw moral equivalence here have to look at the sequence of events and realize that the reaction of the right is largely in self-defense and a continued unwillingness to allow the left a monopoly on defining the political narrative.

Apparently Rep. Gifford’s father is unable to distinguish between a political opponent and a lunatic who wants to blow your head off.

Exactly. I was disturbed by how many commentators (without the excuse of personal grief) rushed to tar political disagreement with the same brush used for the lunatic who wants to blow your head off.

I do think they are going to attempt to use this to criminalize discourse and dissent, even though in reality Loughner's act clearly had nothing to do with anything rational. But they're trying to create the meme, and that's why I think it's so important for us to prevent them from controlling the discussion.

There is something to be learned from this. This incident is a reflection of our culture today in regards to our youth. The sixties counter culture has brought about children who are growing up with distorted identities. From the rampant drug use to the overexposure by our media to perversion to the shock jocks and the celebration of dsyfunctionality on television 24/7. Not to mention the issue of how children are being over medicated with psych drugs. (Was this kid on them?)

People today in our culture are spoiled for one. Kids have laptops, video games, stereos, etc… and yet so many of them walk around still miserable and depressed. It is our culture that is failing them.

The lesson to be learned here is that the liberal culture that started with the counter-culture and the sexual revolution must be defeated. This country must return to its traditional values. If not we see more of this.

Well said.

For some people, throughout the political spectrum, politics takes the place of religion.

An event that would cause a normal person to take a moment to reflect, they analyze for leverage.

I'm surprised that the author of this article did not mention Paul Wellstone's memorial service.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2654353/posts

Really? You don’t think this is political? Really? I have a hard time believing this. You actually said “because this shooting was not politically related.”? Really? Do you actually believe what you said??? Yes he was nuts but how can you say it was not politiical?

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