Here we are again. Another massacre in the US. In the name of free speech and truth-seeking, I disagree with those who say the Tuscon shooting is simply a case of an individual's mental illness. Everyone is subjected to certain cultural and social imprints that influence their views and actions, including sociopaths.
Yet every time these mass shootings occur, the right wing screams about how the Left gets all political about guns, violence and hate speech. Methinks the Right doth protest too much. However, even though the Right should surely answer for their vile speech, it is probably a mistake to assign undue influence to gun-loving, religion-abusing dummies like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the rest over in crackpot corner. Doing so only makes sane, reasonable, people like MSN's Keith Olbermann appear muddle headed. We don't know for sure what Jared Loughner thought of these blow-hards, do we?
On the other hand, it behooves us to at once mourn the victims of this senseless act while also trying to understand the social and political landscape in which such individual crimes of terror occur. All people, including the dangerously disturbed, are social beings who interact with others within a community and who are influenced by society at large.
So let's take an honest look at that society. Even those acts of mass murder that have not targeted politicians are nevertheless part of an alarming social malaise. As punditman pondered after 2007's Virginia Tech masacre:
Is there any correlation between the horrific events at Virginia Tech and the daily carnage unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world? There may be no direct link, but it has been shown that domestic violence does increase when nations go to war, as outlined by the landmark study, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, published in 1984 by Yale University Press. The hypothesis posits that when countries do violence to other human beings, this incites their citizens to perpetrate more violence than they would normally commit. So the phenomenon extends well beyond the returning war vet who becomes a ticking time bomb (although this is a huge problem as well).
Add to this, the plethora of television shows thematically constructed around murder and mayhem, news footage of the daily death toll in Baghdad, even the violence in professional sports--and you have to conclude that this deadly cocktail has an insidious, demonstrable affect on social consciousness, making rage an option for some, instilling fear among the many, and desensitizing us all.
In the documentary film, Restrepo, the soldiers at an Afghanistan remote outpost are a rather different ilk than those of the Vietnam era who mainly wanted to do their part and get the hell out of the of the army asap. By contrast, today's modern volunteer soldiers see themselves as professionals killers hired to do a job. A soldier may or may not believe in one's cause, but for them to consider their role in such historic undertakings in such mundane terms is unsettling. Today's soldiers do suffer the same post traumatic stress disorders that their counterparts did in the sixties and seventies, but there is not the same degree of self reflection that there was back then.This should worry us civilians.
In fact, the hackneyed phrase "banality of evil" comes to mind. The phrase posits that "the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal."
At this stage it is hard to detect any coherent political ideology that influenced Jared Loughner to carry out mass murder, although this guy thinks he's nailed his ideology as somewhere to the right of Sarah Palin. Perhaps. But Loughner's reading list apparently included big names in the Western canon and a discombobulated lot it is: Orwell's Animal Farm, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Marx's Communist Manifesto, Ayn Rand's We, the Living, Hitler's Mein Kampf, and others, but each is distinctive and unconnected.
Speaking of Nazism, the character of Walter, in The Big Lebowski (John Goodman) did not consider Nazis to be in quite the same category as nihilists when he said, "Say what you will about National Socialists, at least they had an ethos." Others may draw a direct line between German nihilsm and Nazism. We don't know if Loughner actually read or understood Mein Kampf or any of the books found in his house or that he had listed online, or even what kind of impact this had on his scrambled psyche. In any case, Loughner's heinous crime was one of extreme nihilsm (life has no meaning). One wonders why this young man arrived at this conclusion.So let's take an honest look at that society. Even those acts of mass murder that have not targeted politicians are nevertheless part of an alarming social malaise. As punditman pondered after 2007's Virginia Tech masacre:
Is there any correlation between the horrific events at Virginia Tech and the daily carnage unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world? There may be no direct link, but it has been shown that domestic violence does increase when nations go to war, as outlined by the landmark study, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, published in 1984 by Yale University Press. The hypothesis posits that when countries do violence to other human beings, this incites their citizens to perpetrate more violence than they would normally commit. So the phenomenon extends well beyond the returning war vet who becomes a ticking time bomb (although this is a huge problem as well).
Add to this, the plethora of television shows thematically constructed around murder and mayhem, news footage of the daily death toll in Baghdad, even the violence in professional sports--and you have to conclude that this deadly cocktail has an insidious, demonstrable affect on social consciousness, making rage an option for some, instilling fear among the many, and desensitizing us all.
In the documentary film, Restrepo, the soldiers at an Afghanistan remote outpost are a rather different ilk than those of the Vietnam era who mainly wanted to do their part and get the hell out of the of the army asap. By contrast, today's modern volunteer soldiers see themselves as professionals killers hired to do a job. A soldier may or may not believe in one's cause, but for them to consider their role in such historic undertakings in such mundane terms is unsettling. Today's soldiers do suffer the same post traumatic stress disorders that their counterparts did in the sixties and seventies, but there is not the same degree of self reflection that there was back then.This should worry us civilians.
In fact, the hackneyed phrase "banality of evil" comes to mind. The phrase posits that "the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal."
At this stage it is hard to detect any coherent political ideology that influenced Jared Loughner to carry out mass murder, although this guy thinks he's nailed his ideology as somewhere to the right of Sarah Palin. Perhaps. But Loughner's reading list apparently included big names in the Western canon and a discombobulated lot it is: Orwell's Animal Farm, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Marx's Communist Manifesto, Ayn Rand's We, the Living, Hitler's Mein Kampf, and others, but each is distinctive and unconnected.
Loughner obviously suffered from a dangerous mental illness. But this does not mean that we should ignore the zeitgeist ("spirit of the age") in which he exists. Regardless of Loughner's motives, a society infused with so much violence at home and abroad is neither civil nor secure. And if it is at the point where such violence is considered the norm, even accepted, albeit with sad resignation, then that society will continue to produce more Jared Loughners, until the spirit of the times change. Perhaps that is the real issue here.
