Rhetoric & Violence

I’ll admit it. The moment I heard that an Arizona Democratic congresswoman was shot, I thought, “Oh great! One of the Tea Party-ers took all that rhetoric seriously and shot someone.” Judging from the initial blog posts of some in the blogosphere, notably Klein, Krugman, and Yglesias, I was not alone in that initial thought.

We seem to be wrong, or at the very least not completely right. Despite the facts not supporting, completely, the notion that the perpetrator was politically motivated the pundit-ocracy has tee-ed off on this tangent and I don’t think that’s an entirely bad thing.

Will Wilkinson disagrees and I think his post is important to keep us all tethered to the real reasons this particular gunman perpetrated this particular heinous act, but I also think his post fails to address something connected to the incident.

Why did so many commentators believe, just like I had believed, that the shooting was politically motivated and specifically why did we think it was entirely probable such an incident was perpetrated by a member of the Tea Party?

There’s a lot of baggage to that question. Clearly I’m citing “liberal” bloggers and there is the perceived “liberal bias” of the mainstream media. Maybe we are fearful of people who identify with the Tea Party and/or the people further right than people in the Tea Party. Maybe we’re concerned the ramparts of our urban utopia, bastions of liberalism that they are, will be stormed by gun-toting “patriots” from the “real America” and those first shots fired in Arizona are the opening salvo in a broader struggle yet to come that will be decided by “Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson” as Glenn Beck once said.

I would follow up those potential reasons for our response and ask, why do we feel that way? The answer, to my mind, is the hateful, violent rhetoric that has become part and parcel of the message of the right.

Also, let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that the violent rhetoric in recent years has been coming more from the far right then the far left. It’s not being partisan if it’s true. I didn’t hear anybody threaten to shoot John Boehner if he became speaker (though plenty of people threatened to move to Canada if McCain was elected president, which would seek to confirm leftist pacifism). It hasn’t always been that way in America, but that’s the way it is right now.

We’ve heard this litany before. Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map, basically anything that Glenn Beck says about Obama, Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s “second amendment remedies” for Congress, and who can forget the original innovator, Rush Limbaugh. Michelle Goldberg has a web-only piece in The American Prospect that recounts some of the history and urges some restraint in the rhetoric we use. This isn’t an assault on free speech, this is a call for some personal responsibility. Does Sharron Angle believe we should actually shoot members of Congress? I would imagine not. Does Glenn Beck truly think we have exhausted all options and armed opposition to the government is the only way to bring change? I doubt it (advertisers don’t have products to sell during a full-scale civil war and that’d be an issue for a radio program).

If they don’t believe it, then they have a responsibility not to say it. I’m not talking about being at a point were we can disagree without being disagreeable, I’m just asking that you not advocate for a violent solution to what is a political problem. And I’ll go on record and say this, we don’t need legislation about speech to handle this, we don’t even need forced civility, we just need not encourage the violent elimination of political opponents. That strikes me as a low bar.

What happened in Arizona on Saturday was a tragedy of the first order. Two public servants were shot and one has already died. Five other people died for doing nothing more offensive than being in that parking lot at that Safeway at that moment. As we learn more about the perpetrator, hopefully we will begin to understand why this particular incident happened. It does not appear to be what so many of us thought it was when we first heard the news, but maybe this is an opportunity. Perhaps this violence, though not springing exclusively from violent rhetoric, will give us all a moment to consider our words, what we want them to mean, what they may mean to others, and what actions that perception could lead to.

This time it wasn’t politically motivated, but if I heard the same story again, right now, I’d have the same first thought I had on Saturday. I’m hoping we get to a point where that’s not the case.

Glenn Beck and Anti-Intellectualism

The New York Times Magazine has a profile out on Glenn Beck this weekend, but they have a preview available now. After reading it, I felt like it wandered. It was neither revealing of Beck's ethos, nor critical of the misstatements and intimations he dresses up as "history." But that's not what bothered me.

What bothered me was Beck's concept of populist intellectualism, where the "common man" gets it and the college educated mess it up. This was best represented in a comment by an attendee at Beck and Palin's Anchorage performance who remarked, "[Woodrow Wilson] was the start of the Progressive Era. He believed that college intellectuals should decide how the world should be run."

Now beyond the contradiction of deifying the founding fathers, (Thomas Jefferson graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1762 and passed the Virginia bar in 1967) and finding Woodrow Wilson's "college intellectuals" repugnant, there are broader concerns I have.

What's wrong with being a college educated intellectual? Why is this a perceived cause for a fissure in our social fabric? Is this now the great societal divide in America?

The rising tide of anti-intellectualism is one that has increasingly concerned me. It seems politically advantageous to pick on the smart kids. That's dangerous thinking. The college educated should not lord over those that don't have a college education, and perhaps that is the perception. Perhaps that is the reality. Young, college educated students are being tapped to manage older, more experienced professionals that haven't earned that piece of paper called a college diploma.

If that garners resentment, I understand it to a point, but to deride the educated as shysters because they are educated seems like a really good way to prevent the country from moving forward. Maybe that's the idea.

I meandering post to say the least. Maybe if I'd finished that graduate degree it would make more sense. Course, then I'd have to hate myself more.

Glenn Beck's Rally Write-ups

In case you didn't hear, and if you live in DC you had to have been under a rock not to, Glenn Beck held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial this weekend. I didn't wander down to the Mall myself.

I was concerned I would be found out as a socialist, fingers would be point, mob justice would commence, and some part of the Mall's landscape would be used to facilitate my end. I did, however, watch a little on C-SPAN. I only saw what I hope was the majority of Beck's comments, and on the whole his comments was just stupid blathering. I have no idea what point he was trying to make, but again, (finger point to self) socialist.

In fact, my biggest bone to pick was the whole "We were $600,000 short of our goal, and God provided." Now, a guy who made $32 million in 2009, should have $600,000 lying around and he certainly shouldn't weep because this ego-event wasn't going to make its goal. Maybe it's the socialist in me, but if a $5 million event is short by $600,000 and I make $32 million a year, I would just donate the other $600,000. But that's me and I also tend to believe social justice isn't a dirty word or Mao-ist plot.

Anyway, some interesting write-ups by reporters on the ground on Saturday and reflections on the people they talked with from Economist.com and from The Washington Post. They both reach the conclusion, rightfully in my estimation, that the grievances most members of the Tea Party have aren't new. The new part is the complete distortion of background information they are receiving (from Mr. Beck on pretty regular occasion) and how that creates an impossible environment to actually deal with their grievances.

That's the real pity. Fellow citizens with legitimate grievances that are getting bad information, making them incapable of contributing to the solution.