Killer
You ask me who killed the Kennedys
When after all
It was you and me
-from “Sympathy for the Devil,” The Rolling Stones
Lots of people are talking about civil discourse with regard to the Tucson shootings, like it was angry talk that caused this demented young man to start blasting away. I think that the distressed sheriff who first raised this issue was sincere. I think he believed that; and I think that many people of good will believe that, too.
Lots of members of the American reactionary fraction have gone on the defense, because they assume – rightly in some cases – that there are political opportunists who want to lay this mayhem at their doorstep.
There is certainly no doubt that the ease with which this youngster purchased firearms and ammunition was a key facilitating factor in the Safeway terror; and that has the gun fetishists’ underwear in a wad, because they are having a hard time justifying the sale of 30-round magazines for handguns without tipping anyone off that they themselves want to stockpile weapons and ammo for their own often-racial fantasies of future conflict.
To be fair, there are a few folks among leftists and non-racial populists who entertain nutty martial fantasies of their own.
I’ll probably be drawn and quartered for pointing out that the President’s speech at the memorial service, calling the killing of six people a tragedy, was delivered by a man who has the blood of thousands on his hands. Saying so is not civil discourse by some lights. Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani lives don’t count, and sending one’s own people to die trying to kill them is called “leadership.”
But these examples of benign wrong-headedness, sentimentalism, opportunism, lunacy, and chauvinism are not the whole story.
Let’s start with the premise that Jared Loughner is crazy, not coherently political. His reading list was all over the map, everything from The Communist Manifesto to Ayn Rand. He was very attracted to conspiracy theories, and was reportedly a devotee of David Winn Miller, a bizarre internet guru that claims to be a judge and the King of Hawaii. Loughner capered in front of a camera in a g-string with his gun, ate a lot of acid, and attacked street signs.
I’ll leave the DSM-IV acolytes to put labels on what kind of crazy Loughner is. The fact is he wasn’t crazy on Mars or in a time warp.
He was crazy in Tucson, Arizona, United States of America, in January 2011. Jared Loughner could read and write in English. He watched television, listened to the radio, saw movies, and read newspapers. He knew how to buy a gun and call a cab. When he couldn’t get his ammo at one Wal-Mart, he had the wherewithal to head to the next one and try again.
Jared Loughner may have some problems with dissociation, however that is being defined, but he didn’t learn to load and fire a Glock 19 via some synaptic disruption in his cerebral cortex; he learned it from a culture. Last I checked, there is no evidence of a Glock 19 gene, though I expect the DSM-IV people to come up with a Glock 19 Disorder soon enough, and Searle will invent a drug to control it.
This may sound like I’m trying to make the US case against him, given the narrow legal definition of insanity; but I’m not. The legal definition of anything is always inadequate, because law can never anticipate the complexity of context.
The case I’m making is that Loughner – in his own mentally fractured way – was behaving exactly the way his culture demonstrated he was supposed to behave.
Rage at the discovery of falsity seems to be proportional to the level of authenticity promised at the start.
— Linda Kintz
He absorbed his information and analysis from electronic media, where mainstream discourse is so disconnected from lived experience, so shallow and anodyne, that the ubiquitous (if syncretic) loon-cries to be found on the internet appear authentically critical by comparison. Especially for an alienated youth, bullied in school with its enforced regimentation and cruelty-promoting age segregation, frustrated in romance (with all its gender baggage), and finding refuge in psychoactive chemicals, beginning with alcohol (the real gateway drug).
What did he get from his history books, from films and novels, from his culture that valorizes the soldier and cop above all others, but a steady IV drip of dominator masculinity and the belief in redemptive violence?
What did he get from a culture that worships celebrity, confrontation, and war technology?
Young people learn to behave by mimesis. They look for models and imitate them. Every model available to a young man whose life is wretched and whose refuge is audiovisual media seems these days to carry a gun. Soldiers, cops, secret agents, even mercenaries and bounty hunters.
I’ve quit attending movies that feature guns and explosions in the ads; which means I’ve pretty much quit attending movies.
Everything gets solved by killing the bad guys. So once you define someone as the bad guy (or the bad girl), the solution is clear. Redemptive violence combines seamlessly with masculine prerogative in a culture where masculinity is most clearly understood as the ability to conquer, dominate, prevail over an adversary. The world is defined by enemies. The man is defined by his enemies, and his ability to prevail over them.
Give a bullied, outcast, crazy boy a gun and he’s equalized.
On another note, because most of us have mollified the killer-meme in our own lives. Gabrielle Giffords was an elected official. The idea that electing a special leader can solve problems shares a premise with the idea that killing an elected official can solve problems.
Watching MSNBC’s incredibly rude Chris Matthews a couple of days ago (he interrupts everyone he brings on and shouts them down, with no clue about how whiteboy that is), and he was castigating Rush Limbaugh for a roadside ad in Tucson that featured bullet-holes and called Rush a “straight shooter.” It was a legitimate criticism.
Limbaugh is a jackass, and he is definitely part of the right-wing that fantasizes about shooting people as a core political principle. That is definitely a core element within the so-called Tea Party movement, but they’ve always been there. That is a whiteboy thing, too. Go to a gun show sometime, and see what I mean. Confederate flags everywhere, and Nazi paraphernalia on sale.
But what Matthews doesn’t recognize is how his emphasis on electoral and policy politics reinforces people’s perceived dependency on that as the principle agent – or even the sole “legitimate” agent – of change. There is an element of truth in it, after all. We live in a technocratic society, where power is exercised from a haze of interlocking directorates, and where powerlessness defines the rest of us. But when a person, for reasons rational or irrational, comes to believe that this power is exercised unjustly, only this shared belief in the great agency of elected officials remains. The echo of sic simper tyrannis calls to the boy, to the man, to the future celebrity.
Mark folk:
“The idea that electing a special leader can solve problems shares a premise with the idea that killing an elected official can solve problems.”
Killing an Elected offical CAN solve problems, Stan, that is why it has been conducted in assasination conspiracies throughout American history. Killing Lincoln elevated the Southern Johnson to the presidency, who canceled the “40 acres and a mule” for freed slaves, leading to their working for their former masters who introduced neoslavery. The neoslavery is discribed in SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME by Douglas Blackmon.
The killing of John Kennedy may have led to the Vietnam war, which was desired by the military and intelligence agencies. The killing of Robert Kennedy prevented him from being Elected to the presidency, thus investigating the Warren Commission findings, the most fraudulent cover up conspiracy since the Dreyfus Affair.
I apparently am a conspiracist, since I think that 9/11 buildings were exploded by internal demolition, the obvious explanation with overwhelming empirical evidence. Therefore when another Lone Assassin is pillored in the media as being politically crazy, my first impulse is to reach for a conspiracy explanation. The only evidence of one so far is that the Chavez building, which held the Ethnic Studies department, banned by the Arizona government, was trashed at the same time as the mass murder.
also the anti-Semitic media claim that the assassin was Jewish and a member of the same synagogue as Giffords. Is this true? Is it important? Is it relevant? We don’t know the political associations in the shooters background yet, so it is impossible to say. He may be just what the media says he is, a crazy confused kid. But we conspiracists tend to be suspicious of what the media says, or, indeed, of anyone attacking the possiblity of conspiracies.
15 January 2011, 10:03 pmStan:
Kennedy started the Vietnam war (escalating with Special Forces, a unit I served in and that Kennedy began… the Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg is named the JFK Special Warfare School for that reason… and he awarded the unit its distinctive Green Beret, a symbol of imperialism everywhere in the world now.)
Internal demolition cannot be done on the sly (I received proficiency pay for several years for using non-standard explosives, and have quite a bit of experience with them. ID is too work intensive and too messy to conceal from a buildings inhabitants, in fact, it cannot be placed effectively while people are in the way, a spaghetti of “nonel” tubes running all over the place.)
The Kennedy family has accepted the Warren Commission report.
The media is not, as far as I can tell, anti-Semitic (the usual conspiracy claim is just the opposite, so this nonsense is refreshing in that respect).
And we do know a few things about Loughner, which I noted (and which have been documented).
Finally, neither this thread nor this blog will be hijacked as a megaphone for conspiracy theories (tho mixed metaphors are okay). There are plenty of Illuminati-hunter sites out there. Not here.
16 January 2011, 6:26 amPeach McD:
I feel the same way about movies. I’ve had an interesting email conversation with Robt Jensen about the pornography of violence. He understood my point but said he didn’t want to muddy the waters by using that word. Still, American movie culture that promises to right the world by killing the bad guy is a top US export – along with porn and armaments.
16 January 2011, 8:54 amGuy Montag:
“[In the movies]Everything gets solved by killing the bad guys. So once you define someone as the bad guy (or the bad girl), the solution is clear. Redemptive violence …”
One exception I recall is the 1998(?) movie “Savior” with Dennis Quaid. Quaid is a SF soldier who goes down the “redemptive violence” path. After his family is blown up by a bomb in France, he walks into a mosque shoots those he thinks responsible, and ends up in the Foreign Legion in Bosnia as a sniper shooting Muslims.
Sounds like a typical American movie. However, this was a European film. Quaid finds himself in situations where he’s unable to “save” things with violence. Against expectations, he never fires his rifle(after shooting a shepard boy in the opending scene)in heroic battle to save the day. There’s redemption in this movie, but not “redemptive violence.”
16 January 2011, 9:59 amMark:
It’s not a ground breaking idea that the masculine individualist fantasy of guns and martial violence being both redemptive and also a kind of patriotic duty has always been part of our social fabric. Although putting it in those direct terms will get you some looks from alot of white working class folks. And it’s repercussions throughout society are rarely discussed. I don’t recall violent rhetoric being as ubiquitous as it is now however.
I seem to remember a slight embarrassment when males would spew their macho gun/racial/gender rhetoric in the past. Kind of like the slight discomfort whenever the line “all men are created equal” is cited. The womens movement has enabled/informed us that this is an antiquated and obsolete phrase – of course we all know now that it would be better to say “All people” instead of “All men.” I would say this is widely accepted, eve among gun-fetishizing white men.
The difference these days is the amplification by the great media machine. In reference to the whole “conspiracy” thing I do believe there is a powerful base of billionaires who benefit from the continuation of this rhetoric. Anything that continues the further slide to the right generally and effectively marginalizes all left-leaning sentiment as being “lilly livered” or “weak” serves to solidify and promote the standing of this class of people. I accept “conspiracy” as a perfectly legitimate way to describe how the machine works. But it is a conspiracy that operates quite openly. Many of these people are public figures. People like Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, LLoyd Blankfein. Others of this class of people are not public figures but they sit on boards of directors and act as political figures. They are not bogey-men.
The CFR and the Bilderburg’s and the Trilateral Commission, these are all no more conspiratorial than the local Plumbers Local – I’d say they are simply a class of people who meet (sometimes in secret) on a regular basis to discuss and implement ways to promote their class position. Except, of course they have much more power than your local plumbers union.
Anyway, I’m extremely saddened by the Tuscon shootings and all this talk about dialing down the rhetoric is, in the end, only a good thing. If we can get poeple to be a bit more civil and less militant – sign me up. This country is so filled with violence and weapons…..sheesh.
16 January 2011, 3:29 pmStan:
I think media sells violence – in one respect – for the same reason there is candy always stationed at the checkout stand in grocery stores (where kids will see it and nag their parents for some). It is cheap stimulation, and it sells.
Selling, however, is based on demand, even when the demand is produced by advertising (which is psychological manipulation). There is a recursive feedback loop between popular ideology and popular culture, and there is an arms race (thinking of movies here) to provide stronger, sweeter, more titillating… to an audience that is more and more jaded, requiring stronger and stronger stuff to get off.
One of the main points – no surprise here – I am suggesting is that while plenty of people see this, as stated above, we don’t seem to see – or we don’t acknowledge – how determinative, once again, gender is. Sex and violence are portrayed in ways that reproduce male power and continue to marginalize, humiliate, and oppress women… as well as put boys-2-men in our emotional straitjackets, seeking domination and danger to prove ourselves (even if vicariously).
Even when the gender equality meme is played out (in purely liberal terms), the same old same old is reproduced. Watch the awful (and weird, frankly) GI Jane, for an example. Woman achieves equality by beating a man, telling him to “suck my dick” (analyze that!), and going off to kill bad Arabs. There is no gender subversion here, just a female actor in drag.
16 January 2011, 3:51 pmMark:
One of the reasons I keep coming back to see what ol’ Stan is saying about a particular issue is precisely because of the observations you have about gender as it relates to militarism and our society, etc. Your writings and observations on the subject have definitely influenced me over the years. This is simply not discussed much anywhere else, not in my world anyway. Maybe in some Susan Sontag book. But really you know, who actually reads those things? Mainly a bunch of smarmy liberal types who don’t give a fuck about working-class stiffs anyway?
What we can actually DO about this in society? Well, aside from the usual suggestions one could anticipate I’ve grown more and more dubious about what impact a couple of old liberal types with no money can actually have. (I guess I’m including you as an “old liberal type with no money, no offense intended). Then again you’ve increased the range of the discussion, for me anyway, and for this you are to be commended. And no, I’m not just blowing smoke up your arse.
Being aware of how the media zeitgeist influence, inform, and coerce the culture is obviously helpful. I get the feeling that so many people are just scraping by, working their butts off, they really don’t have the time to sift through the bullshit shoveled at them from CBS, Fox and the right-wing blow hards that abound through the landscape.
I read somewhere recently that nationwide there was a 45% turnout for this last mid-term election, a figure I don’t question. About half the people, it would seem, understand that the political parties are basically interchangable and neither will do anything to improve the plight of the 85% of us who make less than 40K a year. In fact, they consistantly and actively enact policies that make things worse. This being the case, why not just arm yourself to the teeth and make sure the next sucker doesn’t take what you busted your ass to get. If you can get yourself a weapon at a gun show with less red tape…sure beats having to deal with the man. I have a nephew who has a concealed carry permit and is convinced his 9mm Glock is going to protect him from…i dunno somebody I guess.
I have guns. Hunting rifles. They sit in a gun closet. I think I shot the shotgun last fall once. One grouse. Haven’t shot the 30/30 for ten years. I personally don’t have any illusion about these weapons making me safer. They are basically tools. Tools that have a very destructive potential and are to be respected and apparently and is something that alot of anti-gun people have a hard time wrapping their heads around. It is something that I think working-class folks enjoy scandalizing the anti-gun crowd with. A kind a reverse class envy – another aspect to the brashness and posturing.
Anyway, this last shooting in Arizona has really got to me…I dunno… how many dead 9 year old’s does it take to change the political climate? Hopefully not any more….
16 January 2011, 10:59 pmMichael Anderson:
On a tangential, but related, course—I know a person here, who has a bumper sticker that states “God bless the troops—especially the snipers”. He also talks about the Hwy 101 bridge being blown up by “terrorists.” What is he thinking? Guess it’s OK if you bless the troops…
17 January 2011, 7:25 amld:
I’ll probably be drawn and quartered for pointing out that the President’s speech at the memorial service, calling the killing of six people a tragedy, was delivered by a man who has the blood of thousands on his hands.
(Figuratively) drawn and quartered by whom? By FS readers? Whatever in the world gave you that impression?
17 January 2011, 10:24 amWinston Warfield:
I grew up in Tucson, so what happened there resonates personally. This discussion around the influence of gendered cultural influences is valuable, too rare, and right on target (if you’ll pardon the phrase). I was at one time a “gun nut”, owned a small arsenal, reloaded my own ammo, etc., so have personal knowledge of this sub-culture, which I have seen grow to become no longer “sub-“. The fetishizing of guns and weapons, seen mostly in the movies, has become mainstream, so that every teen boy (and some girls) is conversant with the tools of lethal personal power projection. Please don’t misunderstand me, this isn’t a rant against guns, because the “liberal” hue and cry to control guns cannot possibly succeed in stopping this. The NRA is totally correct in their slogan “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. It’s the impossibility of discussing what that actually could mean in this toxic culture that is the actual problem, you ask me.
17 January 2011, 12:03 pmThe intersection of male socialization to be able to dish out violence and domination, and to be invulnerable to competitors, with the actual handling and firing of a lethal weapon, is a heady thrill which is hard to put into words. Without the language of gender and patriarchy, it is impossible to understand, and thereby, critique this social pathology by former adherents such as I, or certainly by the so-called “clinical experts.” The effort to locate Jared Loughner’s crime in the realm of personal, clinical insanity is a crippled culture’s way of dismissing and denying all discussion which is “strange”, or uncomfortable, or “radical”, and one of the bigger taboos nowadays is to analyze anything from the standpoint of accurate and contemporized analysis of patriarchy. Those with the power (e.g. the “bully pulpit”) to educate us on this gendered cultural disease will not, or cannot. So we are doing it ourselves. Good. This site is providing important linguistic tools and background concepts for us to develop self-awareness, especially us men.
You add to this in Tucson the explosive growth of middle-class suburbia over the past 40 years, now collapsing economically, which is not a community at all, but a crippled social organism of bedrooms and TeeVees, internet porn and hate blogs. Then you stir into the mix the emergence of neo-fascist racial victimization of Mexicans and Indians in southern Arizona, which has always been lurking there, trust me, put into the mix a smart white kid into nihilism (how could he not be?) who has no employment future and has just been bounced from community college and rejected by that great sink for male dominance fantasy, the U.S. Army, and you get an explosion.
Yet is there ANY DISCUSSION of this in these terms? By anyone with a large audience and persuasive powers? Nope. Certainly not by Harvard-educated “systems managers”. We’re stuck with the “personal insanity model” as an explanation, which means that this kind of sadism will, like cancer in temporary remission, reemerge.
Tim:
Winston…thank you so much for the first hand clarity. Great insight into the processes and ingredients that give us our contemporary culture and all it’s volatile moments. The concept of the patriarchal issue and it’s dominating role in our funk is never addressed enough…time to come out of that wilderness and let the women heal our wounded psyches. Thanks brother!
17 January 2011, 6:47 pmMaggie:
Hey, Stan. Remember me? Well this may blow you away. But I don’t think this event ever happened. I’m not sure either the girl or Loughner even exist. Think I’m crazy? Could be. Or could also be one day you may think me quite prescient. I am neither. I just looked carefully at all the bogus and contradictory information the media provided and concluded nothing happened.
17 January 2011, 11:05 pmDan:
I know that a lot of folks here are past/beyond straight up Marxist analysis, and that’s all to the good, but just because you’re past something does not mean it has no relevance (it just means it just means that it is not the whole of the story)…
Anyhow, several classical Marxists (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxembourg and more) spent a lot of time talking about the disjunction between what is “taught” — i.e. what people are told is the truth via the popular media and by the prevalent memes of the moment — and by what is truly experienced. All of those analysts put forward the hypothesis that when the disjunction between what is taught and what is experienced become large enough, social and political dis-association of one form or another starts to become widespread.
I think we’re seeing it start to accelerate (it’s been going on at lower levels of activity for quite some time).
On a completely different tangent: Regarding blowing up the WTC buildings via demolitions? There is zero empirical evidence: explosions are distinctive creatures on seismographs, and there are many seismographs in the local vicinity of the WTC. Those local seismographs recorded the impact of the planes at exactly the time that the crashes were recorded on camera, and recorded the slow rumble of the collapse of the towers and ongoing destruction, and never recorded the distinctive signature of any detonated chemical explosive. Not a one. So… those with experience (Stan, for example) in building demo seem to think it logistically nigh unto impossible to carry out without anyone noticing… and those with the data indicate no evidence. Drop that one, please.
18 January 2011, 11:38 amMark folk:
The major untold story in the Giffords shooting is not conspiracy, but racism, which appears also Unmentionable in the media. Arizona is highly poloarized against non-Whites, and this type of non-White racism has been used historically by the White ruling class in order to rule. More hispanic babies are being born in Arizona then White babies and, given Arizona was oringianly stolem from Mexico, arouses White fears. Against all non-Whites. Black Dems and Repubs activists have resigned their posts out of fear of this racism. Violence has been emphasized in the media, anti-goverment values, but the underlying racism has been dis;cnnected from the assassination.
19 January 2011, 10:17 amDan:
I don’t think conspiracy is useful or fruitful to consider. I saw a phrase bandied about another website: Stochastic Terrorism. In essence, scattering the seeds to the winds and knowing that the ground is fertile, and that somewhere, one of those seeds will germinate.
The racism angle is prevalent, pervasive and at the very core of the right wing psyche – it is part and parcel of the entire rightist structure. Our culture was built on -isms (race, sex, and so forth) and it is no surprise that as our culture and economic structure comes under ever greater stress from within and from without, that the bare and ugly bones of that structure become ever more visible.
19 January 2011, 10:44 amStan:
Don’t get it. Is there some evidence that Loughner is racist, or that he had a racial beef with Gifford?
19 January 2011, 12:34 pmMark folk:
the only evidence I know of so far is Loughner’s mentioning in his Facebook rant the ‘Second Constitution.’ This is right wing code for the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments giving civil rights to racial groups. That and the trashing of the Ceasar Chavez building at the same time as the mass shooting.
So Loughner may be just what he is portrayed in the media, a lone nut. But his rants had political referents, racist referents, and the political-racial aspect has not been explored, or, if explored, publicized. Giffords and the judge were both mainstream pols, but they both courageously opposed the racism against Hispanics prevalent in Arizona.
19 January 2011, 1:20 pmsam:
The lyrics are:
I shouted out “Who killed the Kennedys?”
When afterall it was you and me
I interpret that to mean one of the titular Devil’s many inhumane manifestations is a purveyor of sensationalism. The words “Who killed the Kennedy’s?” have been used to sell countless tabloids, not to mention other media.
It’s already been “shouted out” on at least one popular program that Loughner was probably a brainwashed assassin. Who needs proof? Lack of it doesn’t halt the sale of ad space on conspiracy websites, magazines and radio shows. Besides, inhumanity is so dull and depressing without mysterious additives. Spice it up a bit, and you have a hot product.
19 January 2011, 7:58 pmMatt S.:
Stan,
I saw “The Tillman Story” the other day, which I thought was well done. Hopefully you’re the same Stan who appeared in the film.
Just one point (based on JFK talk above): have you read Gaeton Fonzi’s ‘The Last Investigation’? Especially in conjunction with Anthony Summer’s ‘Not In Your Lifetime’, it makes for very compelling reading.
Thanks.
22 January 2011, 5:49 pmkathy:
sharp piece Stan! I agree with your points here. (Why can’t i write something that pithy!!)
30 January 2011, 9:21 amby the way–inspired by Matt’s question, ha– is the character Stan Goff (played by William Hurt) in Syriana a coincidence?
Michael Anderson:
They walk among us…
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/08/former-us-marine-arson-japan-north-hollywood.html
Ex-Marine arrested in Valley fires served time for arson in Japan
The man arrested Tuesday for allegedly setting nearly two dozen fires in North Hollywood is a former Marine who served time behind bars in Japan after setting fire to multiple restaurants and bars on Okinawa.
A decade ago, the fires outside the U.S. military facility in Okinawa received great publicity in Japan and further strained relations between local residents and U.S. military personnel.
2 August 2011, 9:24 pm