Detail from The Stranger’s cover art
We’ll begin with the “Sneak Preview of the Cover of The Stranger This Week, Created by Dan Savage and Aaron Huffman” as an example of the strong argument for incitement. Click on the artwork to see the whole cover on Slog.
In contrast, at the Seattle Times, Danny Westneat argues that “Words don’t kill, killers do,” and calls “violence-soaked entertainment” and the sanitization of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to the stand as material witnesses.
Westneat doesn’t have to live in Tucson, though. Danny, meet fellow columnist Jon Talton, who was just talking to a Tucson cop: “The Kooks passed an insane law that says anyone but a convict can carry a concealed weapon. With no background and no training. I treat everyone, especially Kooks and gang bangers, as if they are carrying a 30-round Glock under their shirt.”
(Now a quick detour to AZCentral.com: “A nasty battle between factions of Legislative District 20 Republicans and fears that it could turn violent in the wake of what happened in Tucson on Saturday prompted District Chairman Anthony Miller and several others to resign.” That’s right, Republicans are worried about getting shot.)
At Crosscut, they threw every pundit they had at the assassination (I won’t call it an attempt as six people, including a judge, were killed). Knute Berger recalls his own run-ins with the tinfoil hat brigade, and says that at the very least, these people don’t need any media incitement to act unpredictably. Anthony B. Robinson, president of Seattle-based Congregational Leadership Northwest, lays out a moral appraisal:
But they are morally implicated. As is well known, Palin had Congresswoman Giffords on her map of “targets.” She was “in the crosshairs.” Palin’s “Don’t retreat, reload,” slogan speaks volumes, as does the campaign rhetoric of Gifford’s Tea Party-sponsored Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly.
Mark Trahant opens with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ personally voiced concerns about Sarah Palin having crosshairs on her district, and concludes: “We need to encourage responsible free speech by condemning those words that go beyond civility.” Ted Van Dyk wraps up with: “I find the present political climate in Arizona to be distasteful and destructive. Yet I do not blame it for the Tucson shootings.”
At Publicola, Josh Feit gave some context to the idea of incitement, intended or otherwise, with a story about Rep. John Boehner calling a fellow representative “a dead man.” Dan Bertolet accused our culture of becoming “unhinged.”
U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott had a different take for the Seattlepi.com: “It is the first time we’ve had one of these people alive: They usually turn the gun on themselves. At least we have the opportunity to try to figure out the ‘why’.” As it turns out, McDermott has a personal stake in wondering why people want to kill politicians.
For anyone asking “What does it all mean?” the waters remain muddied by the hasty, reactive responses to the shootings. There are several competing narratives here. One is that an apparently mentally unstable young man who may have had a fixation on Giffords was able to walk up to her with a perfectly legal 9mm Glock with a 30-round clip.
Another is that Tea Party rhetoric has consistently employed inflammatory calls to action, predicated on the nation facing a dire emergency. Because the Tea Party is a movement, it’s difficult to pin down what “it” believes in its heart. But there is no other major political movement in the U.S. that so commonly employs thinly veiled death threats as talking points.
A third is that gun-metaphor-friendly Sarah Palin employed target sights to make a bold visual point, and that subsequent events have illustrated the drawback to that. The response has been so strong that Palin now understands the power of incitement, if not the term “blood libel.”
The only immediately clear thing, as a friend mentioned, is that everyone’s emotional and cognitive biases have been confirmed. (This is actually a real analysis, not put-down.) If you tend to take a big-picture view, Palin’s target sights and Jared Loughner are going to be implicated. In a knee-jerk emotional sense, there will seem to be a bright, shining line connecting the two: “Well, of course that’s what happens!” (Again, see that cover art, above.)
On the other hand, someone more atomistically minded needs only to hear “alienated loner” to know that this tragedy is the price we pay for acting as if all our citizens are deserving of their liberty. In this light, the assumptions made above are “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.” (The same complaint is repeatedly made by the NRA after mass killings, as people attempt to “hijack” the tragedy to restrict gun rights. This is a terrible cross for the NRA to bear because mass killings happens so frequently here in the U.S., and yet people insist on calling for gun control every single time.)
So we have our Rashomon moment when everyone seems to have a piece of the truth. The person who pulled the trigger pulled the trigger, not Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. Yet why do Beck or Palin exist as public figures, if not for the implicit assumption that people listen to them? Surely it matters what they say. The ability to hold both of these truths in our collective heads would be a start, but it is not likely when we are feeling emotionally reactive–as in, the hours and days after a traumatic incident. In that window, particularly, people simply hold to their biases. Knowing when to say something is often just as important as what you say.
As shown by the google search, both parties have a long history of demonization of each other. The word yellow journalism was used to describe rather heated political rhetoric in print throughout our history (so much for objective journalism), if not outright fights/shooting duels between politicians. As a skeptical observer of all mainstream media, I have to laugh at how we are now supposed to tone down our political speech when there is NO evidence the AZ shooter listened to anyone other than the voices in his own addled pot head. On a side note it seems the shooter became miffed at the Congresswoman after she failed to answer his weird grammar/content question at another open meeting earlier. After all the political attacks/smear campaigns on the Bushes (Michael Moore and pretend assassination movies of the Bushes) and the Clintons (dirty old man/socialist) it is as the old saw says, “the pot calling the kettle black”. For the last 40 years we have seen the rise of Saul Alinsky type protest demonstrations/movements that seem more to shock/publicize/self-promote themselves rather than educate or calmly persuade logically. I personally think PETA or Code Pink tactics turn off more people from any message they might want to promote. NPR is just as biased as any particular talk radio show left or right. Just because all of the mainstream media dogs are barking the same agenda/tune for ratings doesn’t mean you should go along with the pack so some of our very basic liberties (1st and 2nd Admendments) get diluted for the delusion of public safety or some perceived civil debate tone that we never had.