Spreading the blame a little farther

[nancylebov]

Last I heard, there's nothing solid tying Loughner to the more violent right-wing rhetoric. It may have affected him, but if so, it doesn't show up strongly in his writing.

The one relatively good thing in the situation is that he's still alive, so we've got a better chance of learning about his influences.

There's a wide insurrectionist streak in the American right, but what's unusual[1] is that Loughner didn't stop with killing a politician or a politician and a judge. He went after a crowd of people who weren't in the government, and I can't think of any other American examples of assassination combined with mass murder.

This is terrorism, and I think he was influenced merely because terrorists have moved the Overton Window-- the range of what's thinkable. [2] Killing random people is how you say you're serious.

If this is true, there's no obvious solution. I'm hoping that terrorism will fade out eventually, and expecting that no one will be quite sure why.

[1] I think I'm right about this-- if not, I'm sure you'll tell me.

[2] OK, it's a slight extension of the idea of the Overton Window.

Comments

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Just to nitpick.... He may not have known this person was a judge.

[milimod.livejournal.com]

As much as I'd love, any day of the week, to see Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck grow up and shut up until they can say something constructive, I don't honestly believe that Loughner's actions would have been much different without their contributions. I believe Loughner has been headed in that direction for many years and there were simply no checks or balances working to counter him. I don't even think it was his "dysfunctional family," as they have been promptly described in the media. I think it was classic organic psychosis -- chemical imbalance, whatever you want to call it. It was inside of Loughner, eating away at his cognition like acid, and events conspired to bring him to that shopping center with a gun on Saturday morning. In a better world than what we have at the moment, he'd be confined to a facility where he could be diagnosed, treated and kept from hurting himself or others. He may get diagnosed; he'll be shut away probably for the rest of his life if he doesn't get the death penalty and therefore will no longer be a danger to the general populace. But his life as he's known it is now over. The toxic political discourse may quiet down a bit -- we can only hope -- but there will still always be people who cannot think rationally and will mistake innocent people for the "demons" that haunt them. I'm 100% in favor of gun control, but never forget the epidemic of stabbings that we've seen in China this year. At least 21 have been killed and over 90 injured by knives, hammers and cleavers. There have been crazy people as long as there have been people. The world we live in is doing little or nothing to alleviate this problem.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

The quotes I've seen say that he was deeply suspicious of government, and if you combine that with the Tea Party rhetoric that government is bad, and liberals are pro-repressive government, and liberals are traitors to the American way of life, then you end up with an endpoint of "so anyone who is at a liberal political gathering is an enemy of real Americans". Add that to his thwarted desire to join the Army (presumably to be a hero by killing enemies of real Americans), and you get Loughner killing as many people as he can manage at a Democratic politician's gathering.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

There's a report of him acting out in one of his college classes (last year?) at a female student who read a poem out loud about having an abortion; IIRC, he called her a "terrorist".

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Apparently he had quite a personal vendetta against Giffords. In 2007 he attended at least one Giffords rally -- and formed a personal grudge against her when she snubbed his insane question.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message

"[Loughner] told me that Giffords opened up the floor for questions [in 2007] and he asked a question. The question was, 'What is government if words have no meaning?'" He said, 'Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question.' Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her."

Giffords' answer, whatever it was, didn't satisfy Loughner. "He said, 'Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question,' and I told him, 'Dude, no one's going to answer that,'" Tierney recalls. "Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her."
[....]
Tierney notes that Loughner did not display any specific political or ideological bent: "It wasn't like he was in a certain party or went to rallies...It's not like he'd go on political rants."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There's a wide insurrectionist streak in the American left, too. I was in college in the late 1960s and early 1970s; I remember everything from merely disruptive protests to SCUM and the Weather Underground and the killing of Malcolm X by members of the Nation of Islam.

So far as this particular killer has any traceable political outlook, it seems to have been more leftist, at least a few years ago and according to the young woman who knew him then. But I think the more obvious explanation is that he was not even a political terrorist, but a psychotic; any ideological content in his beliefs was picked up at random. No political movement or faction is immune to paranoid hangers-on.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Do we have evidence that he was even a hanger-on to either major faction? Giffords' opponent, Kelly, said they had never heard of him.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The news reports I've seen don't support that. But that was kind of my point; the phrasing "any ideological content" was meant to convey that I didn't claim to know if he had an ideological position, or what it was if he did. The evidence that's coming out now looks increasingly as if he didn't.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

How do we get to the idea that Loughner was a leftist?

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Here's a version of the news story about Caitie Parker. You'll have to decide for yourself how much evidential value to assign it. I think that an anecdotal account of things seen several years ago doesn't count for a lot, even if you trust the witness; but it seems to be stronger evidentially than the purely speculative interpretation of him as a rightist, at least at this point.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's hard for me to believe, but it's been two generations since the sixties.

Maybe it's just a matter of where I hang out, but I see a lot more "tear it down violently" in the contemporary right than the contemporary left. I do see left wingers who think the current economic system is simply unworkable, but they seem to be resigned though angry about the system not doing what they think is necessary and not envisioning going outside the system to make what they want happen.

The only left-wing drasticism I'm seeing is among fringe environmentalists-- that one got violent with the Unibomber, but very few people seem to go in for it.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Did you see the "No Pressure" video from that environmental group in the UK? They weren't exactly fringe; they were pretty mainstream, with funding from several large corporate sponsors. I'm sure they didn't mean their images of the exploding heads of schoolchildren who didn't endorse their smiling teacher's call for reducing their families' carbon footprints to be taken literally, any more than Palin meant that Democrats should be shot; but in exactly the same spirit as for the criticisms of Palin, you can take them as normalizing the idea that people who don't follow green values deserve to die.

Then there was Barack Obama's speech about "If they bring a knife, we bring a gun." Sounds like violent rhetoric to me.

You can find violent rhetoric and violent imagery anywhere in the political spectrum. There's just a natural tendency to say that when your people use them, everyone knows that's not what they actually mean, while interpreting the other group's exactly similar rhetoric literally as a threat.

But I don't think "these people use violent imagery" is enough of a peg to hang a conviction for inciting murder on. Even if this particular murderer had actually been shown to have any attachment whatever to right-wing ideas, it still wouldn't count as making people who express those ideas as guilty of murder. I'm not even seeing "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" here.

[landley.livejournal.com]

People who want to change the current system don't have to tear it down, just wait for it to collapse. (Or for china to reposess it.)

Regan and the first Bush gave us a trillion dollar deficit. (And the savings and loan crisis, and the 92 recession.) Bill Clinton balanced the budget (and gave us a surplus and an 8 year economic boom). The second bush gave us back the deficit (and began his administration with the dot-com bust, drove it through enron and worldcom and california power outages and repeated airline bailouts, let oil industry executives literally write his energy policy with gas flirting with $3/gallon, and ended with Lehman Brothers and the mortgage crisis).

And yet the republicans claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility, and that their policies are somehow good for the economy. And people believe them, despite simple math not supporting this at all.

People only bother to be dramatic when they think there's still a chance of fixing things. Our national debt and our GDP are about equal (at $14 trillion). How is that _not_ game over? (For comparison, greece's GDP is somewhere around $330 billion and its national debt is somewhere around $420 billion. That's the point at which the EU decided to essentially liquidate the country.)

[kiya]

This post is interesting as a set of rhetorical influences. (Linked from a locked post, or I'd link you to the discussion there.)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It's kind of weird to see a reading list that includes We the Living, 1984, The Communist Manifesto, and My Struggle being listed as evidence of an individual vs. the state mentality (Orwell was a Trotskyite and a lifelong leftist after all) or of a generalized "smash the state" attitude (about the furthest thing imaginable from what Hitler advocated). In fact I could hardly think of any four works that have less in common ideologically.

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

I admit that I am not a psychological professional, but my father-in-law was and we had many fascinating conversations on the subject. Based on the descriptions I've heard from his friends and classmates and the disjointedness of his writings, I'd have to say that he's a full-blown schizophrenic. Early 20s is about the time that the condition comes into full bloom... someone might be mostly-normal but a bit "odd" during childhood and adolescence, then in the 20s the fuse finally blows and they're living in their own reality which has nothing to do with ours.

In other words, don't try to come up with any "rationale" for what he did... there isn't any.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Even schizophrenics have some logical-to-them rationale, pieced together from their personal experience.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/01/05/slipping-into-psychosis-living-in-the-prodrome-part-1/

This argues that schizophrenia starts with weird sensory experience-- the crazy-sounding theories are efforts to explain why the perceptible world doesn't make sense.

[sethg]

Indeed—if Loughner had shot Giffords in the hope of impressing a movie star, we would not be having this conversation.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Interesting; I think you're right. I can think of a number of cases of assassination and a number of cases of murder en masse(1) but none before this where they're combined.

(1) I used that term to distinguish what this guy did, or say the shooter in the bell tower at UT, from the more usual kind of mass murderer who kills masses one at a time.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Very good.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I do think you're stretching of the Overton Window idea, in that I don't believe it shows a change in the goalposts of the thinkable. I doubt anybody imagines Loughner's action to be valid political discourse, but everyone could already imagine it before it happened.

Moreover, I'm surprised that nobody seems to be able to come up with an assassination/mass murder in US history; there are so many in other countries, from the attempt to kill Louis Philippe with an "infernal device" to the use of bombs at public rallies to kill Rajiv Gandhi. I worked on a game design proposal in 1994 that involved a plot toward a mass murder/assassination attempt against a US president (it was a 24 type thing avant l'heure, in that brief window when computer games were "about" things), and I guess it's been done many times in other media. So I don't think there was even a "it couldn't happen here" kind of coccoon to be broken through.

I doubt terrorism will fade out: in one form or another it's been with us for a long time and it's highly effective in certain ways. I think we can expect reporting of terrorism to go out of fashion slowly in the US as people forget the Bush agenda, but then when acts of terrorism show up they'll just be labeled "anomalous," as they were back in the 90s.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I meant that the publicity about terrorism changed Loughner's Overton window, not the general public's.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

ah. I don't know if we can judge Loughner's window of the thinkable. He seems to be able to think lots of things other people can't or won't.

In some ways what we're dealing with here is analogous to art: a personal response to the world as it is, made difficult to interpret by insufficient reporting, but full of intriguing echoes.

Robin Laws reckons it will usher in a new (shorter) period in reporting fashion, away from inflammatory hyperbole and conspiracy theories. His commenters are unconvinced, expecting it to turn the heat up another notch.

For myself, I'm wondering what all this is distracting us from so energetically. Because it surely can't really be that this is the Matter of America right now.

[landley.livejournal.com]

I blogged about moving the Overton Window a few months back:

http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#04-07-2010
http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#11-09-2010