As you say below, most people responding are doing so from this feeling of helplessness. Everyone who has a kid ounderstands what you're saying here - and has felt the very same feelings. You saw it in Obama's emotional response: that coulda been my kid. I can remember some horrible tragedies happening when my son was little. The feeling is still with me, today, many years later: that hated feeling that, as much as you want to control what happens to them, you can't. And so you have to, daily, put it out of your mind. I've always thought that one of the reasons why people respond so strongly to these events is that they'e, for so long, repressed this daily horror, that the repressed comes back with a vengeance.
And still... what irritates me about the response on facebook is the agony of the victim's innocence. And yet ... 5000 people have been murdered in Chicago since 2001 - as a result of gun violence. Little children are killed daily - due to the policies that the united states government pursues - often knowing that the end result is the death of children. The outrage is mostly absent. Most of the people on Facebook, lighting digital candles and passing around glurgey stories of heroism or nasty mean arguments about how its all because we took god out of schools ... these are not people who would get so upset about a kid on the south side of Chicago or in Pakistan - let alone were the victims of a bullet a grown adult. Oh, that! Well, that's poverty - and we all know poverty is the fault of people who don't work hard. Or, it's about drug deals gone wrong. Or gang violence. Whatever it is, it is somehow traced back to a lack of innocence.
But this, happening to good people in the suburbs, white people - well, this, is just horrible because, wham!, out of the blue, for no reason, they are shot to death. Which, of course, makes everyone think about themselves, their own kids, their own families, their own kind. They see themselves buffeted by a fate that they seemingly can't control. They can't pull up all the benefits of being white, middle or upper-middle class (or at least wielding the markers of such existence) and protecting themselves from the winds of that shitstorm
There's that good old American individualism expressing itself there, no? The outrage and horror is about innocence. But these were innocent children, is the cry. What kind of metaphysics of innocence and guilt is this? Why do we, even as lefties, cling to it. Why is it more inexplicable to go after innocent 6 year olds than it is to go after movie theater goers or shoppers at a mall or people at church or women and doctors at abortion clinics? Or randomly pick off people in the suburbs of Washington DC?
The other thing I find disturbing about some forms of left cultural analysis -- it's this weird, I dunno, weird desire, need, demand even that u.s. culture be the worst, most disgusting, most awful, most sick one there ever was. Why? Because it is evidence that capitalism is horrible. Since capitalism is the worst here, then we must find everything about every part of it - bad.
It is explanation for how powerless the left is, to boot. People don't rise up because they watch too much t.v., or play too many videogames - or whatever. This sort of analysis needs to find this horror to justify itself. To find anything wonderful out there, thriving under capitalism, would be a horror.
It kind of reminds me of that faction of lefties who rub their hands as an economy tanks. Woooo. World's going to hell in a handbasket. Finally, stock brokers are jumping from windows. Finally, the privileged shits in this country will get their's. They will finally suffer under capitalism and, as a consequence, they will finally rise up and get rid of capitalism. As I've said here before, I can remember a lefty professor telling me to stop campaigning for Jesse Jackson. Better to let Reagan win. That way, he'll give the working class what they want and give it to 'em hard.
It is a sadistic attitude: people can only change if they are punished. LEt Reagan flush the country down the toilet, he said, and maybe finally something will change.
I get that same sense form the doomsdayers wringing their hands over the supposed depravity of u.s. culture. It's like this weird desire to find depravity everywhere because somehow a depraved u.s. culture is vindication of a left analysis. And an even weirder sense that the person doing the analysing either 1. participates in none of it; is far too above it all to, say, engage in masculinity for instance; Or 2., participates in it but nevertheless gets a great deal of satisfaction out of posturing as one who pariticipates in it, but in the right kind of way and who can, therefore, be special interpreter. that's what creeps me out about the cultural analysis of the exile crowd.
It reminds me of that creepy form of cultural analysis from Dinesh D'souza. Here, white people, let me explain people of color for you.
At 05:22 PM 12/17/2012, Sean Andrews wrote:
>I will beg one last post to both clarify and largely yield the floor. I
>admit that some of my thinking here on guns has been largely colored by a
>very emotional response. I am a recent father of one 2.5 year old boy and
>we have another child due in February. This event really shook me - if only
>because I honestly hadn't thought about the death of my child in this way,
>and I have a child close enough in age to them. I also don't often think of
>guns as reasonable in any way other than the one offered by the NRA. I do
>think the US has a unique problem with them, though I may even be wrong
>about that. I don't have stats on hand and don't know how to judge their
>reliability.
>
>On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 3:20 PM, Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com>
> wrote:
>
>things about efficiency and training. Clearly training and planning are
>important - the Bath School attack was news to me and I imagine most people
>in this country. Always good to have a different frame of reference.
>
>And I hadn't thought as much about efficiency as a marksman - clearly he
>wasn't a good marksman and I guess that's sort of what I meant: he didn't
>need to be well particularly trained or well planned. Just know enough
>about the assault rifle to hold and point the trigger and you can mow down
>a crowd of first graders easily. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the
>functionality of this weapon, but it seems like it democratizes the
>massacre in some way that makes the absolute psychopath a little more able
>to carry it out. As I've just said, I am sure I could be persuaded even
>that is up for argument. But even taking it as given, I definitely see
>Jordon's point below - it makes a lot of sense and calls much of what I
>just wrote into question. The last point is especially important.
>
> >
> > I'm bumfuzzled by that one. I don't think it's worth considering what
> > kind of firepower would be necessary to stop an attack like this. My
> > position is that basically if someone is determined enough, no amount of
> > arming teachers, locking down schools, etc. is going to stop this kind of
> > thing from happening. It happens. It's incredibly rare. But it happens.
> > It also happens that large areas of urban US are effectively controlled by
> > gangs who are engaged in black market economies that require turf control
> > through the pervasive use of violence, but we're not wasting dozens of
> > lbo-talk posts talking about that tragedy.
> >
> >
>
>I disagree - IIRC we have had a lot of discussions in the past on urban
>violence and the like. But it is only rarely that we have an object of such
>broad cultural attention on which to converse about this. Maybe we talked
>about it in relation to The Wire once.
>
>
> > Why are those the only options? Why do we need "deadly accuracy" on this
> > accounting of rare behavior?
> >
> >>
>I agree. This is a good reminder of what I was trying to read into this
>event. I suppose it is good to call this the anti-anti-gun position since I
>am sure much of my response to this is a reaction to the response of the
>NRA. That is a hard reflex to imagine since it doesn't really have an
>outside. I'm not completely on board with what you are saying, but it
>certainly provides an unsettling vantage point.
>
>
> > I'd rather think about the "craziness" (cue: Carrol for the misuse of the
> > word) in the US that leads to having a crumbling economy that costs us
> > individual misery among millions of people due to vast inequality and
> > greedy policy decisions.
>
>
>And, really, I would to - so it is a good reminder. I was saying something
>about how glad I was my kid wasn't dead in this fashion, but quickly
>remembered how many terrible and disturbing acts of violence take place in
>that regular, systemic violence Zizek (and surely many other people,
>beginning with Marx) of capitalism. 20% of kids in Texas live in poverty,
>and I have a much more everyday fear about that possibility for my
>children. It is easy to get caught up in the viscerality of it.
>
>
>
> > It is, after all, a big world, with a lot of other societies not
> >> plagued by gun violence to the degree the US is. That can't be
> >> a complete coincidence can it?
> >>
> >
> > *shrug*
> >
> > You call it a plague; I call it anomolous. There's a big gap there. We've
> > been over this before, but the "plague of gun violence" in the US is
> > completely dominated by suicide; followed by violence commited in the
> > service of another felony -- such as a drug deal gone wrong, or a
> > retribution or turf war killing. When it comes down to it, there's very
> > little worth looking at here that qualifies as being the same as what
> > happened with Adam Lanza.
> >
> >
>I've actually been thinking about this a lot - not only because I've only
>recently ever had actually suicidal thoughts largely caused by my basic
>fear of capitalism as a lived reality (e.g. future employment to support
>said family). It is very interesting to note (as you also did in the other
>post) that suicide ranks so highly in the gun violence. I actually think
>that makes Ames argument even more compelling. Suicide by gunshot is one of
>the most efficient methods for successful suicides, so it stands to reason
>that might a salient feature in terms of US suicide levels - something like
>the position staked by Marv in this argument, if I'm keeping people
>straight. Durkheim is actually the originator of this - the whole idea of
>anomie and social dislocation caused by what is effectively capitalism. But
>it looks increasingly like little of that had much to do with this case
>either.
>
>
> >
> > I'll close by recommending Adam Kotsko's book, "Why we love
> >> sociopaths," which is a fairly thorough collection of the recent
> >> swath of sociopathic characters on TV programs, including Sopranos,
> >> Breaking Bad, Dexter, Weeds, Mad Men, House, and many more.
> >> Again, provocative but not foolproof.
> >>
> >
> > Yeah, tens of millions of people watch TV shows, and one or two of them
> > now and again go into a school or a shopping mall and kill a bunch of
> > people as their last desperate action in their life.
> >
> > I see clearly the connection.
> >
>
>My apologies to both you and Dennis. This really isn't Kosko's argument. He
>never says anything about a direct effect - and in principle I wouldn't
>agree with him if he did. He is doing something far more literary and thus
>open to great interpretation, but I found his arguments compelling. It is
>more that he looks at the popularity of sociopaths as a sort of cultural
>index for what we take to be heroes (or anti-heroes) today. In many ways it
>is just another take on the political economic argument, but he makes it
>more artfully by dissecting the fantasy this sociopath represents vis a vis
>contemporary capitalism. It is also much better use of media in a
>sustained, accessible argument that it is much better than someone like
>Zizek on the topic. Lacan is very useful in his own way, but this book has
>the potential to read a broader audience - which is why it is commendable
>that Zero Books did so. It is almost completely unrelated to this except
>in so far as he discusses what the sociopath increasingly represents in the
>American psyche.
>
>Sorry. No more posts...
>
>Thanks,
>sean
>___________________________________
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