When I think about Jared L. Loughner’s attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, it’s hard to know what to say. My thoughts, of course, are with her and her family and with the families of all the others who were wounded or killed; but I have to admit that part of me, when I first heard about the shooting, was not surprised, and that makes me very, very sad. It’s not that I am someone who’s been thinking it’s only a matter of time before those right-wing “crazies” start coming after left-wing politicians–and I know Giffords is a centrist in a lot of ways–the way there are right-wing “crazies” who go after abortion providers; it’s that so much of the rhetoric coming from the right since President Obama’s election has been so violent, so focused on portraying not only Obama himself but what comes out of his office as hate-worthy in the way that one hates a scourge that needs to be eliminated, that the commission of violence against someone on Obama’s side simply did not seem all that surprising–though my lack of surprise didn’t make it any less horrifying.
I am not saying that the rhetoric of the right is at all directly implicated in Loughner’s act. By all accounts, he was a deeply disturbed man, and I agree with David Frum that “any suggestion that the Tucson shooting was somehow inspired by the extreme anti-Obama political rhetoric of the past 2 years” is just plain wrong. As Frum says, “that point should be acknowledged, accepted, and internalized.” Nonetheless, the fact that I was not surprised by the shooting gives me extreme pause, and so I appreciate–as I usually do not, since I don’t normally like him all that much–Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comment” on the shooting, even though I think he was not explicit enough in making the point that I quoted David Frum as making above. Olbermann does do a good job of naming names and giving examples, though, and I appreciate the fact that he at least nominally took the left to task as well, though I am guessing that a more objective look at the political rhetoric from the left than Olbermann is likely to provide would reveal that it is not quite as innocent as he implies.
I also really like the way David Frum concludes his post. After quoting examples of rhetoric that, in his own words, “invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence,” he says this:
Again: this talk did not cause [the Giffords shooting]. But this crime should summon us to some reflection on this talk. Better: This crime should summon us to a quiet collective resolution to cease this kind of talk and to cease to indulge those who engage in it.
He’s right and so is Olbermann when he says that people who refuse this reflection, who trivialize the need for it, who continue in whatever way, shape or form to insist that “they’re only words” ought to be shunned until they become irrelevant.
http://obamalondon.blogspot.com/2011/01/inexplicable-edits-on-sarah-palins.html
Permit me to link to a feminist take on it.
Sorry, busted link. Trying again:
http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2011/01/09/palin-and-clinton-obsessives-suddenly-discover-that-violent-discourse-is-a-bad-thing/
Lauren: “But when such a heinous act is committed by a white christian American….”
From what I have heard, he was an atheist.
-Jut
Robert,
That’s a brilliant post. Thanks.
Yesbut. Of course our national discourse should be more civil. It seems to be getting worse all the time. I don’t know how we get there from here.
But the real villains in *this* tragedy appear to be severe mental illness, a society that doesn’t give people with mental illness adequate treatment and surveillance, AND a society that casually gives people with severe mental illness access to guns.
Calling the shooter “crazy” and talking about “right wing crazies” is extremly ableist. We have so far not gotten any diagnosis of mental illness of the shooter from a doctor. People who became violent against abortion providers have not all been mentally ill.
I know it easy to blame “the crazies” and move on. But just because it makes people feel better (“only a crazy pperson could do this. I am not, and don’t know, any crazy people. Therefore no one I know could ever do this”), othering perpetrators of violence this way is not only dishonest, it is also incredibly damaging to people with mental illness. Unless combined with drug abuse, mental illness does not make people more prone to violence (and drug abuse has the same effect on people who are not mentally ill. People with mentall illness or mental disabilities are, however, more likely to be the victims of violence that people without. And when everyone paints them as violent and dangerous, this becomes even more likely.
It is also a question worth pondering if, had the shooter been a muslim, people would be as quick to blame everything on mental illness. Somehow, I am pretty sure that the focus would be on a possible connection to muslim terrorists. But when such a heinous act is committed by a white christian American, then people look for a different way to other him and distance themselves. And calling him crazy seems to be the way to go.
Lauren,
Thanks for catching this. My intent was to refer to ironically to the stereotypical narrative you are referring and I was careless in leaving out the quotation marks that should have made that clear. I will add them. I did not, however, call Loughner “crazy.” Instead I called him deeply disturbed, a word that for me at least does no mean mentally ill per se, but rather troubled, which is a description borne out, I think, by at least some of the news accounts–here’s one–that I have read.
Thanks for understanding. I might be extra sensitive to this at the moment, because it is such a wide spread meme. Which is why I read “disturbed” like that- it is so wide spread, I am pleasantly surprised when I come across someone who means it differently- sort of the way that people may say “there is something wrong with him” and mean the fact that his morals are deeply corrupted- I absolutly agree with that, but people have said the same thing and meant “he is mentally ill” so often that I don’t assume the first is what they mean.
From what I have heard, he was an atheist.
Thanks for correcting me. I still think, though, that there are very set narratives for these kinds of crimes and what narrative is chosen by the media and the majority of commenters depends very much on things like nationality, skin color and religion. The default for murders committed by muslims is “extremist”, the default for white Americans seems to be “crazy lone gunman”- which is great when you want to avoid looking at the biggersocietal forces that can have influenced the actions of a killer, like for example comming of age in a time when the political rhetoric ofter borders on- or crosses the line of- being eliminationist and encouraging violence.
Not to be contrary–because by all reports Loughner did claim atheist as a label–but I think it is just as valid to label him a white Christian American because when most people make first impression assumptions, at least here in the US, they assume Christianity as a default. And he was raised in a largely white Christian culture. So until they were explicitly told that Loughner was an atheist, they would have had to assume that he was mentally ill in order to distance themselves from his crimes just as Lauren noted. Of course, finding out that he was an atheist only helped cement the idea of mental illness in a lot of peoples’ minds. You can almost imagine the mental checklist going on in their subconcious minds: Shooting? Terrorist! White guy? Crazy! Atheist? Oh, that explains it, then.
Floyd: Not to be contrary–because by all reports Loughner did claim atheist as a label–but I think it is just as valid to label him a white Christian American because when most people make first impression assumptions, at least here in the US, they assume Christianity as a default. And he was raised in a largely white Christian culture.
Can we assume he was heterosexual? Should we assume he was a right-winger, although it appears he may have been a leftie? Does this make it okay to assume that the Ft. Hood shooter was a jihadist?
Your whole point seems to be: it was okay to pigeonhole him as a Christian and, then, when we find out he was an atheist, we get to pigeonhole him again. In both cases, it seems we want to make assumptions in order to support our own pre-established political narrative. That is a bad tendency.
-Jut
Indeed, Keith Olbermann did not do much research on how the left has acted in this regard. For example, here is an ad from 2006 where a Republican candidate’s opponent ran an ad where crosshairs were superimposed directly over the face of the candidate himself (:08 – :10). That’s a hell of a lot more direct than putting them over the candidate’s district. Imagery of violence, both visual and verbal, have been directed towards Republican Presidents and other officials for a very long time. That doesn’t excuse anyone on the right from doing the same. I’m just pointing out that Olbermann couldn’t resist taking advantage of this tragedy to make political points.
Of course, some of his points were valid. It’s pretty outrageous to call one’s supporters to make one’s opponent afraid to leave their home. But you can find examples of that on the left as well.
The overall point of racheting down the imagery and the overblown rhetoric is a good idea. There’s plenty of it. I have to wonder, though, just how much impact this event is going to have. Just to name what I can remember off the top of my head, I’ve seen President Kennedy shot and killed, Sen. and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy shot and killed, ex.-Gov. and Presidential candidate George Wallace shot and paralyzed and President Reagan shot and wounded. All of these were supposed to be turning points. None were, it seems. Of course, here there were many more people involved and you had a child killed, so that might give it more impact. I’m not optimistic, though.
In reviewing that list it’s clear that political candidates of all stripes have been victimized. This isn’t the exclusive property of one side.
It’ll be interesting to see how people throw around accusations of violent imagery for political gain. For example, “target” is a term used to describe ad campaigns for soap or beer. Using it to describe a political campaign seems rather innocuous to me. If someone says “We need to target candidate ‘X’ for defeat” and candidate “X” starts claiming their opponent is threatening them or using violent imagery I’ll suspect that candidate “X” has little of actual substance to say. But if someone says “We need to make candidate ‘X’ afraid to leave their home” then candidate “X” has got a legitimate complaint.
I think the point was that the creation of media narratives involves channeling people into types, and the narratives about these types are different depending on which preconceptions or fears they trigger.
Thus, not that it is appropriate to assume the shooter is Christian, or that he is an atheist, but that these assumptions are sometimes byproducts of the way in which the media narrative is formed.
From Jut:
“Can we assume he was heterosexual? Should we assume he was a right-winger, although it appears he may have been a leftie? Does this make it okay to assume that the Ft. Hood shooter was a jihadist?
Your whole point seems to be: it was okay to pigeonhole him as a Christian and, then, when we find out he was an atheist, we get to pigeonhole him again. In both cases, it seems we want to make assumptions in order to support our own pre-established political narrative. That is a bad tendency.”
I’m sorry, Jut, I didn’t mean to be imprecise in my meaning. I wasn’t saying it was okay to pigeonhole him as anything. But people do make assumptions about others and we have to keep that in mind when we talk about these things. Humans, all humans, use mental shorthand to make immediate judgements about everything in the world around them as a matter of the evolutionary processes that made us who we are as a successful species. Those of us who are concerned with how power is filtered through racism, sexism, and hmophobia are often just as guilty of this as any unrepentant bigot (want proof then think of a tea partier). To acknowledge this fact is not to give assent but to confront it head on.
As far as labelling him a Christian on first view, I don’t think there is anything wrong with doing so. After all, Loughner grew up in a society that is by every indication a Christian majority society. It is a society that gives lip service to secularism yet still tries to inject Christian ideology into every issue. Making an assumption, in the face of a lack of any other evidence, that Loughner is a Christian is not the same thing as pigeonholing him. It is merely recognizing that that is the shorthand that people use when trying to make sense of the world around them.
As an atheist myself, I am often confronted by people who assume I must be a Christian. It doesn”t bother me. I merely correct them and go along my merry way. That some of them will then assume that I must be out abortin babies and rapin and thievin doesn’t affect me in the least. But they will still think that way because it allows them to, as Lauren said, “other [me] and distance themselves” from any actions I might take that they disagree with.
Mandolin said it much better and more concisely than I did.
Here’s Time labelling the shooter as mentally ill and apparently seeing it as at least one basic cause of the shooting. The point of the article is to question why mentally ill people have access to purchasing guns, but they seem to be presuming a) that he’s mentally ill and b) there’s a cause/effect relationship.
a society that casually gives people with severe mental illness access to guns.
No, we don’t. When someone has been diagnosed by a medical professional as both mentally incompetent and possibly a danger, that person’s access to guns can be restricted.
But I don’t want my ability to buy a gun to protect myself from a stalker compromised by some random guy who doesn’t like my driving calling the state to report me as crazy. We have laws to protect the rights of mentally ill people exactly because they used to be casually abused.
As for violent rhetoric, it’s not just political–it’s our entire culture. High school football teams are urged to kill their opponents, admission to college is framed as beating out other candidates, etc., it’s all competition and we choose to use violence-related words to describe it. No one side is exempt: the left had that movie fantasizing about the assassination of Bush when he was a sitting president.
I don’t think people are describing the shooter as crazy because of “only a crazy person could do such a thing” but because he recorded a bunch of You Tube videos in which he comes off as really crazy – completely irrational, incoherent thought process, persecution complex, etc. – and because his classmates at community college described someone who was eventually barred from classes because of bizarre outbursts and who often spent class giggling and talking to himself.
I have very personal reasons for strongly opposing the stigmatization of people with mental illness, but frankly, I will be shocked if this guy is found competent to stand trial without serious medical intervention. (But never fear. This is Arizona. They’ll get him competent, and then they’ll fry him.)
Going back to the topic of the post, I think this post from James Fallows is germane:
Those with murkier motives include just about everyone on RonF’s list.
Fallows goes on to say:
It’s possible my memory is selective here, and if so, I welcome correction, but it seems there were a lot of assassinations and assassination attempts in the late 60s/early 70s, and then in the somewhat more sedate political environment that followed, there were very few. And while very few of the assassinations and attempts were directly and obviously linked to the main political issues of the day, it’s hard to believe the general zeitgeist didn’t somehow play a role, even if an indirect one.
Like Richard, I was not surprised – shocked, but not surprised – but if you had asked me what topic would motivate a generic political assassination, I would have said immigration. The rhetoric has been white hot angry, full of very violent, murderous imagery for years. People have been hung in effigy. Giffords opponent in the recent election held campaign events that involved shooting M16s. I could even tell you names of people I worried about as potential shooters. There have been times where I’ve been at events and thought someone was about to start shooting. (Arizona is an open carry state, so as long as your gun is visible, you’re good. And of course, lots of people also have concealed weapons permits.) But … they didn’t.
But immigration does not seem to be even on the radar of the shooter, and Giffords was one of the more conservative Democrats on this issue, with a lot of emphasis on enforcement.
Police are looking for another person, a white man in his 50s who has been described as a “suspect” or an “accomplice,” rather than the more neutral “person of interest.” The police haven’t shared too much about how or why they concluded he is a suspect. If he’s identified and questioned, we may know more. If he is never found, a lot of people will be convinced that right-wing extremists used a crazy person as their shooter and got away with it.
Like RonF, I don’t think we’ll really change. At some point, the political passions of today will fade and be replaced by something else, but we have a long history of using very violent metaphors, not just in our politics, but in all aspects of life, and I doubt we’ll stop.
Going off the (very good) post that Robert linked to, I can’t escape a feeling that her being a woman has something to do with this. It’s not something I can back up with a lot of evidence. It’s just that the level and nature of the threats she received before this seem very out of proportion to her moderate political views. My understanding (sorry, I’ve been reading so much about this that I can’t remember where I read it – know it was buried half-way through one of the news articles) is that Grijalva, the much more liberal representative from the neighboring district (and my former representative), receives more threats, including death threats, in the form of phone calls, e-mails, letters, but was the never the target of something like having his office seriously vandalized (the windows of Giffords office were either kicked or shot out – the investigation was inconclusive – after her health care vote) or having threatening people show up armed to campaign events.
Obviously, it’s not really clear what connection the earlier threats have to what happened. She might have been targeted because she happened to be the shooter’s representative, nothing more complicated or logical.
Police are looking for another person, a white man in his 50s who has been described as a “suspect” or an “accomplice,” rather than the more neutral “person of interest.”
I believe this person turned out to be the taxi driver who brought Loughner to the scene, accompanied him into the grocery store so Loughner could get change to pay him, and then left. He contacted police yesterday, they checked him out, and said that he is not in any way a suspect.
He seems to have become somewhat focused on her mainly because at an earlier event, he asked her a (nutjob) question and she blew him off. That does ring the resentment-against-women bell more than any partisan political bell.
nm, thanks for the update. I hadn’t read the latest. (Other than marathon comments here, I’ve been off-line most of the day.)
Robert, yeah, I almost mentioned that. Apparently he told a friend at the time that her answer was dumb or she didn’t come as intelligent to him. He seems to have been rather obsessed with his own idea of what knowledge or literacy or something was.
Why?
Oh, right. Because Loughner is crazypants. Therefore, his actions must exist in a cultural vacuum. Schizophrenics don’t get “inspired” by the world around them. We’re immune to cultural influence. We just….randomly do stuff. ‘Cause we’re so crazy and all, you know. OOGA BOOGA BOOGA!
Richard, seriously, I’m just not seeing the logic here. You say that you don’t want to participate in ablist memes about the mentally ill, but from where I’m standing, your argument seems to rest on the notion that crazy people are immune to influence by the media, or that when we decide to do things, the culture around us plays no part in shaping those decisions. Is that really something you believe?
Schizophrenics don’t exist in a cultural vacuum, and neither do people with crappy moral values. Claiming that if Loughner has “something wrong with him,” whether that something be schizophrenia or just some vague non-medicalized quality of “being disturbed,” therefore his decision to assassinate Giffords must have nothing to with any cultural influence — that “any suggestion” that his decision to assassinate a politician was even “somehow inspired” by the culture around him would be “just plain wrong” –is…
::catches self before engaging in ablist language::
Well, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Loughner wasn’t raised in a box. He’s not an alien from outer space. He may be schizophrenic. And? So? No schizophrenic I have ever met, not even any of those I met in the hospital, has ever tried to claim to me that they possessed some special magical immunity to societal influence.
Amazingly enough, paranoid schizophrenia, while some believe it may provide some defense against certain types of illusions, does not confer any special immunity against culture. Scandinavia has a much higher rate of schizophrenia than other regions of the world do. Their murder rate? Pretty low. Would it be “just plain wrong” to suggest that cultural influence might just possibly have something to do with that?
When “diagnosed schizophrenics,” to use the popular phrase, decide what to buy at the store, what clothing to wear, for whom to vote in an election, we make those decisions under the same cultural and societal influences as everyone else does. We are not immune to the influence of upbringing. We are not immune to the influence of advertising. We are not immune to the influence of propaganda.
So why on earth should anyone believe that when one of us turns out to be a violent, murderous asshole, he suddenly and inexplicably — like magic! — becomes totally immune to the cultural soup in which we all soak?
Cheers, Elkins.
For a direct and obvious example, paranoid schizophrenic imagery varies depending on cultural immersion. Narratives about the CIA and aliens emerge at particular historical moments for particular historical (and, it should go without saying, social) reasons.
Elkins,
You’re right. Thanks for pointing this out. I fell easily into Frum’s rhetoric, and now that I read what I wrote again, given your critique, I don’t think I even needed it to make my point. If I have time, I will go back and edit. Now I am knee-deep in preparing my classes.
Thanks, Richard. I’ve been seeing a tremendous amount of “oh, well, the guy is obviously nuts, so cultural issues are totally irrelevant” deflection today, and it has really been getting under my skin.
Even if the shooter is schizophrenic and he was completely unmotivated and uninspired by the Republican imagery, etc, there is still another issue: schizophrenia is a highly treatable illness. If this guy is diagnosable, why was he not under treatment by a psychiatrist? Could be his own failure (too paranoid to get help, too disorganized to get to an appointment, unwilling for whatever reason to take meds), but it could also be lack of insurance. Could universal health coverage have stopped this shooting? Probably not-too many other things going on-but maybe.
It could also be that he is an adult, and it is very hard to force a mentally-ill adult into treatment if they don’t want it.
Hm, we used to be able to edit these posts.
Robert, while I agree with much of your link in #2, the writer is being a little clueless. Yes, there are plenty of ‘progressives’ who are sexist – this is not news to any feminists. No, she was not the still small voice in the wilderness with her tiny band decrying the sexist attacks on Palin. No, not every vile attack on Palin was sexist.
And yes, the “golly, what’s wrong with that graphic” is horseshit. As has been pointed out umpteen times, yet your feminist blogger seems to have conveniently forgotten, at the time that graphic came out Giffords herself said that she found it disconcerting and thought it was inappropriate and suggestive that ‘targeted’ officials should be dealt with violently. If it was simply vigorous political language, then why did Palin’s spokesperson try to pretend it was never ever a gun sight – never mind that Palin herself called it a “bullseye” during the campaign – and said it was a “surveyor’s mark”? Instead of, you know, saying that of course it was a gun sight but it was just “targeting” districts like that DNC article in 2004 and had nothing at all to do with “RELOAD”ing.
The focus on Palin is unfortunate, in that it sweeps away all of the other powerful right-wing voices that are much, much worse and are openly pro-violence. Rush Limbaugh, Sharron Angle, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck – I doubt that Palin has said a tenth of the awful things any one of them has.
It could also be that he is an adult, and it is very hard to force a mentally-ill adult into treatment if they don’t want it.
Actually, there are two situations in which inpatient treatment of psychiatric disease can be forced: suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. This guy seems to have fit the latter.
But I was trying to make a more basic point: Suppose he did have insight and realized that his thought processes were not normal. Could he have gotten treatment if he had sought it? Lack of insurance or inadequate insurance might have prevented his getting treatment for any mental illness he might have had (and it’s hard to tell whether he had a formal mental illness or not by newspaper accounts-though he was clearly “crazy” in the lay sense). If he wasn’t interested in treatment, that’s a different, more complex problem. But he might have been prevented from getting treatment by the collective decision of the US people to not provide health insurance to the entire population. If so, then the attack was caused by Republican propaganda, whether the shooter was inspired by the “cross hairs” campaign or not.
Dianne, I agree with you that people who seek help for mental-health issues very often can’t get it – or are afraid to try, because then they’re on record and on paper (and anyone who really believes medical records are confidential is indulging in serious wishful thinking).
But knowing now that Laughner may have had homicidal ideation, after the fact, is not enough to have had him involuntary committed; and it’s also true that it’s very difficult to get a resistant person mental-health assistance short of something as drastic as that.
From the Mother Jones interview with Loughner’s friend, it doesn’t really sound as if Loughner thought that he was in trouble. Of course, it’s always hard to know from the outside what anyone is thinking. Perhaps he did have moments where his thoughts frightened him or he feared he was losing his grip. But it’s also quite possible that he didn’t, in which case even a well-funded mental health care system would not have done very much for him. As mythago points out, it’s difficult to incarcerate an adult who has committed no crime against his will — and that is a very good thing, IMO.
Indeed. There’s some minor tsk-tsking going on in part of the blogworld because he got pulled over the morning of the shooting – and then they let him go ZOMG!!!. Because he hadn’t done anything at that point, duh, other than run a red-light.
I really think a minority, but not an unsizable one, of people have genuine difficulty with the idea that for practical purposes, time runs in one direction and knowledge doesn’t go back in time.
Robert said:
This is probably another side-effect of the ableist thought process.
Because, clearly, if a guy is “crazy”, he’s scary, freaky, super crazy all the time and, surely the attending officer should have seen that.
Only we keep hearing: “But he was such a nice man… I never would have suspected!” after things like this. Because “crazy” people aren’t obviously “crazy” all the time.
It just makes a lot of people feel better to think so.