Pointing fingers
Today’s shooting in Tucson, which has left six dead, including a child, and twelve injured, including Arizona congressperson Gabrielle Giffords, was still in the ‘breaking news’ stage when people started posting links to a graphic published by Sarah Palin’s PAC. The graphic shows the names of twenty Democrats, including Ms Giffords, with their locations marked on a map of the US by what look suspiciously like gunsights.
I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin (that’s a little thing we call ‘understatement’, by the way), but I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with attempts to blame Palin (or Beck, or Limbaugh or any of the other two-penny demagogues) for some of the things done by their crazier and more heavily-armed followers. The language they use may be extreme, but rational adults understand that it is not an incitement to commit murder or insurrection. And even though some of their followers are very irrational indeed, I still believe there’s a big difference between ‘irresponsible’ and ‘criminally liable’. The truth is that we really have no idea how big a role violent rhetoric plays in convincing some addled psychopath to start shooting, and I’m deeply suspicious of people who feel that it’s a foregone conclusion that this or that public figure must be to blame.
In this particular case, it looks as if there may be something else entirely going on. Huffington Post has unearthed some videos made by alleged shooter Jared Lee Loughner and they don’t look exactly like the rantings of someone who has drunk too much Tea Party Koolaid. Instead, they look like the work of someone who is mentally ill, full of private terminology (“conscience dreaming”, “mind controller”) and the kind of fragmented, half-illiterate, logically incoherent ramblings you find in the writings of nutjobs who are convinced that they have just discovered The Big Secret. There are no hate-filled ravings; there’s just a kind of impenetrable word salad.
I don’t know what was going through his head when he pulled the trigger, but if these videos really represent his thinking, it may not have been anything to do with Sarah Palin. Or even Gabrielle Giffords.
