After CNN, which gave us a number of hours on the situation without an update, but did allow the gradual infill of data, my sources have been 1) The New York Times and 2) the New York Daily News. Now the Daily Snooze is not the totally reactionary fishwrap of yore, when they took McCartney's side against Lennon. Um, excuse me. (Sen. Joe) McCarthy's side against anyone to his (political) left. There are still some matters in which they are quite conservative (ablist and pejorative language in the reportage; fiscal matters), but they've been to the left of the Post (Murdoch's rag) for many years now, and it was through the News' Mike Lupica that I learned that the little girl was the granddaughter of Dallas Green, who'd managed the Mets, Yankees, and Phils in his day. The Times meanwhile had an article about local gun culture.
And there is much blathering about the rancidness of the loose lips on the right who never met a violent metaphor they didn't immediately take to their bosom.
OK. Remember how violence on TV was decried for decades, how it was feared that impressionable minds would become inured to mayhem, how a culture of shoot-'em-up, beat-'em-up in media was going to translate into Real Life?
Don't hear that much anymore, do you?
Part of the reason is that "violence" is now cordoned off to after 9:00 pm on the broadcast channels and pretty much anything goes on cable because
So. Verbal threats. Harlan Ellison had a story in, I think, either Deathbird Stories or The Glass Teat, about a couple of yackamores in a theater balcony and what happened when they were asked, politely, once, to cut the chatter by someone whose next response was to throw them off the balcony. The examples of conservative wishing-dead that have been brought up are things one might hear in an ill-regulated schoolyard or among twelve-year-olds discovering beer.
Threats with guns, that's a different matter.
Bob Herbert reminds us that we are a violent society in denial about it except when things like this happen.
Homicide is white noise in this society.That last is kind of key: "violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us."
The overwhelming majority of the people who claim to be so outraged by last weekend’s shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others — six of them fatally — will take absolutely no steps, none whatsoever, to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. And similar tragedies are coming as surely as the sun makes its daily appearance over the eastern horizon because this is an American ritual: the mowing down of the innocents.
[...]
If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment, and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.
Meanwhile, the Readings for the Day:
- Echidne of the Snakes (of course) on the Tea Party's response. (As if they'd know anything about anarchism or anarchists. Give me a break.)
- Anglachel on mental illness and political events and the point where "both sides do it" has some small validity.
- Radical Hott Off Notes (via Dumblr Bumblr Tumblr) quoting from Shakesville and adding a thought.
- Barbara Walters defends Sarah Palin. (via the NY Daily News)
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