America’s culture of death
April 19, 2007 at 6:22 pm by John F. Sugg in Randomly NotedOne of the favorite laments of the right-wing noise machine is that there’s been an epidemic of teen sex, especially oral sex, because of Bill Clinton trysts with Monica.
Rush Limbaugh, for example, recently proclaimed: “Who popularized oral sex for the nation? And who was defended day in and day out royally for doing so? Bill Clinton. And who defended him? The Democrats.”
When a, ummm, turgid intellect as Limbaugh renders such an erection of opinion, it not only must be true, but we must apply it to other social events…
The massacre at Virginia Tech, for example.
Prevaricator General Gonzo thunders: “I am deeply saddened and angered by these senseless acts of violence.” And George Bush asserts: “It’s impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering.”
Impossible to make sense? Well, no. It’s pretty easy to understand where hatred and violence lurk — waiting for the first disturbed individual to wander by.
When you start elective wars, liken political opponents to Osama bin Laden — well, you light the fuse. “NRB,” who regularly posts attack comments on CL blogs, is a righteous right-winger too afraid to give a name. He recently erupted on Fresh Loaf: “[W]hat the AJC really deserves is to have a hijacked jetliner rammed into it.” How far is this character from picking up a gun and shooting those he has been trained by Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Boortz, et al to hate with homicidal fury?
I assumed when first reading the statements from Bush and Gonzo that they had admitted and were taking responsibility for the crimes they have committed in Iraq. But, no, they were referring to the tragedy in Blacksburg. It’s not surprising they won’t acknowledge their own lethal guilt.
The Virginia Tech shootings say something about American society, the society Bush and his consigliore claim to lead. They have cheapened life, from the senseless, based-on-lies-and-exaggerations carnage in Iraq, to the culture of kill-first-talk-later at home. From Bush’s never-equaled mass murdering on Texas’ death row, to the lunacy of portraying a clump of insensate cells as more important than protecting and healing children already born, to attacks on every part of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights other than the gun-totin’ Second Amendment — the Bush death cult has declared life is all but irrelevant.
Add to that the media violence, slasher films and video games. We saw the contributions of that culture during the Columbine slaughter. And I suspect Cho Seung-Hui probably thought that after putting a bullet in his own head, there would be a flicker on a video screen, he would stand up, and go to level two of “Kill Your Classmates.”
Any list of mega-violence in America transcends parties, ideologies and presidents. But some events are rooted in the times. The Kent State killings, for example, eloquently reflected the paranoid, enemies-list-driven presidency of the delusional Richard Nixon — unrivaled in its pathology until the Bush regime.
Every day in Iraq, almost three times as many people die from gun deaths as perished in Blacksburg. Ten of the 80 daily gun deaths are children. Meanwhile, Britain’s recorded 46 homicides involving firearms last year. New York City recorded at least 579 homicides.
I am not an anti-gun liberal. I own guns, and have since I was a child. But my support of the Second Amendment is reluctant. I wish I could throw away the guns. But you can’t retrofit a nation into dealing with stress in non-lethal ways. History or whatever, we’re tied to guns. As with conservative friends such as Bob Barr, I fear a nation where only the government has guns. Because it would never be just the government — the criminals always find a way to arm themselves.
Maybe Virginia Tech will wake up this nation. I doubt it. We see the idiots on the right actually blaming the students who were killed. John Derbyshire of the National Review Online wrote: “Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy?”
Ludicrous ban on carrying concealed weapons on a college campus? Is this guy real? Of course, that foul thinking is parroted by our own Georgia General Assembly, which wants to destroy business owners’ property rights by declaring that employees can come to work armed.
Boortz and the rest of the barking lunatics on the right tried to outdo each other by declaring the solution to violence is — can you guess — more violence. Most of these people never wore a uniform (Cheney, Boortz, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, etc.) or dodged combat (Bush). Brave guys who let others die for their criminality and mistakes.
Just to annoy the hell out of the right, I’ll quote France’s Le Monde on the Blacksburg tragedy. At least there’s still sanity in Europe. Le Monde editorialized:
[I]n a country where ‘the right to possess and bear arms’ is inscribed in the Constitution and where it is estimated there are 192 million guns, the problem is not just one special-interest group. After the tragedy, voices have been raised to deplore the fact that professors and students were not authorized to arm themselves since, [in that event] one of them could have neutralized the killer. With such reasoning, America is not ready to master its violence.
In the culture of killing — not created by the Bushies but certainly elevated by them to unheard-of extremes — Americans will continue to arm themselves. The next disturbed kid will have no trouble getting a gun, and more innocents will die. The spiral will ratchet up another level. Again and again and again.
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