Zero Effect: The Arizona Shootings

It wouldn't surprise me whatsoever if the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords by Jared Loughner was politically motivated. And that's the picture that's starting to emerge. (Mr. Loughner shot others besides Representative Giffords, of course, but Giffords was his primary target, so I refer to the incident as her shooting.)

Indeed, it would surprise me if the incident were NOT politically motivated. If it turned out it was merely the product of voices in the gunman's had, or if there were some old family grudge he thought he was settling, basically ANY non-political motivation, that's what would surprise me.

With all the violence inherent in today's politics, I refer to violent rhetoric and violent implied inclinations, it's surprising that such an incident hasn't happened sooner. And let me say something that isn't politically correct, but is true: This violence is mostly, almost exclusively, found on the right. The days of the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, violence on the left, are for the moment long past. Perhaps the most-violent rhetoric from the left I've seen in awhile came from Eliot Spitzer, and we saw what happened to him.

Some folks wish this shooting to be what public policy scholar Thomas Birkland calls a “focusing event,” a moment that crystallizes the need for a change. Seen as a focusing event, presumably the shootings would focus our attention on the need to increase civility in our public discourse, to recognize that there's a difference between winning an election and “knocking you down,” as now-former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer so eloquently threatened to do to now-former New York State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. Birkland was talking about a policy change following a focusing event, not a change in political tone or a process change, but the principle is the same in both cases.

And it sure would be nice if this shooting could serve some good. I'm tired of seeing the right portray President Obama as the Joker from Batman, or with a Nazi flag behind him. I'm tired of people bringing guns to meetings with their Representatives to protest the government giving them health care. I'm tired of people at rallies threatening to lynch the Attorney General of the United States. I'm tired of hearing the likes of G. Gordon Liddy advise people to shoot federal agents in the head. I'm tired of Newt Gingrich thinking he knows what a “normal American” is and who the enemy of those “normal Americans” are.

And, mostly, I'm tired of hearing Sarah Palin and Carl Paladino and those of their ilk use sex-laced, incendiary rhetoric and then hide behind the First Amendment when something bad happens. The First Amendment, after all, doesn't give one the right to yell fire in a crowded theater.

It would be nice if this shooting helped to end all that, helped to restore to America a conservative movement that not only understood that compromise was necessary but that praised the idea of compromise (as Ronald Reagan once did) and that understood your opponents could be friends after 6pm (as Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil claimed to be). But let's face it. Even if the shooting was politically motivated (which it may-yet turn out to not be), and even if that fact if true were undeniable (and, sadly, everything is deniable these days), it still wouldn't change anything. The shooting will not be a focusing event for anything.

The shootings by army psychologist Nidal Hasan were successfully directed into scrutiny on American Muslims, and logic suggests the Arizona incident will direct a similar scrutiny toward the right. But contemporary American politics, as the shooting itself ironically suggests, is not about logic.

The violent rhetoric of the right isn't new, and we've seen similar potential focusing events before. The Oklahoma City bombing; the Branch Davidians' madness at Waco Texas; the Olympic Centennial Park bombing; the anti-government Right Wing rhetoric and violence of the Unabomber; various abortion-related killings; the flying of an airplane into IRS offices in Texas; the shooting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; etc. All of these, and others, many others, were potential focusing events to change the increasingly ugly nature of our political discourse. But all were successfully redirected. Instead of focusing on militias, we focused on the alleged root cause of the militias: Bad government. Ironically, this is the same thought process, focusing on society and not the criminal as the root cause of crime, that the right has long decried when it's convenient for them, such as now, wherein we are told that Loughner is totally responsible for his own actions. The right wing insisted that we reach out to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics (as long as their actions can be somehow traced to spontaneous anger at the government itself, and not the result of things said by the political right) with sympathy and understanding, even as they explicitly denied similar considerations to gun-toting, economically-motivated urban street thugs. Or to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics whose actions can in part be traced to violent political rhetoric.

And that's what'll happen this time. Nothing. Or, worse than nothing, the incident will somehow be used to cast scrutiny in the wrong direction.

The corrosive influence of Post-Modern philosophy on America's public life, once feared by the right, has become their greatest friend, because it enables them to sell us political goods we can't afford and have no good reason to buy. When all facts become opinions, it's the opinions of those with the biggest mouths and the most money that get to become facts again. And when all values are openly questioned, anger becomes the most-important value. Anger focuses, cuts through, motivates, intensifies. And, best of all, anger cheap to buy or manufacture.

The right, by far, has the most money (the Koch Brothers, unlike George Soros, aren't going to back down for fear of being misunderstood), the biggest mouths (conservative talk radio has reigned since the 1980s), and certainly the most anger. And if the anger already present isn't sufficient, the money can be used to buy more.

If Sarah Palin's pathetic, self-serving video, and her bizarre public E-Mail exchange with Glenn Beck, showed us anything, it's that the redirection process has already begun. And if the polls showing that Americans mostly think that the shootings in Arizona had nothing to do with politics are accurate, it may mean that the redirection process has already succeeded.

Zero effect. This, America, is the politics we're stuck with, the politics we've made. Focusing events may have no actual meaning.