Can’t get satisfaction and I don’t care what you do

I don’t need to tell you that there’s something horribly perverse about the public dialogue surrounding gun tragedies in this country. It starts with “never again” and it ends with inaction and more gun tragedies. This piece by Benjamin Kunkel (via) seems apropos:

If you wished to characterize the Democrats and the Republicans in terms of true exaggerations, you might say that the Republicans have become the Party of Psychosis while the Democrats have become the Party of Neurosis. The Republicans are psychotic because they have lost contact with reality, and orient their behavior not toward realities but toward fantasies. The Democrats are neurotic because they are aim-inhibited, as an old-fashioned shrink might say: their anxieties, hang-ups, and insecurities mean that they can’t attain satisfaction, since in a basic way they won’t even allow themselves to know what they want.

Many features of the Republican psychosis are well known: Global warming isn’t caused by humans; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are responsible for the financial crisis; the President, who may be a foreign-born anticolonialist undermining America at the bidding of his father’s ghost, has eliminated the work requirement for welfare; and so on. There’s never much point in talking to psychotics, though we can speculate about the particular delusions they exhibit. Most of us probably subscribe to an interpretation of the Grand Old Psychosis (GOP) that goes something like this: The trauma of American decline as experienced by white people, older people, and men—and above all older white men—has caused a psychic break producing a classic paranoid delusion, in which that segment of the population which through its race, culture, and creed embodies the American virtues responsible for the country’s former greatness is being attacked by a composite monster (dark-skinned, sexually deviant, non-Christian, and anticapitalist) bent on stigmatizing family as patriarchy, religion as ignorance, and free enterprise as predation. Here as in many cases of persecution delusion we might suspect the displacement onto others of a terrible guilt, in this instance surrounding war, racism, climate destruction, and so on. This interpretation of Republican loss of contact with reality is cartoonish and speculative but, in my considered opinion as a democratic ecosocialist and citizen–clinician, probably true as far as it goes.

For Your Reading Pleasure

If you really want to look into the mind of the semi-literate gun nut, I would completely recommend this thread.

My favorite part is the anonymous commenters daring me to call them a pussy or gun nut to their face. Think about it for a second and then giggle.

*** Update ***

I didn’t realize we were dealing with these cretin. I had no idea that we were dealing with the Uncle Jimbo and Black Five morons.

Sunday Evening Open Thread

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A little somethng for the Obots, from the Los Angeles Times, via Taegan Goddard:

Final Tally Shows Election Wasn’t Even Close…
“In the weeks since the election, as states have completed their counts, Obama’s margin has grown steadily. From just over 2 percentage points, it now stands at nearly 4. Rather than worry about the Bush-Kerry precedent, White House aides now brag that Obama seems all but certain to achieve a mark hit by only five others in U.S. history – winning the presidency twice with 51% or more of the popular vote.”

(I can’t believe the Muppets never did a version of ‘We Are the Champions’, but this is the closest I could find on Youtube, and it just didn’t seem appropriate.)
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What’s on the agenda for the ragged end of the weekend?

Grief Is Another Country

The other front pagers have been covering the Newtown disaster amply.  I have nothing to add, at least not yet.

I’ve lost much of today thinking about the parents, which has pretty much frozen my brain in place.

It’s a cliché, but still, absolutely true:  there is no loss like that of a child.  To my great good fortune and deepest fear, that’s a catastrophe I do not know.

But I did see it up close.  Without belaboring personal details (and a story that is not mine alone), my father predeceased my grandmother.  She lasted months only after that calamity, and that’s all I’m going to say about that for now.

But it’s the utter wreck that such a loss wreaks on those it touches that I’ve been turning over in my head all day.  John caught a lot of that with this post, which I read this morning, but that just made me think on it the more.  At some point during the day, it came to me, a stray wisp of memory — some words that I had once encountered that I half recalled to be as close as anything to give voice to something of what parents feel in these circumstances.

Decades ago, some years after we lost my dad, I capped a wholly undistinguished college acting career with a bit part in one of the lesser Shakespeares, King John.  Even Bill’s second tier work has flashes of seemingly impossible insight delivered in otherworldly language.  Act III of King John erupts in such a moment, at the point when Constance, believes her son, Arthur, has been doomed to murder at the order of King John.  I looked it up and here’s what I found:
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Make it monthly…

Like most, I’ve been stunned and shocked over the last few days.

The pattern is tragically clear. In the wake of the latest mass shooting, we have a conversation about mental illness (mostly, in ways to avoid talking about guns). Yes, there are always some who dare to suggest that it might be time to talk about new gun laws, but that conversation is quickly shut down out of political fear of the gun lobby–especially fear of the NRA.

What we do not do–ever–is talk about all the political organizations on the Right–like the NRA–that fuel paranoid delusion and the manufactured outrage 24/7 as their core reason for existence.  And yes, I said “Right” as I can not think of a single organization of the “Left” that uses delusion, lies and endless attacks on reality as their prime organizing tool and I can hardly think of an organization on the “Right” that doesn’t. This isn’t a both-side-do-it moment. Conservative thought in America is broken. They sell crazy talk, anger and fear. They have created a space where every paranoid sense of persecution is justified–and even honorable. They sell the idea that any extreme action taken in response to these political delusions is a virtue.

The relentless wingnut attack on reality–where every conspiracy theory is valid and all anger about your pet delusion is justified–is not harmless. Lives are damaged, blood is drawn and people die. It is a feature, not a bug of a War on Reality. From the NRA to Americans for Tax Reform to the Koch Brothers to the Heritage Foundation to Fox News to the Birthers to well, any of them, the modern conservative movement has mainstreamed paranoid fantasies and the manufactured anger required to support them. I am not at all surprised that media and cultural acceptance that the endless stream of political-based paranoid delusions should be treated as justifiable reason for rage and extreme actions would inspires some random nut case to act on his private iteration of rage and crazy. More »

Indicators of Action

Grief vs. rage. I’ve been going back and forth since Friday. I have two elementary school aged kids. Newtown hit me hard. But in the end, I’m a fucking pussy. I’ll blog. I’ll vote. I’ll organize. I’ll give money. But none of that requires me to leave my home, to sacrifice, to make a commitment. I’m a fucking pussy.

I appreciate the importance of healing. I respect and honor the need of victims to work through their grief. I weep — literally — at the images of communities coming together to support the victims of tragedy.

But none of that really makes a difference. You know when change will occur? It will not occur just because people come together to mourn. It will happen when people are so angry, so desperate that they act.

The evidence of action will not be a candlelight vigil. Action will only come when people instead, spontaneously mass at the NRA HQ and torch it. When they mob Congressional offices and shut them the fuck down. When gun dealers and shooting ranges are protested 24/7.

We’re not there yet. But we’ll get there. I wish I could be leading the effort. But I can’t. I’m a fucking pussy.

Another One: Indiana Police Arrest Man Who Threatened to Shoot Up School And Murder Wife

The AP is reporting that a man in Indiana has just been arrested for threatening to shoot up a local elementary school. Police were called to his house after the man allegedly threatened to set his wife on fire and then go to the nearby elementary school and kill as many people as he could before police could stop him. Police found 47 guns and $100,000 worth of ammunition in his possession.

CEDAR LAKE, Ind. (AP) — A northern Indiana man who allegedly threatened to “kill as many people as he could” at an elementary school near his home was arrested by officers who later found 47 guns and ammunition hidden throughout his home.

Von. I. Meyer, 60, of Cedar Lake, was arrested Saturday after prosecutors filed formal charges of felony intimidation, domestic battery and resisting law enforcement against him. He was being held Sunday without bond at the Lake County Jail, pending an initial hearing on the charges, police said in a statement.

Cedar Lake Police officers were called to Meyer’s home early Friday after he allegedly threatened to set his wife on fire once she fell asleep, the statement said.

Meyer also threatened to enter nearby Jane Ball Elementary School “and kill as many people as he could before police could stop him,” the statement said. Meyer’s home is less than 1,000 feet from the school and linked to it by trails and paths through a wooded area, police said.

~snip~

Officers searched the home, finding 47 guns and ammunition worth more than $100,000 hidden throughout the home. Many of the weapons were collector’s guns.

Also:

Yesterday, 50 rounds of ammo were fired in the parking lot of Fashion Island mall in Newport Beach. No one was hurt.
Oh, and a three year-old in Oklahoma is dead after accidentally shooting himself in the head yesterday.

But don’t you dare talk about gun control laws. Don’t you dare talk about violence against women.

Kerrrrist.

UPDATE: Also, a gunman open fire in a hospital in Alabama yesterday — three people were wounded. (h/t Violet)

And, right now, the St. Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, Connecticut has been evacuated and is surrounded by police, following what may be a bomb threat. (h/t vtr)

I don’t even know what to say. I got nothin’.

[cross-posted at ABLC]

Those people

How much do I love that this guy is also a former ambassador? Good God. We exported this:

The finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, who also was Michigan’s former GOP chairman, was captured on video telling a tea party meeting that voters in Detroit get picked up at pool halls and barbershops and bused “from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times.”
Ron Weiser also said at the Aug. 9 meeting in Milford that someone not from Detroit would not want to go to the polls there at 6:30 a.m. “without a side arm.”
The video of Weiser’s comments, recorded by a Democratic operative shadowing GOP congressional candidate Kerry Bentivolio to a meeting where Weiser also spoke, was given to the Free Press and posted on YouTube by the Michigan Democratic Party. Weiser emphatically said Friday that he meant no offense to Detroit and was speaking about past, not current, campaigns. But his comments immediately drew sharp criticism from a civil rights activist and a Detroit lawmaker.
In a phone interview Friday evening with the Free Press, Weiser, an Ann Arbor businessman who was running for a seat on the University of Michigan Board of Regents when he appeared at the tea party gathering, initially said he didn’t recall making the comments and didn’t think he would have used that kind of language. He later acknowledged making the remarks.
He made the comments in the video while explaining why he thought the GOP had a strong chance of winning Michigan in the Nov. 6 presidential election.
First, Detroit’s population, which heavily votes Democratic, has shrunk, Weiser said in the video.
“Secondly, no Coleman Young machine. No Kwame Kilpatrick machine. There is no Dave Bing machine. There’s no machine to go to the pool halls and the barbershops and put those people on buses, and then bus them from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times.
“And there’s no machine to get ‘em to stop playing pool and drinking beer in the pool hall. And it does make a difference.”

Those people.

He never intended any harm, by the way. It’s standard practice for the finance committee chair of the GOP to blithely announce that African-American voters routinely commit felony voter fraud, you know, if you can drag them out of the pool halls and bars and get them on a bus.

I’m still getting used to the fact that conservative politicians and paid political operatives regularly attack voters. Just think about how strange that is. A big part of their politics now is smearing certain voters. Not just Democratic elected officials. Not just powerful Democratic donors. Voters themselves. How is this punching-down smear campaign directed at voters even “politics” as we may have previously understood it? Obviously, they’re not interested in persuasion or making a case or appealing to anyone outside their base, because, like with Mitt Romney and the 47% comments, this is how they talk about us when we’re not in the room. Is this still “politics” or is it something else entirely?

The Venn Diagram of Tragedy

What makes these mass shootings so fucking infuriating is that the situations are so simple, so consistent. Mental illness + guns. This isn’t one of the incredibly difficult-to-predict situations. A who could have known moment.

No, what seems to have been going on in the Lanza house was the equivalent of building a bomb. And the question wasn’t whether it would go off, but when. And it wasn’t whether people would die as a result, but who and how many.

The problem with the broader “gun safety” frame is that it places restrictions on millions of gun owner who objectively are a low threat. Now, personally, I don’t give a shit. If it were in my power, I’d seize every fucking firearm in the country other than revolvers, shotguns, and bolt-action rifles and melt them all down. But that isn’t going to happen. And as a matter of practical politics, I think that any effort to impose restrictions on all gun owners is going to be virtually impossible to accomplish.

But, maybe, just maybe, we could talk about restrictions in cases where this Venn diagram occurs. If there is a person with mental illness in a household, they should, simply, not be allowed to possess firearms. We can debate what the specific dividing lines are. Is it schizophrenia? Depression? Autism spectrum? I don’t know.

But in many of the recent high profile cases, the indicators were obvious. Lanza was a kid who could not function in school. Despite his intellect, he was so unable to interact socially that he was pulled from high school. Now, I don’t want to punish families facing the challenge of mental illness. If anything, I’d like them to have much more and better support. But maybe, just maybe, such households should, in the interest of public safety, be barred from gun ownership?

A thought

For some odd reason it surprised me to find out that France also has big garish advertising inserts in the Sunday edition of their local papers. A few years ago I was looking for one of those odd ‘royale with cheese’ feelings that you get when you experience something extremely familiar, yet with little parallel universe-type differences, so I picked up a local paper in northeast France and flipped throught he ads. It took me a while to notice that there was not one single damned ad for violent toys. You could get FIFA ’08 for 25% off, EMT playsets, firefighting helicopters, boats, planes, trains, some movie tie-in tchotchkes and Disney-ish stuff of all varieties. But lord help you if you want an army guy or something that looks like a gun. As far as I could tell it just wasn’t there. Maybe the government bans it, but French friends convinced me that there just is not much pent-up demand for toys that simulate combat, mayhem and murder. Once I saw it the difference was really jarring. Over here you really cannot turn a page of your average advertising supplement without ten different kinds of murder-themed toy marketed to every age of American kid. They no doubt have that stuff, but most view this obsession with violence, especially among children, as distasteful and a little embarrassing.

Maybe there is not much point in railing against culture and the way things are. Reference, for example, Charles Pierce’s ongoing series about kulturkampfers on the right. Still, take a minute to feel the way that other people experience the world. Or hell, just watch Bowling for Columbine and see how Canadians deal with life just ten minutes over the border. You have to wonder how much better off we would be if we could reach this profound fear and anxiety of Americans against Americans, a pathology that underlies compulsive gun acquisition and so much hate-driven policymaking, and just breathe it out a little.

***Update***

I see that a number of people think that I want to ban video games or some such stupidity, including Atrios who, characteristically, criticizes with a vague bad-faith ‘shorter’.

It makes not much sense to ban something if you can’t reduce the demand. Take pot. Or alcohol. Neither one causes much harm by itself, with exceptions that are about as common as a kid playing out a TV scene with dad’s gun. Banning stuff that everyone wants and causes not much harm (compared to frequency of use) leads to pointless criminal law and makes a hero out of bootleggers. The point, which seemed pretty clear when I wrote it, is that most places don’t have to ban the stuff I am talking about, and if they did the effect would most likely be counterproductive. The problem is not the people who make and sell crap that Americans want. The problem is us. De-escalating the intense fear and anxiety that leads to us staring at each other armed over a locked transom, and worshipping the people who do violence, would involve something a lot more fundamental than a stupid V-chip. However, it is also most likely pointless. Conservatives love this kulturekampf business and we mock them for good reason. So this post was not a call to action because there is no obvious action to take. You can’t rewire a country to hate and fear each other less, or at least there is no productive way to legislate it. So here we are.

Gun Safety

I’m not a huge believer in reframing, but I do like “gun safety” instead of “gun control”. Easy availability of assault weapons is a safety issue for everyone.

None of the gun owners I know would recommend an assault weapon like the one used Friday, or the one used in Portland, or the one used in Aurora, all variants of the M-16, for “home defense”. Those weapons all fire high-energy rounds that can penetrate walls and ceilings, and the occupants therein.

So why don’t we drop the “home defense” bullshit and restrict those guns to the shooting range. If you must own an AR-15 or Bushmaster or AK-47, it should stay locked in your personal gun cabinet at the range, never to leave. If you change ranges, a bonded courier can take it to the new one. The same is true of the high-capacity clips for your Glock, your 100-round drum magazines, and all the other expensive toys that let you bang off a couple of dozen rounds in a minute. Yeah, that’s expensive and a nuisance. So are the laws surrounding other potentially unsafe pursuits.

This seems like a pretty simple compromise but I’ve never seen it mentioned. I don’t really care what people do at a gun range – I just don’t want schools, shopping malls and movie theaters turned into gun ranges.

Late Night Open Thread: Eine Kleine Nerdmusick

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My sincere thanks to commentor Karen Marie!

True Stories in Gun Control

After Operation Desert Shield and Storm, I was stationed at Camp Blackhorse in Doha Kuwait with the 11th ACR. We were an Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR), which basically means we were a self contained unit. For each squdron, we had 3 Cav troops- Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie, which had two platoons of cav scouts in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and two platoons of M1A1 tanks, and a mortar section for each troop. We also had Delta Company, which was nothing but armor (tanks), then a howitzer battery, our own medics, etc. Basically, a Regiment has three Squadrons with the makeup I described, and an Air Cav squadron with attack helicopters.

Basically, our mission for decades had been in the Fulda Gap in Germany to act as speed bumps when the Commies rolled through the valley. Our job was just to slow them the fuck down before the Armor deeper in country could mobilize and counterpunch. We were the guys who spent decades running border control between the West and East Germany. We were there when the wall fell, and we were there for reunification day in Germany

Back to the story. When we were in Camp Doha in Kuwait, we would have rotations. Alpha troop (my unit), would go run border missions in Iraq while Bravo troop would do maintenance on their vehicles (the sand just killed tanks and wore down our equipment), while Charlie troop be in what we called Z-phase, which was running the security for our base. We had towers and gates and 12 foot walls, and armed troopers at every gate with mirrors to look underneath cars and plenty of folks to investigate people coming in as civilians to run base operations (cook, give haircuts, etc.).

So why am I telling you this? Because in the middle of one of the most dangerous regions in the world, even with clear Rules of Engagement, every time I went on gate duty, there was a piece of tape over my ammo clip on my M-16 and M1911 .45. Why? Because the most heavily armed military in the world did not want accidental shootings. If a situation arose, I would have to eject my ammo clip, remove the tape, and reinsert and work the action before I could fire.

This was in a combat zone. Yet I have spent the last two fucking days dealing with armchair commandos telling me they need unlimited firepower to be safe in… Connecticut.

If there are bigger pussies in the world than gun nuts, I don’t know who the fuck they are.

Open Thread: Another Musical Interlude

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I do not claim to know much about music. Anybody got suggestions?

What’s on the agenda for the remnants of the weekend?

It’s A Shanda for the Neighbors

That’s how my lace-curtain Irish grandmother would reprimand us, in a loose translation of her Yiddish-speaking neighbors’ shanda fur die goyim. The Newtown tragedy has disgraced America, per Evan Osnos in the New Yorker:

The children of Chengping were still filtering into the local elementary school on Friday morning, China time, when a deranged thirty-six-year-old man named Min Yingjun entered the campus. He carried a knife. (China bans private gun ownership.) By the time the security guards got to him, he had wounded twenty-two children and one adult. All survived. China, like most places, had seen this kind of madness before: one especially heavy string of school attacks in 2010 killed nearly twenty people and wounded more than fifty. The killers are as hard to recall in their particulars as they deserve.

A few hours later, on the other side of the globe, when Adam Lanza entered a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, the particulars of his motive were unknown and, in the long run, beside the point…

It takes a lot to make China’s government—beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests—look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it. When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of them concluded, as this one did that, “from the look of it, there’s no difference between a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ country. And there’s no such thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!”

It is a strange fact that in refusing to allow rational gun policies in America, the N.R.A. and its acolytes have damaged precisely the treasure they purport to hold so dear: the moral charisma of American liberty.

Historian and ex-seminarian Garry Wills on “our Moloch”:

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. More »