Looking out at the contemporary scene through an LGBT lens.

Friday, January 14, 2011

GUNS, GAYS, GIFFORDS and the PALIN ‘BLOOD LIBEL’

Among the many myths being repeated in the wake of the killings in Arizona this past week is that we can not protect ourselves from the evil that emerges from a lone madman like Jared L. Loughner. In this view, such havoc as this pathetic young man wreaked is at once both unexpected and inevitable, operating like some act of God for which we can’t find insurance coverage: there will always be crazy people and crazy people will always do crazy things. Go figure.

The body count had only barely been calculated, and the dead were not yet cold in their final resting places, however, when Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik had the temerity—I would rather say chutzpah—to suggest that the poisonous public discourse emanating from radio and television, involving figures in both the media and the political realm, might well have acted as a spur to the mad young assassin. And the fact that Dupnik placed radio and television commentators high on his list made it probable that he was referring to the current crop of right-wing rabble-rousers—the unnamed Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and that irrepressible sob-sister, Glenn Beck—for whom confining themselves to civil discourse would be career suicide. Their entire modus operandi is to gin up the incipient anger of their audience with visions of apocalypse just around the corner.

Soon enough, others also charged that Loughner’s rampage could not have succeeded to the extent it did had this twisted soul not been able to purchase an automatic weapon and the ample ammunition needed to feed his need for—What?: vengeance? masculine self-esteem? infamy? The National Rifle Association (NRA) has such a lock on the Second Amendment, given its recent interpretation by the Roberts Supreme Court and the new Tea Party Congress’s supine regard for so-called gun rights, that any regulatory suggestion was immediately attacked as a “politicization” of the current national tragedy—never mind that the tragedy might well have been mitigated if a law hadn’t lapsed a few years ago making the size of the reloading magazine, 30 rounds, free once again for easy purchase by the nut-job Loughner. The right to own a gun in this country under any and all circumstances has become an unquestioned mantra, and questioning this right is now treated as a provocation, like continuing to believe in a woman’s “right to choose,” a position that seems now to suggest such moral turpitude that it is hardly ever invoked in so-called polite circles. Nicholas Kristof had an excellent piece in yesterday’s Times on the issue of gun control, framing the issue—as it should be—as a national health crises, and reminding Americans that we are second only to Yemen (Yemen! Bastion of democracy!) in our per capita ownership of guns. I suppose this is another instance of American exceptionalism.

Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Congresswoman who was the purported target of Mr. Loughner’s rage, is herself a defender of Second Amendment rights, which may well have made her particularly sensitive to Sarah Palin’s website, on which appeared, prior to the mid-term elections, crosshair “target” symbols pointing out districts which Palin’s allies were encouraged to win back for the Republicans. This included Giffords’ district. The lock-and-load former governor of Alaska is often one to use gun and rifle iconography to prove she has the biggest balls in the room. Poor Todd Palin! His wife’s little target symbols were mentioned by Representative Giffords weeks ago on TV as just the kind of rhetorical flourish that politicians should realize could have “consequences.” In the aftermath of Giffords’ being shot, while six other innocents were killed and still others wounded, a number of commentators picked up on Giffords’ weeks-old comments about being “targeted” online as a clear indication that Eva Peron Palin (my locution) was perhaps the most prominent example of the kind of “incivil discourse” feeding the popular frenzy for easy solutions and sworn enemies.

The myth, then, of this having been an unexpected tragedy is one that certainly needs to be put to rest. Nothing is more to be expected on a regular basis, as night follows day, than that another of these lone madmen with private demons driving him to distraction will buy himself a cheap weapon to murder or maim whatever unlucky group of American citizens happens to be in his line of site as he shoots his way onto the front pages. This is surely the easiest way to achieve that fifteen minutes of fame about which Andy Warhol was so prescient. Though Andy might have noted that infamy was just as good as celebrity, the former being a way to achieve the latter.

For her part, Sarah Palin would not accept any responsibility, as if she was being charged with the crime itself. No, she was being held up as an example of borderline extremist discourse. Still, she managed to make online public comments in her own defense which once again showed how very mean-spirited and small-minded an opponent she can be. She tried to turn the tables on her crosshairs critics, making it seem as if she was unfairly becoming collateral damage from the Tucson shootings. Said Our Lady of Self-Pity in tight-lipped smugness:

Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

Her use of the term “blood libel,” the Middle Ages-old canard that Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake their Passover matzos, and since used with reckless abandon by anti-Semites throughout Europe and the Middle East, immediately revealed one or all of several possibilities: 1) Palin’s total misunderstanding of the term “blood libel”; 2) her ignorance of Christian-Jewish history and the etymology of the phrase; 3) her willingness to feign innocence while stooping to any extremes of language or symbolism to put her opponents on the defensive. She is the Alfred E. Newman of politics: “What? Me, vicious?”

Now, lest I be charged with incivility toward Ms. Palin, let us remember how many very incivil commentators have for years spewed defamatory steretypes about the LGBT and other communities like noxious environmental fumes that fall on the living and the dead without the least harm to their public reputations. Indeed, at least some of them have been provided ample opportunity to continue sounding off in the public square. William F. Buckley never lost the respect of his journalist peers despite his suggestion in the mid-1980s that People with AIDS be tattooed as a mark of identification to prevent them from having sex; Pat Buchanan, whose comments about gays have in the past sent shivers down my spine, is treated as an eminence grise of the Right on any number of round-table panel talk shows; Rush Limbaugh’s conflation of feminists with Nazis hasn’t hurt his career; and the dripping sarcasm of Bill O’Reilly toward anyone with whom he disagrees, now outdone by the dripping tears of Glenn Beck, is in fact his stock in trade. Yes, Don Imus was called out for his unsavory “’ho” comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, but he was long known for crossing the line, yet still managed to get perfectly respectable public figures to chat with him on his radio show as if he were a fount of wit from the Algonquin Roundtable circa 1928. Well, he’s back on the air, although perhaps mildly chastened. How does this explain Ann Coulter continuing to get publishing contracts despite her high-profile disparagement of 9/11 widows?

So can anyone doubt that if Father Coughlin of blessed memory—that ranting anti-Semite of radio in provincial 1930s America—were still alive, he’d be interviewed on Fox TV, exchanging pleasantries with Sean Hannity and Mr. O’Reilly, in order to expound on the Ground Zero Mosque, the Israel-Palestine dispute, and whether or not Gabrielle Giffords, as a Reform Jew, can expect to enter the Kingdom of Heaven without benefit of baptism?

Alas, the irony of Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” is probably lost on her, for the blood of Christians and Jews was spilled that day in Tucson and she is not the victim in this tragedy. Nor were the rest of us directly implicated in the carnage, although only members of Congress were asking for laws to keep guns at a distance from their public appearances. What about the rest of us? We will not always be far from the scene of the crime. Gun sales in Arizona and elsewhere have skyrocketed, everyone having forgotten the heroic response without guns of the woman who prevented Loughner from reloading and the men who jumped on the alleged assassin to hold him down while waiting for the police to arrive. And one loyal intern with a Hispanic surname who applied pressure to Giffords’ wound and is probably responsible for saving her life. I suppose we should immediately investigate when and under what circumstances his forebears crossed the border.