Ah, so... we enter a new year full of hope, of resolution that it will be the best of times, celebrating life and.... what, excuse me? What channel? Oh, right, THAT didn't take long to screw up, now did it? Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, her entourage - and members of the public in the vicinity of the mall they were speaking at - were shot at around 11:00am local time on Saturday. The attempt at assassianting a public figure is understanably news-worthy and after the immdiate facts were known it took less than an hour for the blame game began in earnest - the minute that news networks had air-time to fill, there was an accumulation of speculation with only a few reporters actually brave enough to say 'We think we know 'X', but until we're absolutely sure we're not giving the information out'. The person accused of doing it was was one Jared Lee Loughner who, by default, was clearly mentally lacking in the self-control department (let's not get into amateur-hour diagnosis on specifics because that way lies badly defined madness - see the worthy http://www.slate.com/id/2280619/ ). It was also clear that Giffords had survived the initial attack and her condition was better than expected with the understated caveat of 'given the circumstances'. Those who died at the scene included a district judge, John Roll and a nine year old girl called Christina Greene, who was there because she interested in politics and taken to the mall as a treat to meet Gifford. If the story needed any more poignancy - and it arguably doesn't - the press noted that Giffords is the wife of a veteran, serving astronaut and that Christina Greene was born on 11th September 2001. You can almost smell a Lifetime Movie of the Week being prepped.
Here's another scenario: If a man regularly takes his friend out, gets him unfeasibly drunk on cheap alcohol, tells him stuff that gets him angry and then, at the end of the night tells him about the moral right to drive a car under whatever conditions he likes... who do you hold responsible if the man's friend subsequently drives home blind-drunk and angry one night, skids on the ice, loses control and runs over and kills a child en route?
Legally and pragmatically it's the driver because, when all is said and done, said moron has to accept a personal responsibility that each of us retains whenever we do anything. No deposit and no return... no-one tied him to the wheel, no-one forced those last bottles down his throat. Slam - and as they say - dunk. But more broadly speaking there are other factors at play. There's obviously a massive culpability to the friend who created a situation in which tragedy was somehow (by the laws of averages and Darwin) eventually inevitable. There's the cheap drink factor: hmmmm, too readly available? And, hey, did the area have sufficent funds and resources to grit properly?
In the Giffords case, it's easy to see who the 'driver' is (even if we're not sure yet if he had a 'passenger' or 'navigator' onboard to help). The cheap drink, the ungritted road and the 'friend'... well, those are the factors open to debate. Is it Sarah Palin who specifically picked out a group of her opposition in the political arena and placed a literal target emblem over each area on her map telling supporters to 'reload' on her behalf? Is it Sharron Angle's quote about 'second ammendment remedies' if goverment wasn't careful and 'taking Harry Reid out'...'? Maybe Glenn Beck's hushed whispers of conspiracies and an upcoming revolution in the making... or Fox News seeing no problems with - indeed arguably promoting citizens bringing fire-arms to town meetings in a blatant display of both civil rights and machismo?
And lest this sounds like an anti-Right tirade, was Loughner leaning towards extreme ideas in either direction (Left or Right?) Tea-Party members and anti Tea Party members lined up to cast doubt on motives, speculate and, let's be brutally honest here, make their own capital out of it before any bodies were cold. Some anti-Palin sites have been as horribly extreme as some of her own extreme fanbase. Though this site kinda destroys ANY faith in humanity: http://viletweets.com/
We don't know.
But here's the thing. Sooner or later the subtext becomes the text. The argument used to be that violence or sexual imagry on television and games would innately corrupt you. I never bought into that thinking unless it ever became the sole over-powering output of any such media. There was an argument (which perhaps holds just a little more water) that extreme content desensitises us to the horrendous, though even that is open to debate. Nowadays...it's not TV or games, it's real life. Or at least the blogosphere where everyone can be infamous for fifteen minutes. More inexcusably, it's also the news outlets who should know better.
Today in Britain it's perfectly possible to be arrested near Downing Street for wearing a t-shirt saying 'Fuck Blair' (though, point of fact, that's SO last decade!) merely because it could incite public disorder and it's not much better in the US. However, bizarely you can go on (inter)national television or stage and use almost whatever inflammatory language you want under freedom of speech/the First Amendment (that, irony-alert, Congresswoman Giffords read out at the Constitution
To take us full circle, it's possible to make a case that an individual acts alone and is solely responsible for their actions and isn't influenced by rhetoric or spin. If so then there's no need for election campaigns or any type of gun control and there's no absolutely need for representatves and public figures to make any call for more subtle language or for those compeltely co-incidental 'targets' to be removed from Palin's website. Yet, thy've already been removed, so clearly people think they might.
As was duly noted by a colleague: (New House Speaker) Boehner faced criticism last year for saying that Rep. Dreihaus (D-Ohio) 'may be a dead man' for voting for the health-care bill.
'These comments made by Republican leaders can serve as... an excuse or perhaps permission for people who may be unbalanced,' Dreihaus said in March 2010. 'It doesn't really matter the way you meant it, nor the way I accept it. It's how the least sane person in my district accepts it.'"
You can't always cater for the least sane person, but you don't need to effectively send them recruitement forms, either. If the last sane person isn't saying 'enough is enough', could they at least, please, turn the TV off?
