When we study the overall situation of the United States today, we find illumination in certain prominent events. Here, the forces at play reveal themselves; for power resides in the ability to interpret actions, thereby manipulating public perceptions. Has a war broken out? Has a market crash occurred? Watch how quickly a scapegoat is found. Has a politician been assassinated? The actual facts mean very little, because the interpretation is the true battleground, and facts will be invented in order to reinforce a specific mythology. Therefore, blame America if war breaks out; blame the capitalists for the crash of the market; blame the CIA for the assassination of JFK; and blame Sarah Palin for the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona.
Incredible as it sounds, on 8 January roughly twenty people were shot in Arizona by one deranged man. But a thousand deranged commentators will rewrite the crime, turning the gunman into a mere puppet of the political Right. Should an unbalanced citizen, off his meds, shoot a Republican congressman we should expect to hear that the gunman was the puppet of the political Left. With mad tit following mad tat, one crazed shooting might then follow another until the whole country becomes a lunatic shooting gallery, and everyone is shooting at everyone -- as happened to Spain in the 1930s.
The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, however, was not necessarily political, though it was deadly. Of the bystanders that were shot, several have died, including Chief Judge John Roll and a congressional staffer. What is known about the gunman? Jared Lee Loughner, 22, has been arrested and charged. He has been described as a "radical loner." His writings on the Internet are either those of a person who is poorly educated, not terribly bright, or of someone who has smoked too much dope, or is insane. There is nothing profound or interesting, or even understandable in Loughner's pronouncements. His so-called favorite books include The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf and We the Living. For those who have not read these books, they have almost nothing in common except that they deal with political subjects (the latter book is a novel by Ayn Rand which takes place in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution).
Although the alleged shooter's motives are fuzzy, the shooting itself has become useful to certain political agitators. As anyone who follows politics today should know, the United States is a divided country. Americans disagree on the most fundamental issues. There are many angry voices, and violent anti-government rhetoric can be found all over the Internet. Somehow there has arisen a tendency to lump different persons and tendencies together under the label "Right Wing." Yesterday, in my local newspaper, there was a column that blamed Republicans for Loughner's shooting spree. Even the controlled Russian media could not resist the opportunity to blame former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The French newspaper Le Monde stresses the role of the radical Right. Others blame the Tea Party movement. Some of these accusations are self-righteously constructed in the name of reducing the acrimonious tone of political debate.
What is wrong today, and what has debased our intellectual culture, is that everything becomes fodder for politics. We cannot discuss any event or subject without falsifying it in accordance with the political opportunity of the moment. Today the opportunity falls to the Democrats. Tomorrow it will fall to the Republicans. In our intellectually hobbled society, it is impossible for people to comprehend important events in a free or disinterested way. Truth and intellectual integrity quickly fall victim to partisanship and the struggle for ideological ascendancy. In the 19th century, Mathew Arnold described the process as follows: "let us have a social movement, let us organize and combine a party to pursue truth and new thought, let us call it the liberal party, and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up." The key point is that you mustn't try to honestly view something, or have a thoughtful approach to subjects. As Arnold explained, "If one of us speaks well, applaud him; if one of us speaks ill, applaud him too; we are all in the same movement, we are all liberals, we are all in the pursuit of truth." In other words, truth doesn't have a chance when heralded by a party. Once you become a movement, and join a cause, and owe loyalty to a large mass of others, you become a member of what Gustave Le Bon called a "psychological crowd." In regard of this, Le Bon's damning verdict may be quoted directly: "The mediocre man augments his worth by belonging to a group...." Original thought, within a group, is nearly impossible. In other words, honesty becomes a form of treason. Should a state ruled by this mentality attain total power, it is called totalitarianism.
"Let us ... betake ourselves more to the serener life of the mind and spirit," wrote Arnold. "Let us think of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or half an idea, be running out with it into the street, and trying to make it rule there." What a novel idea! Yet this idea is more than 150 years old. It is, in fact, the ideal we should be pursuing. Yet we see less and less of it from day to day. Pick your party, pick your poison. It may be said, and repeated often, that politics makes stupid. The United States faces enemies that are now regarded as "partners." We disarm in the midst of Chinese and Russian rearmament. Yet the petty concerns of party absorb us.
What do we actually know about the 8 January killings? Well, Loughner is not a registered Republican. He is registered Independent. He doesn't like the federal government, which he believes is brainwashing people. Here are some previously published items about Loughner: (1) He was suspended from his local community college for inappropriate behavior in class; (2) he was offered a chance to reapply to college if he submitted to a psyche evaluation (which he never did); (3) he tried to enlist in the military but was rejected as "unqualified" in 2008; (4) He was involved with illegal drugs; (5) On 25 August 2007 Loughner met with Congresswoman Giffords at an event and allegedly asked her the following question: "How do you know words mean anything?"
Loughner supposedly held a grudge against Giffords for failing to properly answer to his question. And why did she fail? Because the question itself was insane; for if words don't mean anything, how could you use them to ask a question at all? And why was Loughner putting this question to a member of Congress? And further, to hold a grudge for not answering adds yet another layer of insanity. You don't have to be a psychiatrist to realize that shooting twenty people on account of a failure to answer such an absurd question is the work of an incoherent lunatic.
What does this shooting incident have to do with the tone of political rhetoric today? Nothing at all. What does it have to do with the Republican Party, or the Tea Party? Not a thing. So what should we take away from the tragic event in Arizona?
The lesson is simple: Incoherent lunatics are dangerous.
