David Neiwert on the Link Between Mass Murder and Incendiary Speech

Sometimes the obvious needs pointing out anyway. I wrote about the Knoxville shooting on this blog, but needless to say, it was part of a larger pattern. And the common link is the shooter's immersion in the world of people like Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck.

We do have serious differences of opinion here. We strongly believe that there's a clear, common-sense connection between the paranoiac fearmongering that has passed for right-wing rhetoric since well before Obama's election (and has become acute since) and violence like that in Pittsburgh, or in Knoxville: horrifying tragedies, in which the sources of the criminal's unambiguous motives are that very same hysterical fearmongering -- whether it's about the evil socialists, stinking immigrants, or conspiring gun-grabbers who've taken over the country since Election Day.

H/t mcjoan at DailyKos.

Random Quote

"A source of unforgettable consolation was the sight of [James] Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team."

Vladimir Nabokov describing the audience at a lecture he gave in Paris in the 1930s, a moment of quasi-surrealism irrupting into reality. From his non-fiction collection Strong Opinions.

If It's Sunday, It's Frank Rich

Frank Rich asks the same question a lot of people have: why did the head of GM get fired while many of the Wall Street wizards are still in place?

The parallels between G.M. and the likes of Citigroup are uncanny. Much as bloated financial institutions gorged on mortgage-backed derivatives even when the underlying fundamentals made no rational sense, so G.M. doubled down on sure-to-be obsolete S.U.V.’s and trucks to serve a market transitorily enthralled by them. Much as the housing boom’s collapse left the get-rich-quick holders of AAA-rated mortgage derivatives with worthless paper, so the oil price spike left consumers trapped with self-indulgent, wealth-depleting gas guzzlers. In both instances, the customers were not entirely innocent.

Boz Scaggs - I'll Be Long Gone

What the hell, another cut from the same album. This is a song obviously written by someone who was deeply in love with late fifties / early sixties rhythm and blues. When I first heard it I thought it was written by Laura Nyro, who also loved and was deeply influenced by the same kind of music. But it's a B. Scaggs original, and the chorus, once it takes up residence in your head, will never leave.

Boz Scaggs - Waiting For A Train

From his first album in 1969, "Waiting For A Train" shows Boz Scaggs the roots/Americana musician, a creature who got buried in the Silk Degrees avalanche several years later. The wonderful dobro playing is by the wonderful Duane Allman, whose own band put out their first album the same year. At the time it was a big deal that these modern young musicians were playing such an old song -- now the gap between today and 1969 is bigger than the gap between them and the Singing Brakeman.

Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Happy birthday to Marvin Gaye, who would have been seventy today. I try to avoid obvious choices when I pick songs, but today can be an exception, because this song is just. so. good. It's the final track on his landmark album What's Going On. (At the end is a coda that links back to the opening track. The single version understandably had that part trimmed, so that people are sometimes surprised when they hear it.)

To my mind, this song is one of those pieces of music that is nearly perfect. The amount of space in the arrangement, how often there is only one or a few instruments playing, is the first thing you notice. But it doesn't mean that it's simple -- there is a lot going on, from the busy bass part that is really the lead instrument, to the slow and dream-like strings that eventually come in. Falsetto vocals veering from unison into harmony, then at one point dropping into the normal range. Congas keeping such a strong rhythm that they make this slow sad song something danceable. A triangle every so often hitting an almost piercing note. And the words, about lives on the edge of despair, of thinking that there may be no reason to hope, of coming close to finally giving up for good. But...not yet. Not yet.

The North Korean Model

While watching the ongoing debate over the financial crisis, I've been struck once again by the insular nature of the right-wing discourse. All rhetorical reference points are contained within a carefully circumscribed (by whom? I can't tell) area, which contains the only allowable items that are allowed into their arguments. If you've been paying attention for the last thirty years or so, you know what those items are, the most prominent in economic discussions being liberalism --> socialism --> communism. What's striking is how comfortable the speakers are within this magical circle, and how proud they are of never stepping outside it. While I was watching all this, something was nagging at the back of my brain, and it finally came around to the front, knocked once, and came in.
What came to mind was a bit from an article I read awhile ago about North Korea. For decades, it was nearly impossible for any Americans to travel there. It isn't easy even today, but it was long nearly impossible. The stories that did come out described a world that seemed unimaginable: a constant relentless barrage of propaganda praising the Great Leader, who loved his people like children and presided over the best place on earth. The people who lived there had to be miserable.
Except they weren't, necessarily. The article I read was by a Western reporter who, when the doors finally opened a crack, went to North Korea. At one point she had the chance to speak to a teenaged girl. The girl was cheerful and open, and could not have been happier. She lived in a land ruled by someone who loved his people like children, and it was in fact the best place on earth. The reporter was shocked, but eventually realized that the girl was the natural result of decades of propaganda: she had never known anything else. She had never been exposed to any other version of reality. As far as the girl knew, what she had been told all her life was the truth.
There is now a significant segment of the current generation of grownups in this country who have been told all their lives that Ronald Reagan was the greatest president who ever lived, that liberals want to destroy America, that military force is the answer to all foreign policy problems, that AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality, that—you know the list. These people are sincere, calm, and frequently cheerful. They do not have any doubt that they are right. Often nowadays with thirty-something cable-news journalists you can detect real irritation when they are challenged. Their irritation seems to result from a suspicion on their part, not that they might be wrong, but that they are dealing with idiots, who simply do not have a grasp of obvious reality.
This is the world that the right-wing noise machine has created. Like the North Korean girl, and millions of her fellow citizens, there are people in the United States who have spent their entire lives in an environment which is all they have ever known, and more importantly, all they can imagine ever knowing. There is no need to argue the merits of conservatism versus liberalism—for them the issue is settled, was in fact decided long before they were born. FDR made the Great Depression worse. The war in Iraq has been a success. George W. Bush was the object of constant slander. The prison at Guantánamo is necessary. Again, you get the idea.
What to do? I have no magic answer. The one thing I feel sure of is that the post-World-War-Two era of heated but mostly courteous disagreement between right and left is never coming back. The last thirty years have happened, and there is no undoing them. The people who make up Rush Limbaugh's audience are not going to open their minds overnight. Or possibly ever. We are in for a long struggle, and facing that is the necessary first step. The steps that come after that we will probably have to discover as we go.