I have been mostly silent about the carnage in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend because it's just so painful to have not only seen but warned of this coming for decades. It has been apparent to those who chose to use their ears and eyes that things have been becoming steadily worse in gun saturated, Supreme Court - Republican promotion of gun nut paranoia and paranoid and politically ideological raving in the media, that those things were going to have exactly the consequences of which El Paso and Dayton are just the latest names of. The mass shootings, the shootings of fewer than four which aren't considered mass shootings, the daily death toll of the terrorist campaign that the gun industry and Republicans have incited and inflicted on the United States are so many that even those with the largest death tolls enter the news cycle, are cycled out of it and then become ever dimming memories in the backgrounds of the minds of America. That is the ones that even make it past the filter of even regional news, many don't become news stories - daily local newspapers which report on such stories becoming ever more rare.
The google pages of these most recent battles against the American People reveal that the Murdoch press is trying to deflect responsibility from Republicans, from the gun industry by claiming that the Dayton shooter was a supporter of gun control and some kind of leftist. If that were true it would be noteworthy only because the clear majority of mass murders in the United States are by gun nuts with experience in collecting and shooting guns, often having large arsenals they have amassed. Amassing those, perhaps, in response to the industry-media paranoia that automatic weaponry might be outlawed in the wake of past mass shootings. That has become a constant feature of this culture of terrorism that dominates the Republican political, legal and media establishment.
But I'm certainly not uncritical of the liberal, the leftist response to the decades of mass murder. Trump and other Republicans have, rightly, been criticized for trying to put all of the blame for this on video games and mental illness, pretending that the guns and the right wing, often overtly Trumpian-Republican ideology of the mass murderers, even when those have been given as the reason for their mass murders. Republican politics and judicial law making ("Second Amendment") has been as potent an engine of this terrorism as gun industry promotion of mental illness, paranoia. But the liberal champions of the delusion that what people of marginal moral and mental health imbibe in the media has NO effect on their behavior has been at least as big a part of the production of this violence as those other two legs of the stool.
Liberals, especially those in the mass media and the scribbling class, have denied that such messaging, overt and the far more imbibed entertainment media. Their willful blindness to THE FACT THAT ALL OF THAT GUN INDUSTRY AND REPUBLICAN-NOW TRUMPIAN PROPAGANDA THAT KEEPS US SATURATED IN GUNS AND GUN VIOLENCE IS DONE THROUGH THE "FREE PRESS" IS AS BIG A PART OF IT AS ANY.
The left denies that entirely obvious truth even as, right under their noses, with their full knowledge, Hollywood, cable-TV, the internet are full of the propaganda and messaging that has not only led to this catastrophic terrorist campaign, almost all of it by one or another variety of haters of egalitarian democracy, overt and intentional or merely unstated due to its being a habit instead of an ideological declaration. The Constitutional piety, sincere and opportunistic, that has replaced Christian morality as the quasi-official religion of those who maintain a pious attitude is the source of the problem. "First Amendment" declarations and absolutism is as responsible for this as "Second Amendment" declarations and enabling judicial interpretations. The extra-Constitutional, self-created right of the Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision, the right of five men in black robes to nullify laws passed even to stem the bloodshed in the streets, in the malls IN THE SCHOOLS WHERE EVEN TODDLERS ARE SLAUGHTERED WITH AUTOMATIC WEAPONS is part of the insane civic religion of liberals as well as those conservatives who bother with a display of piety.
"You can't have it both ways" might have been an alternative title for yesterday's post using Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism and it could serve for this one, as well. The Supreme Court, the federal courts, are packed with Republican fascists who can be counted on to continue this, the liberals are bent on maintaining the mass media rules that have been the foremost reason that Republican-fascists have dominated.
In order for the present day status quo to be overturned, those items of liberal piety - adopted and so easily adapted by the gun industry and Republican-fascists to their own ends - have to be thoroughly criticized and the aura of piety given them by movies and TV shows and distorting historical treatment of the Constitution and the Supreme Court will have to be overturned, not in the courts, not in the Congress and legislatures, but in the hearts and minds of the American People. I will note that in the past, when those haven't been dominated by fascism, when even the Republican Party was not entirely controlled by fascists, gangsters, crooks and cowards, the branch of the government closest to The People voted for restrictions in gun ownership and use and promotion that would very likely have stopped most of the carnage, it was the Courts, especially the Supreme Court, totally shielded from having to do the will of The People, that has done the most to enable the mass murderers, the daily death toll. But it was the mass media, Hollywood fascist chic, ahistorical horse operas, tales of the "noble cause" of the slave holders, regional resentment, etc. which has led to the Republican ascendancy that put those accomplices to mass murder on the bench. For that, the responsibility lies with past Supreme Court rulings allowing the media to lie freely and with impunity for the ends of the owners of the media. And that was a liberal delusion promoted by the media, the scribbling class, the ACLU and other lawyers in their pay.
In order to stop this, the part the left has played in creating the political, judicial and, first of all, media environment in which these mass killings that start in the minds of the murderers, has to be examined, admitted and changed. We haven't even begun to do that in this country, not on the left. The deflection campaign of Trump the Murdoch media and the gun industry will probably inhibit that self-examination. I am totally discouraged about the possibility of saving American democracy, democracy because of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment