Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Surely Some Revelation Is at Hand
Steve Almond bio ↓ · January 10th, 2011 · filed under Media, Steve Almond, politics, rumpus original
http://therumpus.net/2011/01/surely-some-revelation-is-at-hand/#author-bio
(Yet Another) Rumpus Lamentation:
It’s a sunny winter day in Tucson, Arizona. There’s an event being held in the parking lot of a supermarket called Safeway. The local member of congress, a woman named Gabrielle Giffords, is meeting her constituents.
Among them is a young man with a gun who runs toward Giffords and shoots her in the head. He turns on the crowd. Before he can be wrestled to the ground, six people are dead, a dozen more injured. One of the dead is a nine-year-old girl recently elected to her student council. She wanted to see what a real political event would be like.
*
There’s a moment, in the beginning, when the enormity of the violence feels genuine. We’re compelled to wonder: How did we get here? How did we consent to live in a culture where an unstable 22-year-old can acquire a sophisticated weapon with such ease? Where his disturbed passions are not only tolerated, but reinforced, enlarged, given shape?
He didn’t just wake up one day and decide to murder a politician. He made a plan.
*
But remember: it’s just a moment. It dissolves.
Then we’re in America again and it’s all moving too quickly – our eyes, our screens, the facts. Someone says lone gunman. Someone says crosshairs. A surgeon in a strange hat announces that the bullet fired into Giffords’ head passed “through and through” and, after a moment, we understand what he means.
It’s like watching Kabuki theater, a saga of contrived sorrow and recrimination, the voices of a thousand news people sounding grave because it’s their job. After a while, we realize that we’re not just watching the Kabuki. We are the Kabuki.
*
An entire industry of madness has arisen to comfort lost souls, to relocate their anguish in the world at large. What begins as a personal crisis of mental health is transmuted into an annihilating rage.
It happens over and over.
A man blows up a federal building. A man flies a plane into an IRS office. A man enters a church and shoots a doctor. We’re supposed to act shocked. That’s our role. It reminds us of our own sanctity.
*
Sure, there were demagogues back in the olden days. But they enjoyed the latitude of a nation whose virulent forms of hatred were still sanctioned. White men were unquestionably in charge. They were allowed to discriminate, spared the anxieties of a true meritocracy.
Then came abolition and war and suffrage and civil rights. The bigotry had to become clannish, covert. The feelings didn’t disappear. They migrated. They had to go somewhere.
*
The central issue of the emergent mass media was how the airwaves were going to be used.
Because they were both public and limited, the Federal Communications Commission adopted the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, to ensure that licensees devoted “a reasonable amount of broadcast time to the discussion of controversial issues,” and that they did so “fairly, in order to afford reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints.”
In 1987, during the age of deregulation, the FCC did away with the Fairness Doctrine. The result was a talk radio (and later cable TV) industry, which gave voice to the unresolved psychological and emotional grievances of an increasingly insecure white majority. You couldn’t slaughter redskins or lynch niggers. You couldn’t even use those words. But you could still fantasize.
*
And so a new world is created, a universe of projected hatred, in which sadistic impulses are viewed not as pathological, but perfectly natural and indeed inevitable responses to the nation’s moral progress.
The democratic election of a president whose father was African becomes the portent of white slavery. Men are paid millions of dollars to appear on radio and television and play act how one might murder a member of congress, or burn a person alive. They joke about hanging elected officials in effigy, or driving stakes through the heart of the President. A presidential candidate jokes about rape. Another declares that members of congress should be tarred and feathered.
Freighted within these histrionics is a steady flow of disinformation about the nature of our national predicaments and their potential remedies. The rich and powerful (who seek merely to protect their profits and fortunes) are benevolent patriots besieged by the true lurking evil: Government.
The balance of the fourth estate – desperate to remain solvent – serves not as a filter, but an amplifier to this sadism, till it seems we live in a dark weather of paranoia, every sin and fear and indulgence cast out of us and onto the dark forces of Government.
*
The young man with the gun put it like this:
I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications. The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar.
*
On the morning of the assassination attempt, my family received a letter from our insurance company informing us that we would no longer have to pay for a host of preventive services. It will save us a few hundred dollars a year. This was owing to the health care reform law passed last year, for which Giffords voted, and for which she was reviled by people who interpreted her support for a more egalitarian system of medical care as an assault on their freedom.
I remain in a state of bewilderment.
*
Giffords’ opponent in the last election, a veteran of the invasion of Iraq, put it like this:
Get on Target for Victory in November
Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office
Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly
*
In initial reports, little mention was made of the fact that Giffords was Jewish. Then speculation arose that she might have been targeted because of her religion.
I keep thinking about how little we think about the religious right anymore. The church of the disenfranchised can now be found in the mass media. Its pulpits are bright studios with cameras and microphones. Its fire and brimstone preachers are entertainers who brag openly about market share.
In the Europe of 60 years ago, things got bad when anti-Semitism migrated from the Church to secular culture. The rhetoric of competing salvations became the propaganda of a political and economic movement.
*
Kurt Vonnegut believed the human race was doomed if we failed to engage with acts of imagination, because we would then become incapable of imagining the suffering of others.
Vonnegut was one of the few human beings who lived through the Allied bombing of Dresden. He was a POW cowering in a slaughterhouse as planes flew above, dropping bombs on people and buildings.
This was how America fought Fascism.
*
The historian Robert Paxton, who studied Europe during World War II, defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
America is not a fascist state. We still enforce ethical and legal restraints on our population. These do not include preventing mentally unstable people from purchasing semi-automatic guns.
*
Spencer Giffords, the father of the wounded congressperson, when he was asked if his daughter had any enemies, wept.
*
The author David Neiwert doesn’t believe America is a fascist state, either. He believes there is a pervasive mindset which “always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself — unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated ‘enemy’ as vermin…”
*
Jim David Adkisson, who walked into a Unitarian Church in 2008 and killed two people and wounded six others during a children’s musical, and who was an ardent fan of talk radio, put it like this:
Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contribdutes to the downfall of this great Nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is Kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather.
I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just Kill yourself, do something for your country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
*
A self-described veteran, upon reading an editorial I wrote in 2009, put it like this:
GET OUT OF AMERICA,
YOU ANTI-AMERICAN, NO GOOD, SCUM SUCKER!!!
I am sending your article in the Boston Globe to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan … Lot of our men and women from Massachusetts are there now, and they are looking forward to meeting (finding) you! GET OUT OF AMERICA!!! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT LIVING HERE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF MEN AND WOMEN OF HONOR AND RESPECTABILITY WHILE YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A LOWLY, COWARDLY, INSECT!!
*
We will hear much talk in the weeks to come of the Lone Gunman, an archetype useful to those of us who wish to absolve ourselves.
Sober news people will soberly shrug their shoulders and whisper into microphones about the mysteries of the human heart. It will be as if there was no motive for the crime, as if the murderer were a machine that malfunctioned rather than an American who mistook sadism for an expression of his beliefs.
The more hysterical reactions will come from those who feel themselves implicated, who fear the great con of their professions exposed. They will react with absurd rituals of denial, as if, after all their violent agitation, they are the ones being fired upon, the victims of some vast and unending conspiracy.
This operatic indignation is what I meant when I spoke, a few months ago, about the American descent into a shame culture.
It has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the capacity for moral self-reflection. What happens when a large and well-armed portion of our citizenry can no longer apologize? When humility becomes another form of humiliation? Their heroes exhort them: Never retreat. Reload.
*
The young man with the gun, in a final note to friends, put it like this:
Please don’t be mad at me… I cannot rest
He seemed to recognize that he was going to do wrong. But he couldn’t stop himself.
He was not merely following orders. He was attempting to construct a world in which it was bearable to live. When this became impossible, he sought to die for a noble cause.
*
William Butler Yeats, surveying the ruin of the First World War, put it like this:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
*
Violence – whether in word or deed – is both an inevitable human impulse and a failure of the moral imagination. That’s the business we’re in, as artists.
We can pretend we live apart from this compact and sickening drama. But we don’t. We’re a part of this world: our actions, our stories, our conviction. When the trains arrive with their cargo of human sorrow, we refuse to turn away. We’re the fools in charge of forgiveness.
http://therumpus.net/2011/01/surely-some-revelation-is-at-hand/#author-bio
Monday, January 10, 2011
Giffords promoted softer political discourse in email to GOP colleague day before shooting
By Nathan Diebenow
Monday, January 10th, 2011 -- 10:52 pm
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/giffords-promoted-softer-political-discourse-in-email-to-gop-colleague-day-before-shooting/
Monday, January 10th, 2011 -- 10:52 pm
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) on the eve of the shooting that left her in critical condition and six others dead wrote an email to a Republican colleague promoting a softer public political discourse.
"After you get settled, I would love to talk about what we can do to promote centrism and moderation," Giffords wrote to Trey Grayson, Kentucky Secretary of State who resigned to take a position as director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.
She continued: "I am one of only 12 Dems left in a GOP district (the only woman) and think that we need to figure out how to tone our rhetoric and partisanship down."
Giffords wrote the congratulatory note hours prior to attending her regularly scheduled public appearance with her constituents outside a grocery store where she and 19 others were shot.
In a Tucson, Arizona intensive care unit with a life-threatening wound to her brain Monday, Giffords gave her doctors the thumbs-up, a sign of a hopeful recovery. The same day, her accused assassin Jared Loughner, 22, appeared in federal court, facing charges that could ultimately result in life in prison or the death penalty for him, if convicted.
Grayson, who first met Giffords at the Aspen Institute in 2005, told cn|2 Politics that they both believed in running for office "in the right way and for the right reasons" and abhorred divisive politics.
"I think Gabby was really sincere in that email," he said. "And I am going to to redouble my efforts."
Grayson was the Republican-establishment candidate that lost against Rand Paul in the GOP primary for US Senate.
Within the first few months after President Obama's election, the level of anti-government violence escalated to the point that the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning to law enforcement officials.
Conservatives, however, decried the report (PDF) "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" as a political attack on them at the time.
"The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) remarked.
In the immediate wake of Saturday's tragedy, Sarah Palin, former Republican vice president candidate, endured criticism for a campaign race map her political action committee promoted that placed Giffords and 19 other Democratic candidates' districts in "crosshairs."
Two former Democratic representatives from Arizona reportedly received numerous threats during their time in office after being placed on Palin's "crosshairs" map.
"I cannot tell you how much I wish a panty bomber would come in and just fucking blow your place up," one constituent told former Arizona Congressman Harry Mitchell, a Democrat who lost his reelection bid last year.
Another former Arizona representative, Ann Kirkpatrick, received emails calling her a "whore" and had a sewer cap thrown through her office window, The Daily Best reported.
Pleas for more sober political exchanges echoed across the media landscape in the day after the shooting, leading even FoxNews CEO Roger Ailes to tell his on-air staff to "tone it down."
Yet, Ailes denied that his conservative-leaning network promoted the political climate in which the shooting spree took place. He pointed fingers instead to the collapse of the alleged killer's support network, from his school system to the police department.
"So, by the time he decided to go to a mall and and wanting to kill somebody, he was attached to nobody," Ailes said in an interview on Global Grind.
With reporting by Sahil Kapur and Eric W. Dolan.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/giffords-promoted-softer-political-discourse-in-email-to-gop-colleague-day-before-shooting/
The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right
Monday 10 January 2011
by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
To: Palin-lovers, Fox "News," the "mainstream" media, and the Far Right, et al.
From: William Rivers Pitt
Date: Monday 10 January 2011
Re: The blood on your hands
Dear “Patriots,”
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords isn't much older than I am. She served in the Arizona State House of Representatives, and the Arizona State Senate, before being elected to three successive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. She once described herself as a "former Republican," and is today considered a "Blue Dog" Democrat, meaning she holds a number of conservative political positions. This is not terribly surprising, given the generally conservative political bent of the state she has served for the last ten years. She was married four years ago to a space shuttle commander who had served as a Naval aviator, and who flew 39 combat missions in Desert Storm, before volunteering for astronaut training.
Last Wednesday, she was sworn in to her third term as the Representative for Arizona's 8th congressional district. One of her first acts in the newly-minted 112th Congress was to read aloud from the House floor, in response to the Republican Party's recitation of the Constitution, the following lines: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
She returned to Arizona not long after to assist in the implementation of that most vital of Constitutional principles, calling together a meeting of her constituents in a peaceable assembly so the citizens she represents could petition the government for a redress of grievances. Among the gathered crowd were a number of her staffers, a judge, and a nine-year-old girl named Christina-Taylor Green who was born on September 11, 2001.
And then all Hell broke loose.
A man named Jared Lee Loughner waded into the group and fired a bullet into Rep. Giffords' skull at point-blank range, before turning his weapon on others in the crowd. Christina-Taylor Greene, who would have celebrated her tenth birthday on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, was shot in the chest and killed. The woman who brought her to the event was also shot. Gabriel Zimmerman, who served as Rep. Giffords' director of community outreach, was also killed. He was 30 years old, and was recently engaged to be married. U.S. District Judge John Roll, who had served on the bench for twenty years, was also killed. Dorwin Stoddard, a church volunteer, died after putting his body between his wife and the hail of bullets. His wife was also shot. Two of Rep. Giffords' constituents, Dorothy Morris and Phyllis Scheck, were also killed. All in all, 31 shots were fired before several brave souls tackled Loughner, disarmed him, and wrestled him to the ground.
At the time of this writing, Rep. Giffords is lying in a hospital bed in critical condition. The God you Bible-spewing frauds love to flog the rest of us with must have been in that supermarket crowd with her on Saturday, with His hand on her shoulder, because it is nothing short of a full-fledged miracle she survived at all. Doctors are actually cautiously optimistic that she will survive, though the degree to which she will ultimately recover is still sorely in doubt. She can respond to simple commands, according to her doctors, and is marginally able to communicate. If she survives her wound, it is wretchedly certain her life will never, ever be the same.
I just thought you should know a few things about the people you helped into their graves and hospital beds this weekend.
Yes, you.
You false patriots who bring assault rifles to political rallies, you hack politicians and media personalities who lied through your stinking teeth about "death panels" and "Obama is coming for your guns" and "He isn't a citizen" and "He's a secret Muslim" and "Sharia Law is coming to America," you who spread this bastard gospel and you who swallowed it whole, I am talking to you, because this was your doing just as surely as it was the doing of the deranged damned soul who pulled the trigger. The poison you injected into our culture is deeply culpable for this carnage.
You who worship Jesus at the top of your lungs (in defiance of Christ's own teachings on the matter of worship, by the way) helped put several churchgoers into their graves and into the hospital. You who shriek about the sanctity of marriage helped cut down a man who was about to be married. You who crow with ceaseless abandon about military service and the nobility of our fighting forces helped to critically wound the wife of a Naval aviator who fought for you in a war. You who hold September 11 as your sword and shield helped put a little girl born on that day into the ground.
You helped. Yes, damn you, you helped.
The "mainstream" media is already working overtime playing up the "Disturbed loner" angle with all their might. There is no doubt, from the available evidence, of Mr. Loughner's transformation into a disturbed individual. But here's the funny part: all the crazy crap he spewed, about the gold standard (a favorite of Glenn Beck, the master of Fox "News" fearmongering...so he can sell his gold scam to suckers) and government mind control and everything else before going on his rampage, is straight out of the Right-Wing Insanity Handbook. His personal YouTube ramblings were a mishmash of right-wing anti-government nonsense...the kind that attracts sick minds like Loughner, the kind that only reinforces their paranoia, the kind that finally pushes them over the brink and into the frenzy of violence that took place on Saturday. The kind that the likes of you have been happily spreading by the day.
He did not act alone. You were right there with him. You helped.
I'm talking to you, "mainstream" media people, who created this atmosphere of desperate rage and total paranoia out of whole cloth because of your unstoppable adoration for spectacle, and ratings, and because the companies that own your sorry asses agree with the deranged cretins you helped make so famous and powerful. It was sickeningly amusing on Sunday to watch Wolf Blitzer bluster and bluff on CNN about how the media owns no responsibility for this disaster. It was like watching a ten-year-old try to explain how a lamp got broken while he was running through the living room, but no, it wasn't him. It was, in reality, a pathetic display...but that is what you generally get whenever Wolf is on your screen.
"Mainstream" news personalities like David Gergen and John King bent over backwards warning people not to blame Sarah Palin and her ilk for this calamity. It was a sick man who did this, they said. Bollocks to that. I hate to break this to the "mainstream" media know-betters, but words matter. When people like Palin spray the airwaves with calls to violence and incantations of imminent doom, people like Loughner are listening, and prepared to act. The "mainstream" media lets it fly without any questions or rebuttal, because it's good for ratings, and here we are. Words matter. Play Russian Roulette long enough, and someone inevitably winds up dead.
Remember the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and the subsequent occupation? "WMD everywhere, al Qaeda connections to 9/11, plastic sheeting and duct tape because we're all gonna die!" was the central theme of the majority of your broadcast schedule for years...until it was all proven to be a lie. You helped the liars, you were the liars, but you knew that. You also got your spectacle, and the corporations that own you got paid a king's ransom, so everyone was happy, except the dead.
Tell me this is any different, I dare you. For the spectacle, the ratings and the pleasure of your owners, you ran names like "Sarah Palin" across the sky in lights, even after she should have faded into well-deserved obscurity, and helped this blister of right-wing rage fester until it finally burst. This was your show, and in perhaps the most wretched irony of all, I would bet all my worldly possessions that your ratings are through the roof right now. You got what you wanted. I hope you are pleased.
And yes, I'm talking to you, Sarah Palin, you unutterably disgusting fraud. You pulled it off your ridiculous website, but it's out there: you put cross-hairs - literally, cross-hairs - on Rep. Giffords, you blithered about "reloading" instead of "retreating," and you made this country more stupid and violent with every breath you took. Well, congratulations, you failure, you quitter, you inciter of mobs. You put the cross-hairs on her, and someone finally pulled the trigger. Run from it all you like, Lady MacBeth, but this blood will never be washed from your hands.
I'm talking to you, Sharron Angle, you walking punch-line, who talked about "Second Amendment remedies" being necessary if you didn't get your way on health care reform during your failed Senate campaign.
I'm talking to you, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter, and Laura Ingraham, and to every other right-wing tripe-spewing blowhard blogger and Fox News broadcaster. I hope you are proud of yourselves, because this is the day you get to reap what you have been relentlessly sowing since you were forced to encompass the unmitigated outrage of a Black man winning the office of President of the United States.
That's right, I said it. Anyone who thinks good old-fashioned American bigotry and racism are not the core motivation for a vast majority of these so-called "revolutionaries" should get their heads examined. You've heard of the "elephant in the middle of the room?" Well, this is the burning cross in the middle of the room, and no amount of spin will douse those flames.
I'm talking to you, Koch Brothers. Your money to create and spread this disease was well-spent; you now have one less Democrat in the House to worry about, at least for the foreseeable future. Congratulations, you un-American sacks of filth.
And I'm talking to each and every one of you who listened to these traitors and believed the nonsense they spewed at you for no other reason than to pick your pockets for campaign/organization contributions. I'm talking to you who wore your silly fatigues and carried your badly-spelled fact-deprived signs to protests with pistols on your hips and rifles on your shoulders. You who threw bricks through the windows of politicians you disagreed with. You who shot out the windows of Rep. Giffords' office not even a year ago.
You worked very hard to create exactly this atmosphere in America, and now it has come to be. We have entered the age of the Wrath of Fools, and we now must again exist in an America where the word "assassination" has become all too relevant.
You helped this happen. You.
You know it. I know it. Have the guts to admit it, even if only to yourselves.
I know many Republicans and conservatives, and consider them to be dear friends. The single most influential person in my life (aside from my mother) was a rock-ribbed conservative Republican, and there is no person I respected more than him. I do not count these people, and those like them, among those whom I address here. They are as sickened and repulsed by you as I am.
This is not the end of the story, but is just the beginning. The good people of the United States of America, the true patriots, have finally seen you with your media-painted masks ripped off. They have seen what comes to pass when hate, venom, ignorance and violence goes unchecked and unanswered. You have been exposed, and the fact that it took such an unimaginably horrific act for that exposure to take place only increases the fierceness with which you will be answered. You will be repudiated, not with violence, but with the scorn and rejection you so richly deserve. Spin it as you will, scramble all you like. You are found out, and you have nowhere to hide.
Oh, P.S., if anyone reading this is operating under the delusion that the overheated right-wing rhetoric that went a long way towards almost getting Rep. Giffords killed, and had a strong hand in putting six people in the ground, is some sort of new Obama-era phenomenon, well...
"I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for."
- Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95
"Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him."
- Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton
"We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."
- Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95
"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."
- Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02
"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."
- Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02
"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past - I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble - recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."
- John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01
"Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the disenfranchisement of White men."
- State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01
I could go on, and on, and on, and on, but you get the gist.
Most Disrespectfully Yours,
William Rivers Pitt
http://www.truth-out.org/the-wrath-fools-an-open-letter-to-far-right66686
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Gabrielle Giffords: A Victim Of Violent Fox News/Tea Party Rhetoric?
Posted by Mark on January 8, 2011 at 6:27 pm.
http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=3595
There was a shooting today in Tuscon, Arizona that has taken several lives and has left a United States Congresswoman struggling to survive. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), is out of surgery and is clinging to life. Sadly, Judge John Roll and several others who have not been identified (including a ten year old girl) have already been pronounced dead.
While there are some disturbing components to this story (itemized below) it is way to soon to attribute motives in this particular case. However, it is not too soon to reiterate the predictable danger that results from irresponsible and violent language that has become far too common in recent years. Fox News has been at the forefront of this trend, permitting their top personalities to engage in dialogue that is overtly hostile, as well as promoting the most vile elements of the Tea Party.
Bill O’Reilly’s labeling of Dr. George Tiller as “Tiller the baby killer” may have played a part in Tiller’s murder. Glenn Beck’s relentless condemnation of George Soros and the Tides Foundation was cited as inspiration by a man who was apprehended after a police shootout while he was on his way to kill Tides and ACLU personnel. Sean Hannity refers to his audience as “Tim McVeigh wannabes” to thunderous applause. Liz Trotta joked about “knocking off” President Obama.
But the risk is not limited to direct threats as those listed above. The tone of many Fox News hosts and analysts is just as dangerous. They cavalierly describe their political adversaries as radicals, communists or fascists who are deliberately destroying America and blaspheming God. What do they expect people to do upon being terrorized by that sort of delusional peril?
I want to emphasize that the facts to follow are not necessarily connected to the gunman in today’s news. But they are notable nevertheless for how they illustrate potential risks due to the sort of anti-social behavior that is encouraged on Fox News.
Rep. Giffords was targeted by the Tea Party and their AstroTurf benefactors Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.
Glenn Beck attacked Giffords with his co-host calling her a moron for her support of renewable energy in the military.
At a recent event held by Giffords in Arizona, police were called after an attendee dropped a gun.
Giffords’ office was vandalized just hours after she voted for the health care reform package.
Giffords’ opponent, GOP/Tea Party candidate Jesse Kelly, held an event where supporters were encouraged to “Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”
Also killed was Federal Judge John Roll, who had received numerous death threats after ruling to allow a case involving illegal immigrants to go forward.
Giffords was one of the politicians to whom Keith Olbermann made contributions, leading to his three day suspension from MSNBC.
Sarah Palin (“Don’t Retreat – Reload”) put Giffords on her Hit List.
Joyce Kaufman, talk show host and aide to Rep. Allen West told a Tea Party rally: “If ballots don’t work, bullets will.”
GOP/Tea Party Senate candidate Sharron Angle said: “If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”
And perhaps most poignantly, Rep. Giffords father, Spencer Giffords, 75, wept when asked if his daughter had any enemies. “Yeah,” he told The New York Post. “The whole Tea Party.”
I repeat, these may have no connection to today’s shooting. But they are indicative of a problem in the media that must be addressed. There have been plenty of other acts of violence whose connection to this sort of rhetoric is well documented. And there have been credible warnings about just this type of tragic event.
To be clear, I am not calling for any kind of censorship. I am calling for responsibility on the part of the press, and absent that, accountability. The people who deliberately use incendiary language to fire up their followers cannot get off scot-free when the predictable consequences occur. It could not be said better than how Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik put it in a press conference addressing the shooting this afternoon:
“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” the sheriff said. “And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=3595
Liberal Ariz. sheriff sees cause of violence
By: Andy Barr
January 9, 2011 12:47 AM EST
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=DC832363-9500-4F9F-9504-36F5A55FB8CE
January 9, 2011 12:47 AM EST
By declaring Arizona a “mecca for racism and bigotry” and blaming heated rhetoric on the right for the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik gave voice to those looking for a cause of Saturday’s violence.
With Democratic party leaders for the most part showing restraint in their comments following the shootings, Dupnik expressed at a news conference Saturday night in Tucson what many liberals were thinking, but hadn’t yet said.
“Let me say one thing, because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that,” the sheriff said during a press conference. “That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”
During an interview earlier in the day that aired on MSNBC via local NBC affiliate KPNX, Dupnik declared that “it’s time that this country take a little introspective look at the crap that comes out on radio and TV.”
The seven-term sheriff and Bisbee native is well known in Arizona for speaking his mind and has established himself as one of the leading liberal voices in a state that boasts only a handful.
Dupnik, 73, supported Giffords during her campaigns for congress and attracted headlines last spring as one of the most prominent opponents of the state’s controversial immigration law, S.B. 1070, which was signed by GOP Gov. Jan Brewer. Though the policy has been blocked from implementation by a federal court order, Dupnik vowed that he wouldn’t enforce the “racist” law.
On any other day, a warning from a county sheriff — even one known to the national media — to cool overheated talk show chatter wouldn’t have moved the needle much. But with the political class at a total loss over the tragedy and the left aching from the attack on one of their own, Dupnik’s comments have carried outsized weight in driving Saturday’s dialogue.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann called Dupnik’s word “extraordinary” in a special Saturday night edition of “Countdown,” and highlighted the sheriff’s media criticism on Twitter.
In a special comment later in the program, Olbermann linked the incident to Giffords being identified last year as one of former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin’s 20 “targets” for the November election, identified by a website showing crosshairs around 20 Democratic districts.
“This morning in Arizona, this age in which this country would accept “targeting” of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended,” the liberal host said.
Dupnik’s comments were also spotlighted in a series of posts at the top of the liberal Daily Kos.
“Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik isn’t afraid to point the finger at who is culpable,” wrote one Daily Kos blogger.
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) echoed Dupnik’s sentiments in an interview with the Huffington Post.
“The climate has gotten so toxic in our political discourse, setting up for this kind of reaction for too long. It’s unfortunate to say that. I hate to say that,” Grijalva said. “Anybody who contributed to feeding this monster had better step back and realize they’re threatening our form of government.”
Dupnik’s recognition in local political circles as an outspoken Democrat may end up backfiring for those on the left spotlighting his comments in attempts to pin conservatives with inciting violence.
Several on the right have accused Dupnik and those spotlighting his remarks of exploiting the tragedy for political gain. And local conservatives are quickly spinning his comments as those of a partisan.
“For out of state folks perplexed by Pima County Sherriff comments: Pima County is to AZ as Austin is to TX. Dense Dem area comparatively,” tweeted Pamela Gorman, a conservative activist in Phoenix who ran in a primary campaign against Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.).
And a blogger for the Tucson Citizen identified the “Democrat County Sheriff” in a post attacking Dupnik’s “outrageous” use of the incident for “political reasons.”
The blame of overheated rhetoric on the right incensed leading conservatives, many of which offered statements of support for the congresswoman currently recovering from surgery in an Arizona hospital.
“The left is using this tragedy to score political points. Rep. Giffords was on Gov. Palin’s target list for defeat this past November. The left claims Gov. Palin has blood on her hands. So does the tea party movement,” wrote RedState founder Erick Erickson on his blog. “Let’s not let the left, yet again, spin this against the tea party movement, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or Sarah Palin inciting violence. That’s both a profound lie and just another, though lesser, bit of evil.”
“Politicizing this is repulsive,” added Rebecca Mansour, a spokeswoman for Palin, in a tweet.
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=DC832363-9500-4F9F-9504-36F5A55FB8CE
Giffords warned in March of ‘consequences’ to Palin’s violent rhetoric
By Stephen C. Webster
Sunday, January 9th, 2011 -- 1:42 am
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/giffords-warned-march-consequences-palins-violent-rhetoric/
Sunday, January 9th, 2011 -- 1:42 am
Fox News employee Sarah Palin's violent rhetoric caused concern back in March 2010, when she released a map of the United States with gun crosshairs over 20 congressional districts, including Arizona's eighth.
The representative for that district, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), now lays in a hospital after a gunman put a bullet in her head, shooting 18 others before his violent eruption ended.
And in an unsettlingly accurate premonition back when Palin "targeted" Democrats encouraged supporters to "reload" and "take aim" at them, Giffords predicted that there would be "consequences" for the escalation of violent rhetoric in the media.
Her language was also defended by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who at the time suggested that using such terms was perfectly fine.
During a March 25th broadcast of MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown," Giffords differed, substantially.
"The thing is, the way that she has it depicted -- the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district -- when people do that, they've got to realize that there's consequences for that action," she said.
Her sentiment then was echoed by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik at a press conference on Saturday, where he called for "people in the radio business and some people in the TV business" to town dow their level of outrage.
"I think it's the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, that ... This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in, and I think it's time that we do the soul searching," he said.
"It's not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included," Dupnik added. "That's the sad thing about what's going on in America: pretty soon we're not going to be able to find reasonable decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office."
"My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today's tragic shootings in Arizona," Palin wrote Saturday. "On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice."
The gunman, identified as 22-year-old Arizona resident Jared Lee Loughner, was in police custody Saturday night and allegedly posted a revolutionary screed on the Internet describing his opposition to the world's currency systems and an objection to government control of English language rules, among other things.
This video is from MSNBC, broadcast March 25, 2010.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/giffords-warned-march-consequences-palins-violent-rhetoric/
'Vitriol' Cited As Possible Factor In Arizona Tragedy
by Liz Halloran
January 9, 2011
Law enforcement officials continue to piece together the facts in Saturday's shooting rampage that left a federal judge dead and a congresswoman critically injured in Arizona, and some are questioning whether divisive political rhetoric may have played a role.
At least six people died and at least a dozen were injured in the Saturday morning shooting at a Tucson, Ariz., grocery store parking lot, in which the gunman specifically targeted Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Pima County, Ariz. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said. Giffords was shot in the head, and the shooting continued until citizens tackled the suspected gunman, he said.
The dead included John Roll, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Arizona. Also killed was Gabe Zimmerman, 30, the congresswoman's director of community outreach, and a 9-year-old girl. Two other Giffords staffers were injured.
At a news conference Saturday night, a clearly emotional Dupnik, who has been close to both Giffords and Roll, repeatedly cited what he characterized as the "vitriol" that has infected political discourse. He said that his own state has become "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
There is reason to believe, he said, that the shooting suspect "may have a mental issue," adding that people like that "are especially susceptible to vitriol."
"That may be free speech, but it's not without consequences," he said.
The suspected gunman was tackled and held by people at the event until police arrived and took him into custody. Law enforcement sources told NPR the suspect was 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner.
Dupnik declined to name the suspect, but said he "has kind of a troubled past — I can tell you that — and we are not convinced he acted alone."
Officials have a photograph of a second "person of interest," a 50-year-old white male, Dupnik said. "We have an individual we are actively in pursuit of, but I cannot tell you who he is at this point," the sheriff said.
The suspect still had ammunition in his weapon when he was tackled, Dupnik said. Law enforcement officials had previous contact with the suspect and he had made threats, the sheriff said.
NPR and other news organizations reported earlier Saturday that Giffords had died. NPR member station KJZZ in Phoenix reported the recently re-elected Democratic congresswoman and six others had been killed by the gunman, based on a source in the Pima County Sheriff's office.
'A Tragedy For Arizona'
"Gabby Giffords was a friend of mine," President Obama said Saturday afternoon in a nationally televised statement from the White House. "It’s not surprising that today Gabby was doing what she always does: listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbors."
"This is more than a tragedy for those involved," he said. "It is a tragedy for Arizona and a tragedy for our entire country."
Giffords, a moderate "Blue Dog" Democrat and gun rights advocate who in November eked out a win for a third term over Tea Party-backed Republican Jesse Kelly, underwent surgery at University Medical Center in Tucson. Hospital Director Pete Rhee said that a bullet had entered and exited the congresswoman's head, but that he was as "optimistic" as he could be in the situation.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was re-elected to a third term in November.
Drew Angerer/AP
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was re-elected to a third term in November.
There has been a rush to determine what had prompted the massacre in a state that has been roiled by incendiary debate over illegal immigrants and has also become ground zero for those questioning Obama's birthplace.
"It's not a good atmosphere right now, though I'm not saying that's what prompted this," said University of Arizona law professor Andy Silverman, who knew Roll well. "But things in Arizona are very tense, and we've become the incubator for a lot of immigration-related matters and now for the birthers, too."
Giffords' fellow Arizona congressman, Republican Jeff Flake, recalled that she was unfazed after her Tucson office had been targeted by vandals who broke a window on the eve of last year's health care vote.
During an interview with MSNBC after her office was vandalized, Giffords noted that her district was on Sarah Palin's "crosshairs" list of targeted congressional races. And it had been reported that in 2009, Roll and his wife received 24-hour protection for at least a month after receiving death threats after certifying a multimillion-dollar lawsuit illegal immigrants had filed against an Arizona rancher.
Palin, in a statement, offered "sincere condolences" to Giffords and the other victims.
"On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice," she said.
People gather for a candlelight vigil for the victims of a shooting rampage in Arizona, at the steps of the Capitol in Washington on Saturday.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
People gather for a candlelight vigil for the victims of the shooting rampage, at the steps of the Capitol in Washington on Saturday.
As information about Loughner began to emerge later in the day — including online videos and comments posted under the same name as the Tucson native and Mountain View High School graduate — those in Arizona and Washington cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
Some online statements attributed to Loughner suggest an obsession with the nation's currency system and with grammar. In one online video posted under Loughner's name, an American flag is burned.
"It has been a difficult time politically for the country, and I'm sure bloggers and others will go crazy laying blame — on gun rights, on Tea Party people — trying to figure out who's fault it is," said Randy Graf, a Republican who served in the state Legislature with Giffords and lost to her in her first run for Congress.
"As we hear more about the alleged shooter, it seems he may be more like a person with problems whom you can't control," said Graf. He said that despite their political differences, he and Giffords "got along great."
Heard On Air
NPR's Ted Robbins Talks With Guy Raz About The Shooting Jan. 8, 2011
Colleagues Reflect On Rep. Giffords Jan. 8, 2011
Former Rep. Jim Kolbe, the Republican whose seat Giffords won in 2006 when he decided not to seek re-election, said that it is "inappropriate speculation to talk about what the political environment might be."
"We don't have any information yet," said Kolbe, who was a good friend of Roll's. "I don't think members of the media and the public realize that public officials receive threats all the time and have their offices vandalized."
Giffords, 40, has been considered an up-and-coming Democrat, with a moderate streak and an astronaut husband. At age 32, she became the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona statehouse.
She was described Saturday by Arizona University law professor Lynn Marcus, co-director of the school's immigration clinic, as "very accessible and very warm," someone many know on a first-name basis.
"She's taken a position in support of comprehensive immigration reform, but she hasn't been anyone who is perceived as a liberal or pro-immigrant," Marcus said. "Her constituents in southern Arizona are ranchers and rural Arizonans."
Emergency responders surround the scene of a shooting where a gunman opened fire Saturday, shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and several others in Tuscon, Ariz.
Emergency responders surround the scene of a shooting where a gunman opened fire Saturday, shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and several others in Tuscon, Ariz.
She has advocated enforcement and securing the border as key to handling the challenging issue, Marcus said.
Giffords was expected to lose her race last year in the Republican-leaning 8th Congressional District. As Flake said, there was a "very strong headwind" against her — and all Democrats.
"She got re-elected because she's tenacious," he said. "She's tireless."
Kolbe, who has known Giffords since they served together in the state Legislature, said she is "very outgoing, effervescent and thoughtful."
She has a master's degree from Cornell University and took over her family's tire business in Tucson.
Judge, Congresswoman Were Friends
Roll, a 63-year-old Pennsylvania native who received his law degree from the University of Arizona law school, was appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. Silverman, who coordinates a clerk program with Roll, said he considered the judge hardworking, smart and low-key.
"If you put labels on judges, he would be considered more conservative, but I think he's apolitical," Silverman said.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said Roll's death was "a somber reminder of the importance of the rule of law and the sacrifices of those who work to secure it."
Dupnik said that Roll, whom he described as "one of the finest human beings I ever met in my life," had stopped by Giffords' event on his way home from Mass, which he attended daily.
Roll and the congresswoman were friends, the sheriff said, and the judge just wanted to say hello before he went home to "do the floors," like he does every Saturday.
As the news continued to spool out Saturday, apolitical was the tone many, including Graf, were seeking.
"We'll get through this," Graf said. "There's time for politics later."
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/09/132780010/vitriol-cited-as-possible-factor-in-arizona-tragedy
January 9, 2011
Law enforcement officials continue to piece together the facts in Saturday's shooting rampage that left a federal judge dead and a congresswoman critically injured in Arizona, and some are questioning whether divisive political rhetoric may have played a role.
At least six people died and at least a dozen were injured in the Saturday morning shooting at a Tucson, Ariz., grocery store parking lot, in which the gunman specifically targeted Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Pima County, Ariz. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said. Giffords was shot in the head, and the shooting continued until citizens tackled the suspected gunman, he said.
The dead included John Roll, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Arizona. Also killed was Gabe Zimmerman, 30, the congresswoman's director of community outreach, and a 9-year-old girl. Two other Giffords staffers were injured.
At a news conference Saturday night, a clearly emotional Dupnik, who has been close to both Giffords and Roll, repeatedly cited what he characterized as the "vitriol" that has infected political discourse. He said that his own state has become "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
There is reason to believe, he said, that the shooting suspect "may have a mental issue," adding that people like that "are especially susceptible to vitriol."
"That may be free speech, but it's not without consequences," he said.
The suspected gunman was tackled and held by people at the event until police arrived and took him into custody. Law enforcement sources told NPR the suspect was 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner.
Dupnik declined to name the suspect, but said he "has kind of a troubled past — I can tell you that — and we are not convinced he acted alone."
Officials have a photograph of a second "person of interest," a 50-year-old white male, Dupnik said. "We have an individual we are actively in pursuit of, but I cannot tell you who he is at this point," the sheriff said.
The suspect still had ammunition in his weapon when he was tackled, Dupnik said. Law enforcement officials had previous contact with the suspect and he had made threats, the sheriff said.
NPR and other news organizations reported earlier Saturday that Giffords had died. NPR member station KJZZ in Phoenix reported the recently re-elected Democratic congresswoman and six others had been killed by the gunman, based on a source in the Pima County Sheriff's office.
'A Tragedy For Arizona'
"Gabby Giffords was a friend of mine," President Obama said Saturday afternoon in a nationally televised statement from the White House. "It’s not surprising that today Gabby was doing what she always does: listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbors."
"This is more than a tragedy for those involved," he said. "It is a tragedy for Arizona and a tragedy for our entire country."
Giffords, a moderate "Blue Dog" Democrat and gun rights advocate who in November eked out a win for a third term over Tea Party-backed Republican Jesse Kelly, underwent surgery at University Medical Center in Tucson. Hospital Director Pete Rhee said that a bullet had entered and exited the congresswoman's head, but that he was as "optimistic" as he could be in the situation.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was re-elected to a third term in November.
Drew Angerer/AP
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was re-elected to a third term in November.
There has been a rush to determine what had prompted the massacre in a state that has been roiled by incendiary debate over illegal immigrants and has also become ground zero for those questioning Obama's birthplace.
"It's not a good atmosphere right now, though I'm not saying that's what prompted this," said University of Arizona law professor Andy Silverman, who knew Roll well. "But things in Arizona are very tense, and we've become the incubator for a lot of immigration-related matters and now for the birthers, too."
Giffords' fellow Arizona congressman, Republican Jeff Flake, recalled that she was unfazed after her Tucson office had been targeted by vandals who broke a window on the eve of last year's health care vote.
During an interview with MSNBC after her office was vandalized, Giffords noted that her district was on Sarah Palin's "crosshairs" list of targeted congressional races. And it had been reported that in 2009, Roll and his wife received 24-hour protection for at least a month after receiving death threats after certifying a multimillion-dollar lawsuit illegal immigrants had filed against an Arizona rancher.
Palin, in a statement, offered "sincere condolences" to Giffords and the other victims.
"On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice," she said.
People gather for a candlelight vigil for the victims of a shooting rampage in Arizona, at the steps of the Capitol in Washington on Saturday.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
People gather for a candlelight vigil for the victims of the shooting rampage, at the steps of the Capitol in Washington on Saturday.
As information about Loughner began to emerge later in the day — including online videos and comments posted under the same name as the Tucson native and Mountain View High School graduate — those in Arizona and Washington cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
Some online statements attributed to Loughner suggest an obsession with the nation's currency system and with grammar. In one online video posted under Loughner's name, an American flag is burned.
"It has been a difficult time politically for the country, and I'm sure bloggers and others will go crazy laying blame — on gun rights, on Tea Party people — trying to figure out who's fault it is," said Randy Graf, a Republican who served in the state Legislature with Giffords and lost to her in her first run for Congress.
"As we hear more about the alleged shooter, it seems he may be more like a person with problems whom you can't control," said Graf. He said that despite their political differences, he and Giffords "got along great."
Heard On Air
NPR's Ted Robbins Talks With Guy Raz About The Shooting Jan. 8, 2011
Colleagues Reflect On Rep. Giffords Jan. 8, 2011
Former Rep. Jim Kolbe, the Republican whose seat Giffords won in 2006 when he decided not to seek re-election, said that it is "inappropriate speculation to talk about what the political environment might be."
"We don't have any information yet," said Kolbe, who was a good friend of Roll's. "I don't think members of the media and the public realize that public officials receive threats all the time and have their offices vandalized."
Giffords, 40, has been considered an up-and-coming Democrat, with a moderate streak and an astronaut husband. At age 32, she became the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona statehouse.
She was described Saturday by Arizona University law professor Lynn Marcus, co-director of the school's immigration clinic, as "very accessible and very warm," someone many know on a first-name basis.
"She's taken a position in support of comprehensive immigration reform, but she hasn't been anyone who is perceived as a liberal or pro-immigrant," Marcus said. "Her constituents in southern Arizona are ranchers and rural Arizonans."
Emergency responders surround the scene of a shooting where a gunman opened fire Saturday, shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and several others in Tuscon, Ariz.
Emergency responders surround the scene of a shooting where a gunman opened fire Saturday, shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and several others in Tuscon, Ariz.
She has advocated enforcement and securing the border as key to handling the challenging issue, Marcus said.
Giffords was expected to lose her race last year in the Republican-leaning 8th Congressional District. As Flake said, there was a "very strong headwind" against her — and all Democrats.
"She got re-elected because she's tenacious," he said. "She's tireless."
Kolbe, who has known Giffords since they served together in the state Legislature, said she is "very outgoing, effervescent and thoughtful."
She has a master's degree from Cornell University and took over her family's tire business in Tucson.
Judge, Congresswoman Were Friends
Roll, a 63-year-old Pennsylvania native who received his law degree from the University of Arizona law school, was appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. Silverman, who coordinates a clerk program with Roll, said he considered the judge hardworking, smart and low-key.
"If you put labels on judges, he would be considered more conservative, but I think he's apolitical," Silverman said.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said Roll's death was "a somber reminder of the importance of the rule of law and the sacrifices of those who work to secure it."
Dupnik said that Roll, whom he described as "one of the finest human beings I ever met in my life," had stopped by Giffords' event on his way home from Mass, which he attended daily.
Roll and the congresswoman were friends, the sheriff said, and the judge just wanted to say hello before he went home to "do the floors," like he does every Saturday.
As the news continued to spool out Saturday, apolitical was the tone many, including Graf, were seeking.
"We'll get through this," Graf said. "There's time for politics later."
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/09/132780010/vitriol-cited-as-possible-factor-in-arizona-tragedy
US Anti-War Resistance on the Rise
By Kevin Zeese
December 21, 2010
December 21, 2010
Editor’s Note: Though still relatively small, signs of resistance to the continued Afghan War and to the Obama administration’s campaign against leakers have become unmistakable, from the White House gates to Internet sites that present information the government would prefer to keep hidden.
In this guest essay, anti-war activist Kevin Zeese describes last Thursday’s demonstration at the White House and recounts the depth of new evidence about official wrongdoing and deception emerging from the WikiLeaks disclosures:
Mike Ferner, the president of Veterans for Peace, was speaking outside the White House calling for a “culture of resistance” against U.S. wars. His organization was leading a protest outside the White House at the same moment that President Obama was inside announcing the continuation of the Afghanistan War.
Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent and author Chris Hedges, who has seen more war than most vets, joined in the call for action. He adapted President Obama’s campaign of hope and change, urging everyone not to wait for Obama, but to take action:
“Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state. All who resist, all who are here today keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become an enemy of hope. They become, in their passivity, agencies of injustice.”
Hedges urged actions, large and small, against the corporate-government’s militarism.
As Obama spoke inside the warm White House, outside in the snow 131 veterans and their supporters defied authorities, some chained themselves to the White House fence, others refused to leave when ordered by police. They were arrested. Many promised continued acts of resistance.
Some, from other movements, like Margaret Flowers, MD of the single-payer health care movement, urged solidarity as resistance is needed on many issues mishandled by corporate-government. The seeds of resistance had been planted.
The watering of that seed was coming from Obama’s false words and the truth escaping from his government’s secrecy. He proclaimed progress in the Afghanistan War. But, the front page of the New York Times, the day before his speech, reported “two new classified intelligence reports offer a more negative assessment and say there is a limited chance of success.”
These reports (not released by WikiLeaks, but by the traditional leaking in DC) were from the National Intelligence Estimates which brings together the findings of 16 intelligence agencies and showed a conflict with the Defense Department’s more rosy picture.
President Obama then went on to talk about how the U.S. could begin withdrawing troops as the Afghan police were trained and took their place. But, just four days before the President spoke, The Guardian described how “more than 20,000 officers from the Afghan National Police (ANP), the country's main law enforcement agency, have left over the past year.”
President Obama promised to persist until the United States achieved victory, but as Daniel Ellsberg, a veteran and former military analyst for the Pentagon pointed out, Gen. David Petraeus has told the President there will be no victory.
Ellsberg, reading from Bob Woodward’s Obama’s War quotes Petraeus saying: “You have to recognize also that I don't think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. . . You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives.”
If Obama’s inaccurate statements to the American people about a war costing $5.7 billion per month are not enough, you can look to the documentation of failure and potential war crimes in the WikiLeaks reports, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and the diplomatic cables.
They show, among other things, that:
--U.S. troops kill civilians without cause or concern and then cover it up (more examples of hiding civilian killings here, here and here) including killing reporters.
---The CIA is fighting an undeclared and unauthorized war in Pakistan with Blackwater mercenaries.
--Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not trustworthy.
--Afghanistan is rife with corruption and drug dealing.
--The Pakistan military and intelligence agencies aid Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
--U.S. officials look the other way when client governments engage in torture.
The cables also show that beyond the war fronts that Hillary Clinton has turned State Department Foreign Service officers into a nest of spies who violate laws to spy on diplomats all with marching orders drawn up by the CIA. These disclosures have the world looking at the United States with new eyes.
WikiLeaks, the Abu Ghraib prison photos, the reports from Guantanamo Bay, Red Cross reports of secret prisons, intelligence reports and so many other sources of information show Americans what their government is doing.
And knowing the truth and not acting is complicity in these actions. In the face of this evidence, more and more Americans are acting. It was not only the arrest of 131 vets and their supporters that show a rising tide of resistance. That’s also apparent in the publishing of the documents by WikiLeaks and by major media outlets as well as in the independent media around the globe.
In the more than 1,000 mirror sites of WikiLeaks set up as the original site was under attack, we see resistance. When more than 100,000 people downloaded the WikiLeaks “insurance policy” and were prepared to release documents if Assange was harmed, it was an act of resistance.
This resistance also is seen in intelligence officials leaking documents to the New York Times the day before the President spoke on Afghanistan, showing the country that the war is failing despite what the President says.
Resistance is seen in Americans organizing for their right to know and reaffirming freedom of the press, under the banner WikiLeaksIsDemocracy.org. It is also seen in those standing up for Bradley Manning in the Bradley Manning Support Network.
It has always been small things that people do that leads to massive change. While the government has a lot of weapons at its disposal, its insecurity is evident in its reaction to the truth. Government officials show more than embarrassment, they show fear – fear of their own words being exposed and people knowing what they do.
Everyday that a truth is revealed, the government looses power and influence. It is a problem of its own making.
And, while the U.S. military is the most powerful in the world, and the U.S. taxpayer spends as much as the whole world combined on weapons and war, it has not won a significant war in more than 50 years.
Now, all this “superpower” status rests on a fragile economy that is in deep collapse and showing no signs of real recovery, while the ship of state is too dysfunctional to respond to multiple crises facing the nation and world.
The superpower is strong, but weak at the same time. These seem to be the signs of an empire that could collapse at anytime.
Kevin Zeese serves on the steering committee of the Bradley Manning Support Network and Voters For Peace, the organization he directs, is the initiator of WikiLeaksIsDemocracy.org.
http://consortiumnews.com/Print/2010/122110a.html
A Zoo of Our Own Making
By Phil Rockstroh
December 31, 2010
Editor’s Note: At the end of one difficult year and the start of what is sure to be another, there are natural questions about the purpose of human endeavor, doubts that touch us all. For journalists who try to do the job honestly, there are gnawing doubts about the value of this work, uncovering information for a public that often seems distracted or disinterested.
Sometimes, the only answer is an internal one, living up to a personal code of what’s right or what the tradecraft of a profession demands. In this essay (and companion video), poet Phil Rockstroh notes that the barren landscape of American culture presents such an existential quandary to us all: What have we become as a people who “will kill for empire and a parking space?”
In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost ... marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self.
Whether urban, suburban, or rural dwelling, the sense of alienation, for an individual, is profound ... as discernible to the eye as the constellations of foreclosure signs stippling overgrown front lawns across the land ... as hidden as the abandoned dreams within.
The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie.
Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.
After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I- Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.
While above the street -- corporate towers -- that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension -- blot the skyline ... these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.
This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred.
Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.
And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will ...
No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.
The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook -- with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection -- reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial.
It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one's heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.
One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.
And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan.
We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions. The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.
Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.
Possessed by this mode of being: we languish in a zoo of our own making where we gaze, without comprehension, at the confines of our enclosure, chew our paws, pace the cage, and are restless for mealtime. Like an animal in a cage, we are no longer what we were meant to be ... we have forgotten what it is to be alive.
With the exception of superficial form, we begin to lose our affinity to what makes us recognizable as a human being and as an animal -- for we have become simply a sad thing that waits for lunch. And I defy any caged clock-watcher in a cubicle to defy that point.
Restless and agitated in our confinement, we sink further into anomie ... into the benumbing embrace of comfort zones (over- eating, anti-depressants, consumerism as emotional distraction, addiction to electronic media) where we chose safety over the truth of our being.
In these cages of inauthenticity, our heart's longings and human needs are held in stasis by the perfunctory persona we cultivated for approval and acceptance; there, consigned to a barren region of mind where one is rewarded for docility and duplicity, one languishes, bereft of eros and pothos ... unconsciously self-convicted and sentenced for the crime of being a serial betrayer of one's essential self.
So much of the criteria of the modern condition has atomized us, stripped us, collectively, of ritual, purpose and meaning, and placed us in the midst of what T.S. Eliot expressed in prosody as a "heap of broken images."
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
--From: The Waste Land
There is danger, of course, in such places -- but there is also the possibility of renewal.
Personal and historical traumas leave a legacy of bewilderment. And being bewildered i.e., being in a psychic wilderness, lost, having wandered or been cast past the known horizon of experience ... is to be in position to engage the novel, be in the thrall of unfolding mystery, and wander in a soul-suffused landscape of the sublime.
A state of alienation is right where we should be: To be able to adapt to a culture dedicated to little more than finding efficient means of exploiting the hours of the greater public's lives for the benefit of a greedy few ... would be a tragedy.
Living within this culture should bring on despair ... It is a leviathan that has devoured your existence. Do you think you can renovate the belly of the beast ... set up a time-share with Jonah and Pinocchio there ... and live in comfort?
Should not one stagger and stammer in mortification when shown a handful of dust?
Moreover, the solution we are offered -- making ourselves a dwelling within a prison of consumer kitsch -- should and does only bring on more anomie. Eliot wrote the following regarding a psyche attempting to adapt to a dying culture
[...] Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
--From: The Journey of the Magi,
One of the notions, as Rilke might put it, that is "brooding like a seed" in my psyche has been the distinction James Hillman makes between civilization and culture.
Hillman avers that, and I agree, civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux ... our forced reverence is but a perfunctory prayer muttered before the iconography of a dead religion; in contrast, culture is a living, breathing phenomenon of the collective mind, heart, and soul of the people within it.
Its logos inhabit the very air of existence, permeating it like the sound of birdsong, and cricket and cicada stridulation throughout a high summer night.
Moreover, he avers that culture is akin to a madhouse; in fact, the solution lies in the back ward of the asylum, the area where are housed the hopeless cases. In other words, like Dante ... proceed to the place you most fear looking upon, embrace it, and hear its awful keening and heart-opening agonies.
There is the location of rebirth, the last circle of hell ... retreating to a comfort zone will simply leave the situation is stasis.
So the question arises: How does one enter the soul-making shabbiness of the human condition, even though, as always, we are powerless against the trajectory of history and lost within the mad proliferation of culture -- and, as Bob Dylan limned in lyric regarding the alienation this situation evokes, "[one has] no direction home?"
Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder of upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment ... Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.
Wendell Berry believes such ventures to be one of the true vocations of the soul:
The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry
In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home ... to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's Web site And at FaceBook.
Angela Tyler-Rockstroh is a Broadcast Designer/Animator who has worked with major Networks such as Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, HBO Family, PBS, as well as, with Michael Moore on his documentaries, "Fahrenheit” and “Sicko."
http://consortiumnews.com/Print/2010/123110b.html
December 31, 2010
Editor’s Note: At the end of one difficult year and the start of what is sure to be another, there are natural questions about the purpose of human endeavor, doubts that touch us all. For journalists who try to do the job honestly, there are gnawing doubts about the value of this work, uncovering information for a public that often seems distracted or disinterested.
Sometimes, the only answer is an internal one, living up to a personal code of what’s right or what the tradecraft of a profession demands. In this essay (and companion video), poet Phil Rockstroh notes that the barren landscape of American culture presents such an existential quandary to us all: What have we become as a people who “will kill for empire and a parking space?”
In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost ... marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self.
Whether urban, suburban, or rural dwelling, the sense of alienation, for an individual, is profound ... as discernible to the eye as the constellations of foreclosure signs stippling overgrown front lawns across the land ... as hidden as the abandoned dreams within.
The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie.
Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.
After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I- Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.
While above the street -- corporate towers -- that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension -- blot the skyline ... these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.
This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred.
Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.
And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will ...
No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.
The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook -- with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection -- reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial.
It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one's heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.
One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.
And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan.
We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions. The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.
Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.
Possessed by this mode of being: we languish in a zoo of our own making where we gaze, without comprehension, at the confines of our enclosure, chew our paws, pace the cage, and are restless for mealtime. Like an animal in a cage, we are no longer what we were meant to be ... we have forgotten what it is to be alive.
With the exception of superficial form, we begin to lose our affinity to what makes us recognizable as a human being and as an animal -- for we have become simply a sad thing that waits for lunch. And I defy any caged clock-watcher in a cubicle to defy that point.
Restless and agitated in our confinement, we sink further into anomie ... into the benumbing embrace of comfort zones (over- eating, anti-depressants, consumerism as emotional distraction, addiction to electronic media) where we chose safety over the truth of our being.
In these cages of inauthenticity, our heart's longings and human needs are held in stasis by the perfunctory persona we cultivated for approval and acceptance; there, consigned to a barren region of mind where one is rewarded for docility and duplicity, one languishes, bereft of eros and pothos ... unconsciously self-convicted and sentenced for the crime of being a serial betrayer of one's essential self.
So much of the criteria of the modern condition has atomized us, stripped us, collectively, of ritual, purpose and meaning, and placed us in the midst of what T.S. Eliot expressed in prosody as a "heap of broken images."
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
--From: The Waste Land
There is danger, of course, in such places -- but there is also the possibility of renewal.
Personal and historical traumas leave a legacy of bewilderment. And being bewildered i.e., being in a psychic wilderness, lost, having wandered or been cast past the known horizon of experience ... is to be in position to engage the novel, be in the thrall of unfolding mystery, and wander in a soul-suffused landscape of the sublime.
A state of alienation is right where we should be: To be able to adapt to a culture dedicated to little more than finding efficient means of exploiting the hours of the greater public's lives for the benefit of a greedy few ... would be a tragedy.
Living within this culture should bring on despair ... It is a leviathan that has devoured your existence. Do you think you can renovate the belly of the beast ... set up a time-share with Jonah and Pinocchio there ... and live in comfort?
Should not one stagger and stammer in mortification when shown a handful of dust?
Moreover, the solution we are offered -- making ourselves a dwelling within a prison of consumer kitsch -- should and does only bring on more anomie. Eliot wrote the following regarding a psyche attempting to adapt to a dying culture
[...] Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
--From: The Journey of the Magi,
One of the notions, as Rilke might put it, that is "brooding like a seed" in my psyche has been the distinction James Hillman makes between civilization and culture.
Hillman avers that, and I agree, civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux ... our forced reverence is but a perfunctory prayer muttered before the iconography of a dead religion; in contrast, culture is a living, breathing phenomenon of the collective mind, heart, and soul of the people within it.
Its logos inhabit the very air of existence, permeating it like the sound of birdsong, and cricket and cicada stridulation throughout a high summer night.
Moreover, he avers that culture is akin to a madhouse; in fact, the solution lies in the back ward of the asylum, the area where are housed the hopeless cases. In other words, like Dante ... proceed to the place you most fear looking upon, embrace it, and hear its awful keening and heart-opening agonies.
There is the location of rebirth, the last circle of hell ... retreating to a comfort zone will simply leave the situation is stasis.
So the question arises: How does one enter the soul-making shabbiness of the human condition, even though, as always, we are powerless against the trajectory of history and lost within the mad proliferation of culture -- and, as Bob Dylan limned in lyric regarding the alienation this situation evokes, "[one has] no direction home?"
Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder of upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment ... Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.
Wendell Berry believes such ventures to be one of the true vocations of the soul:
The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry
In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home ... to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's Web site And at FaceBook.
Angela Tyler-Rockstroh is a Broadcast Designer/Animator who has worked with major Networks such as Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, HBO Family, PBS, as well as, with Michael Moore on his documentaries, "Fahrenheit” and “Sicko."
http://consortiumnews.com/Print/2010/123110b.html
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