Rutabaga Ridge and Bac-O: A Joke of a Country

Rutabaga Ridge and Bac-O

A Joke of a Country

by Randy Shields / January 25th, 2011

The aftermath of the Arizona shooting reminded me of how much support there is for the Second Amendment compared to other amendments. No one — left or right — believes that guns will be restricted in any way.

Not so with the other amendments. The ruling class has figured out how to make the Bill of Rights irrelevant.

The First Amendment now means we have the right to assemble in cages far away and out of sight of our political leaders at their conventions. (If dissent falls over in a cage does it make a sound?) Freedom of speech now only has real meaning and impact if there are millions of dollars of TV and radio advertising behind it.

The Fourth Amendment was KOed in the phony war on drugs but its body is still kicked about the ring in the phony war on terror. Waking up each day in America means learning how many new ways we are spied upon and not free. Now there’s an ever-growing number of places where we are not secure in our persons and effects — homes, phones, vehicles, cameras, computers, airports and, soon, bus and train stations and malls. (I absolutely draw the line at my favorite station — the Magnum roller coaster station at Cedar Point.) I fantasize about tens of millions of crazed Fourth Amendment fetishists. You’ll only pull that probable cause from my cold dead hands.

The Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments are a nightmarish parade of absurdities where it’s entirely possible to be an illiterate Afghan goat herder kidnapped by a criminal gang ( “He was Osama bin Laden’s yogurt man!”) and sold to the American military for a lottery-like pay out and then be jailed and tortured (if tortured to death, stop here) without charge or trial and, years later, stood up in a show trial held out of sight on an island nation (which Americans have always been taught hates freedom and democracy) and have the torture-induced false confession used as evidence against you and then, when you are miraculously found not guilty, you can continue to be held and put into however many jeopardies it takes to keep you locked up forever and then thrown into solitary confinement in a Supermax prison, like 25,000 Americans, where your mind will be destroyed in a most definite cruel and unusual punishment, and all of this is just a pit stop to your ultimate destination on a gurney where you can, finally, wrongfully, legally, be tortured to death in a “botched” execution. And your kidnapping, false imprisonment, torture and death will be proudly used by politicians to drum up money and votes. It may not be George Mason and James Madison’s cup of tea but it hits the spot with the Tea Party, most of the United States Congress and President Obummer — and these highly evolved superior beings are all that matter.

And yet the Second Amendment seems immune from any encroachment. But I put it to you that we don’t know how strong the Second Amendment muscle really is because it never gets a decent workout. And here’s how to exercise it: I urge all animal liberationists, eco-warriors and every Latino and Muslim in America to assemble the vast, but perfectly legal, arsenals that many on the white right have always had. Then we will see how well-tolerated the Second Amendment is, something the Black Panthers learned long ago. I expect that we would see vegan compounds — bloody Rutabaga Ridges and Bac-Os — being stormed by the ATF and FBI.

***

My favorite headline about the Arizona shooting came from the January 8 Trentonian which threw in everything but the kitchen sink: “Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords shot in head in terrorist attack: federal judge, 9/11 girl killed; is Sarah Palin responsible?”

Here’s a quote from the article:

Giffords is known in her southern Arizona district for her numerous public outreach meetings, which she admitted in an October interview with the Associated Press can sometimes be challenging.

‘You know, the crazies on all sides, the people who come out, the planet earth people,’ she said following an appearance with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Tucson, where Mullen was questioned by a woman who wanted the military to start ‘building cities instead of destroying them.’ ‘I’m glad this just doesn’t happen to me.’

Right. The crazies, the planet earth people who would rather see money spent building cities than destroying them. The crazies who don’t like mountaintop removal and fracking and unconstitutional wars and extra-judicial assassinations and indefinite detention and giving away the public treasury to thieving bankers, or the ongoing spectacle of Senate warmongers like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman pushing for turning Iran into thousands of bloody Safeway parking lots.

McCain was quoted in the same Trentonian article from Colombia, America’s favorite human rights abuser in Latin America, where he was visiting its president. Arizona is a mere anti-union “right to work” state but oh what a free market paradise Colombia is — there, right wing death squads successfully compete against labor organizers by routinely killing them. I’m sure Sen. McCain was raising (Arizona?) hell about all those murdered union organizers. It’s more likely that the senator was ascertaining how well American tax dollars are being spent to exterminate leftist guerillas under the cover of a bogus “war on drugs” and ginning up trouble against Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela next door.

******

The United States Congress feels no urgency about the following: On January 7 the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced there are 14.5 million unemployed Americans, 8.9 million others who are working part-time but who want full-time work, 1.3 million who looked for work in the preceding 12 months but not in the four weeks leading up to the employment survey and 1.3 million discouraged workers who have given up looking for work altogether — for an official grand(ly understated) total of 26 million unemployed or under-employed. Contrariwise, the United States Congress moved heaven and earth in one week in 2008 to prop up insolvent zombie financial institutions with a potential $20 trillion, according to SourceWatch, of which the bankers took millions for Christmas bonuses and kicked back a tiny amount as the Congressional bribes known as campaign contributions.

Trillion$ to pay off the gambling debts of zombie banksters, 26 million Americans without jobs. A joke of a country. A lawless country — with more repressive laws than ever — socially, morally and financially bankrupt, that rightly commands no loyalty or respect. Fast action and trillion$ for bankers, millions of jobless Americans fighting for every little scrap they can get, whether it’s food stamps or unemployment benefits. That’s the priorities of the sanctimonious corruptatons in the United States Congress who call for civility in public discourse while they spend trillions of more dollars on the slaughter of innocent people in unconstitutional wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Arizona shooter is presented as an aberration while the CIA and young men at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada kill hundreds of times more civilians in Pakistan (over 2,000 murdered since Obama took office) in their computer-guided drone strikes.

The Arizona shooting will evolve from ruling class hand wringing about the rabid right’s rhetoric to concrete actions against Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, eco-activists, Hugo Chavez, the FARC, Iran, Hezbollah and any entity effectively resisting the American empire.

*********

I fluctuate every day, sometimes every hour, between hope and despair. My hope is the destruction of the American empire — my despair is that it might not happen in time for millions of people. At this moment, I’m unexpectedly bullish on its demise. I’m totally confident, for the next ten seconds, that something this arrogant, bankrupt and nakedly hypocritical is creating the courageous and determined people all over the world — in the jungles and deserts and even in the belly of the military beast itself — who will bury it, and have a good laugh doing it. Hallelujah, brother!

Oops — too late. Back to the shit. This country is in permanent lockdown. We have the right to dream and the right to blow off steam but not the ability to change anything. Every day we slog on, on fire but insensate, through the perfectly calibrated Hell of America where nothing positive can happen for the vast working class majority unless it first, and mostly, benefits a tiny minority of rapacious parasites. The money is for THEM, the mainstream news is for THEM, all the worry and concern and action in government is for THEM, everything is for THEM and we are of no consequence.

Dictators of the world, come visit America and see how it’s really done: Here the slaves believe they are free because they can buy iShit in ten different colors. Here it’s a way of life that the majority NEVER gets what it wants whether it’s universal single-payer health insurance, an end to wars or an end to bailing out the rich. Behold the narcissistic obedient subjects, with their phenomenal tolerance for dark-skinned pain and death, who have the exact government they deserve — watch them work until they drop because Wall Street fleeced them of tens of trillions of dollars in fraud-filled pump and dump asset bubbles. Behold the Marlboro Man dreams floating above the foundational cowardice of the American working class, ignorantly proud that, unlike the French and Greeks and Tunisians, they would never cause any trouble for their capitalist masters. Behold the Extermi-Nation, where the only honorable place to be is six feet under or the penitentiary.

Martin Luther King knew it then, Bradley Manning knows it now. Listen up, Obummer: Manning is closer to King than you have ever been and will ever be.

Randy Shields can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. Read other articles by Randy.

This article was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Afghanistan, Classism, Colombia, Corruption, Disinformation, Iraq, Legal/Constitutional, Obama, Pakistan, Prisons, Racism, Tea Party movement, Torture, Venezuela, Whistleblowing.

Viewpoint: The Killing Spirit: Psycho Killers & Civil Evolution

The Killing Spirit: Psycho Killers & Civil Evolution

by Jack Random / January 17th, 2011

It is not about blame. We are all to blame and we are none.

It is not about Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michele Bachmann, Ann Coulter or Sarah Palin. They are not the cause of this disease; they are only symptoms.

It is about that part of ourselves we do not wish to see. It is that part of our souls that we keep hidden in the shadows and refuse to acknowledge. It has been with us and within us for thousands of years and it will be within us until the end of time.

It is the killing spirit, the spirit of vengeance, intolerance, greed and hatred. Its antithesis is understanding, empathy, kindness and civility. The one poisons the soul of humanity and the other heals.

So you still think it is a good idea to allow guns at political rallies?

So you still think possession of automatic assault weapons is a god-given right and not a privilege born of responsibility?

If the latest psycho killer to claim more than his share in the fifteen-minutes-of-fame game had been a member of a well-regulated militia, he would surely have lost his membership card long ago and with it his right to bear arms.

To those who have sold their souls to the National Rifle Association it does not matter. No amount of bloodshed is sufficient to justify any infringement on the right to purchase deadly weapons and ammunition.

I do not wish in any way to diminish the tragedy in Tucson, Arizona. It has touched the heart of the nation in a way that few events can. We reach out to the fallen and the wounded. We know their faces and stories and we share their grief.

But I cannot ignore the greater picture. The same weekend as that horrific slaughter in the border town of Tucson, fifty-one people lost their lives to drug related violence south of the border, including fifteen decapitated bodies in Acapulco. The death toll stands at 30,000 since Felipe Calderon became president four years ago. The city of Juarez and its surrounding area resemble Fallujah at the height of the Iraq War: an estimated 200,000 exiles and over 3,000 murders this year alone.

Where do they get their weapons? Welcome to the USA where anyone from drug lords and criminals to terrorists and madmen can purchase weapons of mass destruction as long as you’ve got the cash. We have so armed the drug lords that they typically outgun the police and the Mexican army.

I would not wish to diminish the tragedy in Mexico but even the killing fields of Ciudad Juarez demure when compared to the mass graves of modern Africa, whose often genocidal wars in Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia and Nigeria were all supplied with deadly weapons made in the USA.

We may have yielded manufacturing and industry to foreign markets where labor is cheaper than dirt but we remain the chief supplier of weaponry to the world at war where blood is cheaper than water. What else can we do with yesterday’s killing machines?

How can we expect to close down Guns and Ammo shows when our nation supplies missiles to every dictator who comes looking? How can we expect to ban cop-killer bullets when we sell Apache gunships to genocidal maniacs?

I make no bones: I don’t believe in the individual right to carry arms and I don’t care what our founders said about it.

I believe that societies like species undergo a process of evolution. At an advanced stage of civil society, government disavows the state’s right to kill. At an advance stage, government delivers universal health care, ensures a minimum standard of living, provides security for the aged and infirm, and limits handguns and assault weapons to officers of the law. At an advanced stage, nations will come together to ban the international weapons trade.

The world is perhaps half a century away from disarming its most dangerous members and the nation is likewise half a century away from civilized gun control.

The killing spirit will not be defeated in a day. It will, from time to time, emerge from the shadows with acts that shock and appall us, like the murder of an innocent child or the attempted assassination of a promising leader.

The killing spirit can never be destroyed, not completely, for we cannot as a species survive without it, but those who believe in the better part of human nature must believe that it can and will be subdued. It is the process of civilization that will ultimately defeat the killing spirit by nurturing the better part of our nature: the healing spirit.

There are many who would scorn or sneer at such a notion and I have walked among them long enough to learn that that collective cynicism, a cynicism often born of fear, may be as great a barrier to civil evolution as the intolerance and vitriol of politicians and talking heads.

We Americans like to consider ourselves the most advanced of nations but we are in this fundamental sense severely behind. It is not a problem that religion or education can resolve; it is a problem of collective consciousness. When we can envision a world in which violence is as rare as a lunar eclipse on winter solstice, we will have taken the first step toward fulfilling that vision.

Meantime, let us all share a moment of silent contemplation, remembrance and mourning.

Jack Random is the author of Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press) the Jazzman Chronicles, Volumes I and II (City Lights Books). The Chronicles have been published by CounterPunch, the Albion Monitor, Buzzle, Dissident Voice and others. Read other articles by Jack, or visit Jack's website.

This article was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 7:01am and is filed under Culture, Drug Wars, Guns, Mexico, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan.

Jared Loughner's World of Illusion … and Y/Ours

You think Jared Loughner is nuttier than a fruitcake? Just take a few minutes out of your own schedule to read some of the e-mail you delete. Read some of the crap in your spam folder. Check your Facebook home page; read some or all of your Facebook friend's walls. Join a few freaky or idiotic Facebook groups that never in your right mind you would ever consider. Just for the hell of it, See what all you'll StumbleUpon. You don't have to go far to find stuff even far more weird. Try your local supermarket, library, McDonald's, Burger King or WalMart store or shopping mall where people hang out with no intent to be "normal." It's a ZOO out here in these United States... Then there are places everywhere in the big city or rural sticks where going down that road or lane is risking life and limb... You have just entered the Twilight Zone or killing fields... Jared seems a bit tame or naive or saner than most of what you can find under most any rock. Spooky!!!

Slate

Jared Loughner's World of Illusion … and Ours

The accused Tucson killer isn't the only one who has a love affair with alternative realities.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 7:32 PM ET

See Slate's complete coverage of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and the arrest of Jared Lee Loughner.

The Matrix, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and Inception

As long as we're using Jared Lee Loughner's tastes in philosophy and literature to probe his psyche—and I'm not saying we shouldn't—let's scrutinize our own tastes, too. I'm not suggesting a Mailerian equivalence between Loughner and the average man, so stop composing that irate e-mail to me right now. But Loughner's obsession with alternative realities, his idea that the universe is malleable and a function of an individual's will, is mirrored almost everywhere we look in pop culture.

According to a Mother Jones piece by Nick Baumann, Loughner believed in "lucid dreaming," namely that "conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control." That may sound like the currency of the insane, but it's the stuff of our most popular entertainments. Lucid dreaming served as the foundation for the fifth-best grossing movie of 2010, Inception.

Today's Washington Post calls reality-bending novelist Philip K. Dick—the author of such classics as Time Out of Joint and Ubik—Loughner's favorite writer. While Dick produced most of his short stories and novels for the pulp press, he has recently been acknowledged as a master of literature by the Library of America, which has published three volumes of his work. In Dick's fiction, characters are trapped and liberated as the realities around them melt, buckle, and turn inside out. He defined reality in a 1978 essay as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" but characteristically amended the thought several paragraphs later, writing, "If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

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An erudite overview of Dick's work published in the New Republic in 1993 captures the writer's oeuvre. "To enter a novel by Philip K. Dick is to enter a zone of disappearing worlds, nested hallucinations and impossible time-loops," Alexander Star writes. "Dick systematically blurs the boundaries between mind and matter, between storms in the psyche and crises of the atmosphere. The coiling search to set things right is doubled and redoubled and doubled again. Dick never met a story that ended or a regression that was finite."

If Jared Loughner was living out the Dickian philosophy to a schizophrenic extreme, so, it appears, did Dick. "Phil was not crazy by any standard I would dare apply," writes biographer Lawrence Sutin in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, citing his interviews with a psychiatrist and a psychologist who saw Dick during two difficult periods in his life. But Dick told his third wife, Anne Dick, that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when in high school. It was a very hot topic with the writer. "Phil was hypochondriacal about his mental condition," Anne said. When she was admitted to a psychiatric facility for assessment, Dick speculated about himself, telling a doctor that he was mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic, and that he should be hospitalized, Sutin writes.

In one letter quoted by Sutin, Dick grumbles about how his wild behaviors had earned him the reputation "of an advanced schizophrenic who believed everyone was plotting against him." Dick self-medicated on drugs for most of his adult life, even trying a vitamin regimen, to beat his self-diagnosis of schizophrenia. He embraced the teaching of Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, who, Star writes, "believed that schizophrenia involved a disturbance in the patient's orientation toward time." He had religious visions, claimed that his mind had been invaded by a "transcendentally rational mind" and believed he had been possessed by the prophet Elijah.

Jack Shafer previously analyzed Jared Loughner's photo, defended inflamed rhetoric, and warned against throwing inconvenient Web pages into the memory hole.

Again, I'm not equating Loughner and Dick but trying to establish how Dick harnessed the schizophrenic's worldview of mirror-worlds, parallel universes, and scrims behind scrims behind scrims to power his fiction. In Dick's world, the schizophrenic response to the world is not just normal; it is heroic—and doubly heroic when the protagonist breaks through the reality barriers that have marginalized him.

Thanks to Dick, pop culture caught up with schizophrenia and, thanks to Dick's followers, surpassed it. In Dick's world, the paranoid view is almost always the wisest one to embrace. Elements of Philip K. Dick can be found in such recent movies as The Matrix, in which a dreamer who is being fed upon by machines is awakened to fight and destroy them in a cyber realm. In Dark City, another dreaming protagonist discovers and combats the superintelligent observers who experiment on hundreds of thousands of people by periodically erasing their memories and reconfiguring the simulacrum of a 1950s Chicagoish city as they sleep. Hollywood has turned other Dick works into reality-bending movies, including Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. According to IMDB, a remake of Total Recall is in preproduction.

What is the TV show Lost but a six-season treatise on what is real and what is illusion, who is mad and who is sane, and what the limits of logic and faith are? In the Harry Potter series, the young wizard discovers a parallel world hidden to normal humans in which an evil power seeks to destroy and enslave the inhabitants of both worlds. Other movies in which reality is faked, augmented, and otherwise altered include The Truman Show, The Game, and Avatar, in which even the crippled can walk again. And I'm not even including the hundreds of movies in which ghosts take us into their realms or any of the physicists who speculate that our world is just a projection of some higher, multi-dimensional universe.

According to the Post, Loughner especially loved the movie Waking Life, which chronicles one man's adventures in the dream pool, as he walks "in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity."

Dreaming your way to a magical space was already a hackneyed notion by the time Dick started writing in the 1950s. Alice dreams her way to Wonderland, Dorothy's unconscious mind transports her to Oz, and Peter Pan takes Wendy and her brothers to Never Land as they prepare to settle down for a night's sleep. In all three stories, the young heroes struggle against the sometimes tempting, sometimes frightening alternative reality until they break free and return home. So satisfying were these tales that their audiences demanded—and were given—sequels in which Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy all return to their other, truer dimensions and were tested again.

Everybody shares Loughner's appetite for life in another dimension where they can be in control. One difference between Loughner and the man in the street is that the man in the street can easily distinguish between the imagined and the real—something Loughner appears to have struggled with. When our minds occupy alternative realities, we know it's only a movie, only a book, only a philosophical tract, or only a flask of physicists' moonshine. When we visit alternative realities, our grips on this reality grow firmer. When Loughner goes there, I suspect he strips a few mental threads and loses his hold on our world.

What's it like to live on the leading edge of paranoia? From his perspective, what does his 6-by-6 cell look like? Is it a collapsing cube or does it stretch beyond the infinite?

******

What alt-reality stories, movies, and authors did I neglect to mention? Surely something by Borges. Send tips to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. For an unsavory reality, dip into my Twitter feed. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Dick in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

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Why We Should Take Jared Loughner's Politics Seriously

Friday 14 January 2011

by: Steve Striffler, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: HeyThereSpaceman., unforth, D Sharon Pruitt)

Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old accused of shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others, apparently drew political ideas from the radical right and radical left, listing (fascist) Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and (communist) Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" among his favorite books. He was also attracted to conspiracy theories, thought we should be on a gold standard (because the government was trying to control us through currency), and at times just believed life was meaningless and nothing could be done.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, however, holding muddled political views does not in and of itself necessarily make Loughner mentally ill, unstable, crazy, or even particularly unusual. It makes him American and peculiarly so. In the college classroom, at political events and in grassroots organizing meetings, it does not take long to find many young (and not so young) people who hold what many of us consider to be an oddly contradictory collection of political views. After more than a decade of teaching, I can say that very few of today's college students have any sense of what "the left" or "the right" are or have traditionally stood for, what "liberal" and "conservative" have historically meant or where on the political spectrum we might place fascism and communism. When asked, most students - most Americans - "know" that Hitler and Marx are "bad," but very few can articulate what they stood for politically and many often assume that Nazi and Communist are synonymous.

Like Loughner, a significant portion of young people are, for very good reasons, profoundly anti-establishment, distrustful of anything they hear from the government or mainstream media. But this does not make them crazy anymore than it automatically leads them toward a coherent critique of the political system. Rather, in a world where fragments of information come from so many sources, it often leads them to the odd place where any explanation of the world is as good as any other, where there is no conceptual rudder for judging one theory or idea against another. Hence, they draw from wildly opposing political ideologies and are attracted to conspiracy theories. And it often leaves them in a frustrated place where public figures cannot be trusted, and to the conclusion that nothing can be done to change the world (except perhaps something chaotic and dramatic). Hence, the tendency toward apathy and (after a philosophy class or two) nihilism.

How the hell could we expect otherwise? It is bit ridiculous to ask why so few Americans are politically literate, much less hold politically coherent ideas, after we have gutted public education, turned schools into learning prisons and told young people over and over again they are consumers and not citizens. Political literacy, we learn, is no longer even a requirement for seeking political office, but is in fact seen as a drawback. And an important source of such political guidance, the left, has all but disappeared from mainstream life.

Within this context, it is amazing that any person in their twenties is able to develop anything resembling a coherent political framework for understanding the world, let alone acquire the tools to decipher between news and entertainment, to critically evaluate the fragments of information flying at them 24 hours a day from their TVs, computers and smart phones. Most do not have these tools by the time they arrive to college, and I long ago stopped expecting them to. But neither do I hold it against them, or dismiss their views simply because they are (from my perspective) muddled, incoherent and frequently go in completely opposite directions. I take them seriously both because it is my job as an educator and because I know a better future depends on equipping them with the ability to piece together a critical framework for understanding the world.

It is a bit ironic that at the same time as many commentators are urging us to listen more closely to our opponents' ideas and resist the urge to demonize them, that we are dismissing Loughner's political views without even so much as a real discussion. What he did is horrible, but the commentary has gone too quickly from "Loughner's actions were politically motivated" to "it had nothing to do with politics." We are now told that because his political views do not fall seamlessly into a neat box labeled "left" or "right" that they were irrelevant for understanding events in Arizona and, by connection, for understanding the current political situation in the United States. We should take Loughner's political views seriously. His mental state may have led him down a particularly destructive path, but his political confusion is by no means unique.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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January 11, 2011 at 09:52:37

AMERICA'S VIOLENCE CONTRADICTION

By Bruce K. Gagnon (about the author)

opednews.com

This photo is from a Junior-ROTC "field day" at a school in the south. The article along with the photo said, in part, "Maj. Hicks speaks to the eager group of Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps Cadets about what it means to be a Cavalryman and what the Cavalry does."

I remember the Cavalry. They were the ones who hunted the Native Americans down and killed them. Now they do it in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

We weep and wail and wring our hands when domestic terrorists kill innocent people, as was done this past weekend in Tucson, Arizona. But each and every day our kids all over the nation are being brainwashed about the joys of violence, the thrill of war, the glory of killing the "enemy" and few blink an eye. People somehow separate the killing done by our "hero" soldiers from the senseless random slaughter on our streets at home.

But these can't be separated. They are linked. They come from the same wellspring. They come from America's addiction to war and violence.

We glorify the gun and we glorify the shooter. But then, just now and then, the nation says (as in the case in Arizona), "No, not this time. This violence was not good." But to those brought up listening to the overwhelming public support for guns and glory the messages are just a twisted jumble of confusion. The loudest bang is the one that gets internalized by the majority of the citizenry.

It could change, but we'd have to make a serious national commitment to step away from the bar stool where we keep taking just one more drink of the hot red blood of violence. It could change, but we'd have to keep our president home instead of thrilling in his secret holiday trips to visit the troops in Iraq or Afghanistan to remind them that the nation is behind their killing of innocent civilians in endless war. It could change, but the Congress would have to cut the military budget and transfer the money into mental health programs for those who are living close to the razor's edge and are just one radio talk show host's angry rant about "big government" away from a violent rampage.

It could all change, but each of us would have to do more than shake our head in disgust and say to ourselves, "This is a crazy country." We'd have to step up and take some responsibility, do something to publicly express our deep frustration and concern, and demand that we stop putting our children at the trigger end of machine guns.

We'd have to connect the dots between "random gun violence" and our national obsession with occupation and killing people around the world who happen to sit on land that is wanted, for whatever reason, by multi-national corporations.

We could do something, if we..............................

Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.

more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

The Tucson Massacre: After the Cameras are Gone

by Roberto Rodriguez / January 11th, 2011

As a journalist/columnist of nearly 40 years, I can tell you what will happen in Tucson in a few days. Better yet, I will tell you what the media will do in the next few days; the cameras will leave.

It’s called parachute journalism.

The whole country is exposed to, or gets a glimpse of, Arizona, and then it’s off to the next rampage. Blood and gore sells, but it only has a shelf life until the next crisis.

What will the country have learned from the saturated and instantaneous coverage (much of it unverified, expectedly wrong or exaggerated)? They will have learned that there’s a lot of hate in Arizona. That the inflammatory and incendiary political rhetoric with subliminal and even blatant calls to violence from the right and left have to be toned down, that we all need to be civil and we all need to be positive.

Nice try. But that is not a description of Arizona, nor the nation. With very few exceptions, only the right wing engages in this constant talk of targeting and taking out their opponents and of 2nd Amendment solutions.

The rampage is/was the rampage. It was carried out by what appears to be a right-wing lunatic. He may have had a co-conspirator. His target appears to have been first, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and, secondarily, with his weapon of choice, anyone else who was in the vicinity. Giffords, a conservative democrat, was literally in the crosshairs of the Tea Party and the Sarah Palin wing of the conservative movement. Everyone knows that.

Yet in Arizona, most of the hate here is directed specifically at
Mexicans/immigrants. That cannot be left unsaid by all those who have discovered Arizona overnight. All the hate that Arizona is famous for emanates not simply from right wing hate radio but from the state capitol itself.

Here, Mexicans/immigrants and Indigenous peoples are fair game for the loudmouth talk show hosts and their cult followings, but also from the highest officials in state government. Here, Mexicans/immigrants are daily demonized. The viciousness and dehumanization here has become normalized.

There’s a consensus that everyone is conscious that we need to be civil, that we need to respect each others’ rights except when talking about illegal aliens. Racial profiling (read Indigenous) is a way of life here in Arizona and truthfully, when it comes to brown peoples, it has been normalized across the country. That’s what sb 1070 is about. But it’s also about hb 2281, the effort to kill ethnic studies.

There is no left wing equivalent to the Rush Limbaughs and Glen Becks of the world and there’s plenty local ones in Arizona who revel perversely every time their names are mentioned. They preach unadulterated hate because ‘illegal aliens’ are not human to them. It is not uncommon to hear people talk on the radio about killing Mexicans along the border as if they were speaking of flies or cockroaches.

The hate here is deafening. We have been sending signals for years now and the hate continues. It is relentless, whether from minutemen, hate-radio loudmouths or from state legislators.

To the parachute journalists and all those that have discovered Arizona overnight, don’t forget that. Long after you leave, long after this massacre has ceased to be headline news, we will continue to have to contend with the normalized bigotry and hate against brown peoples that continually comes out of the state capitol and that is nowadays prevalent throughout the state.

Please remember this and look at your own communities to see if all this hate is already festering there. I can almost guarantee you that it is. Bring it to light before the next massacre. Perhaps you will prevent the next massacre.

* Click here for an in-depth look into the Arizona hate.

Roberto Rodriguez, a professor at the University of Arizona, can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com. Read other articles by Roberto.

This article was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 7:00am and is filed under Corruption, Culture, Disasters, Discrimination, Human Rights, Immigration, Media, Prejudice, Racism, Tea Party movement.

Published on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 by The Independent/UK

'Before They Tighten Up the State Laws, I'm Buying More Guns'

Guy Adams finds a brisk trade at the Tucson shop that apparently supplied Jared Loughner

by Guy Adams

Trade was roaring at the gun counter of the Sportsman's Warehouse in Tucson on Sunday afternoon, where roughly 30 types of shotguns competed for shelf space with 100 pistols, 50 rifles and enough ammunition to fuel more than one decent shootout at the nearby the OK Corral.

Whatever the motivation behind the shooting, it seems likely that Arizona's gun laws will now come under fresh scrutiny. The state boasts the most relaxed gun regulations the United States, which in turn has the fewest restrictions on firearm ownership in the developed world. (AFP/Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla)

Just a day had passed since Jared Lee Loughner allegedly launched a deadly shooting spree using a gun purchased from the very same store, but patrons were undeterred. Richard Tucker and his eight-year-old daughter, Emily, spent the afternoon examining a Smith & Wesson revolver, the quintessential firearm of the old wild west. They were pondering whether to add it to the small armoury at their home in Drexel Heights, a residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Arizonan desert city.

"For hunting, I already own two rifles, a shotgun, and a crossbow, and in addition to that, I like to keep a couple of pistols around the house for personal protection," Mr Tucker said. "But this will really be more a toy: something to take out to the range and clip paper targets. When the children are a little older, it'll also be a good gun for them to learn to shoot with."

Pistols are not cheap, and Mr Tucker's potential purchase ran to almost $400 (£257), before tax. But he had decided to make the expensive investment because of the tragic shooting spree which had taken place at a Safeway store just a few miles away, shortly after 10am on Saturday.

"I've been on God's earth long enough to know that liberals never let a crisis go to waste," he said. "So the moment I heard that Congresswoman Giffords had been shot, I knew people would once again be talking about the Second Amendment, and using this one terrible event to try to tighten Arizona's gun laws. And before that happens, I'm buying more guns."

The Sportsman's Warehouse was nonetheless an eerie choice of retailer to make that purchase. After all, on 30 November, Mr Loughner, 22, is believed to have wandered up to the same counter of the same store, flashed his driver's licence and walked away with the $439.99 Glock semi-automatic pistol allegedly used to kill six people and injure 14 others on Saturday.

Whatever the motivation behind the shooting, it seems likely that Arizona's gun laws will now come under fresh scrutiny. The state boasts the most relaxed gun regulations the United States, which in turn has the fewest restrictions on firearm ownership in the developed world.

That makes for some strange inconsistencies. While laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to anyone under the age of 21 are enforced with a zeal that sees OAPs forced to show official identification to be served at Tucson's airport bar, deadly firearms can be purchased by almost any Arizonan who has reached their 18th birthday.

Would-be gun owners must first pass an FBI background check. But Mr Loughner's case suggests these are not exactly rigorous: he got the green light despite a long history of psychological problems which had seen him twice arrested by the police, expelled from college for threatening behaviour and refused entry to the Army because of previous drug offences.

Once firearms have been purchased, recent changes in Arizona law have meanwhile made it even easier for people to carry out attacks. Voters recently agreed to allow citizens over the age of 21 to carry a concealed weapon without a permit in public.

Such is the pervading atmosphere that Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, used a press conference on Sunday to declare: "We're the tombstone of the US. I have never been a proponent of letting everybody in this state carry weapons whenever they want and that's almost where we are."

The Sportsman's Warehouse, which largely sells equipment designed for field sports and does not stock some of the assault rifles and military paraphernalia common in more gung-ho outlets, instructed staff not to speak with the media about Mr Loughner's case. Its manager passed The Independent the number of the firm's head office in Utah, to which calls were not returned.

Advocates of gun reform are not being so reticent. On Sunday, a Democratic Congresswoman, Carolyn McCarthy, announced that she intended to introduce nationwide legislation that will make it harder for dangerous individuals to purchase the most deadly weapons.

Copyright 2011 Independent Print Limited

AlterNet.org

NEWS & POLITICS

Huffington Post / By Cenk Uygur

Yes, Jared Loughner's Act Was Political

The right channels the fear, anger and paranoia of people with mental problems -- and they point them toward the Democrats.

January 11, 2011 |

Photo Credit: AFP

Was Jared Loughner's act in shooting Rep. Giffords political? Apparently this is what's being debated with a straight face now. Is this a joke? He shot a politician in the head. He called it an "assassination." What part of that was unclear?

He didn't shoot Gabrielle Giffords randomly and it turned out she just happened to be a politician. He sought her out, targeted her and then tried to kill her based on the fact that she was a politician. He thought the government was the problem and it was unresponsive to his psychotic demands on grammar and currency.

So, is Loughner a psycho? Obviously. And that's not just because he shot all of those innocent people, but also because it is abundantly clear from his writings and videos that he has significant mental issues.

But why does the act have to be either psychotic or political? It's obviously both. It was a psychotic act driven by his political beliefs. What's so hard to understand about that?

Then, the next question is whether both sides are equally at fault. Again, I'm confused by this question. What the hell did the Democrats or liberals do here? Nothing, except get shot. How can the media possibly attach false equivalency to this? Are the Democrats equally culpable for getting shot as the conservatives are for shooting them?

Loughner shot a Democrat. Gee, I wonder which side he was on? He hated the government and thought they were out to get us. Gee, I wonder which side he was on?

I thought conservatives said liberals love big government. But now some have the audacity to claim Loughner was a liberal. But if one thing is obvious from Loughner's political writings, it was that he hated the government. So, which one is it -- do liberals love or hate the government?

Come on, this is all a smoke screen to make sure people don't see what's going on here. In the last two years, there have been dozens of attacks and shootings aimed at government officials and political organizations. Every single one of them was directed at liberals, Democrats or the government. Now we're to believe that's the world's largest coincidence?

The conservative hate-mongers don't create psychos. We get that there will always be disturbed individuals out there. But the right-wing directs these lunatics to a source. They channel their fear, anger and paranoia -- and they point them toward the Democrats. They use them as hate seeking missiles.

They load them up them up with violent imagery, whether it's talk of cross-hairs or second amendment remedies or the tree of liberty being refreshed with blood. Then when they get a violent reaction they pretend to be surprised and outraged that anyone would suggest they were the least bit culpable. The reality is that it is a simple formula -- violence in, violence out. Violent imagery in, violent results out.

If pretending this isn't political or that somehow it is somehow both-sided doesn't work (which they shouldn't worry about because so far it has worked perfectly in white-washing their culpability in the media), then they say it's political exploitation to point out what they have done.

How the hell are we supposed to point out the problem if we can't mention the issue for fear of being charged with political exploitation? Would it be exploiting the tragedy of the BP oil spill to point out that maybe we should be a little careful about oil drilling? Or are we not supposed to make the most obvious points so that we don't offend the other political side's delicate sensibilities?

You know who exploited a tragedy for political gain? George W. Bush and the entire Republican Party. They used 9/11 as a gimmick to get re-elected. Then they exploited it to attack a random country that had nothing to do with 9/11. It is nearly impossible to exploit a tragedy anymore than they did with 9/11. And maybe that's why they level the charge against us now, because they know that's the first thing they'd do.

But pointing out that conservative commentators and politicians have been inciting their followers isn't done to get anyone elected. I don't even know whose election this would theoretically effect. This isn't done to press some policy agenda (again, outside of gun control, I can't even think of what agenda we are supposed to theoretically be pushing for). This is to point out an obvious fact that is getting people killed -- if you incite violence, you get violence.

To pretend that isn't happening all across the country everyday on talk radio, etc. is to be willfully blind to reality -- and to allow it to happen again. And trust me, next time they'll also say no one could have seen it coming and that whatever we do we mustn't talk about it. Preventing another tragedy like this would be such terrible exploitation. Better to be quiet and let them do it again.

Cenk Uygur is co-host of The Young Turks, the first liberal radio show to air nationwide.

AlterNet.org

Right-Wing Keeps Denying the Consequences of Its Violent Rhetoric

I couldn't help but notice Arizona Representative Trent Franks all over television lugubriously bemoaning the horrible events of yesterday. He just appeared on Candy Crowley's show and said this in response to Sheriff Dupnik's comments yesterday about "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 that is getting to be outrageous."

Franks: Even in these circumstance, first of all I think our focus should be upon the tragedy that occurred here and I think it's unfortunate to inject the comments that the Sheriff did in this case because he has been heavily involved in the whole immigration issue and he found himself in this case at ends even different than Miss Giffords. And I think that he's carrying on that debate even in this tragic moment and I think it's unfortunate.

Crowley: Probably should say that you all have been personally affected by this and that sometimes you say things you might not want to. The point being that there is now going to be this conversation about "why?" And right now we are seeing "the political conversation is terrible, it is heated rhetoric, we are seeing unhinged people to do things." Do you see a link between increased sharp rhetoric, sometimes aggressive rhetoric, violent rhetoric, whatever you want to call it, in the political forum and this type of heinous activity.

Frank: Sometimes in any human dynamic there are so many factors that it becomes difficult to really analyze it. But sometimes you can see a central element, and that central element is this unhinged lunatic that had no respect for human life was willing to make some grand statement, I don't know if he even knows what grand statement he was willing to make to take the lives of his fellow human lives to do it. And there is the problem, a lack of respect for innocent human life. It's a lack of respect for the constitution, for freedom.

It's interesting that he would say that. And even more interesting that Crowley didn't think to ask him about this comment of his at last year's How To Take Back America conference:

Obama's first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers' money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries...there's almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. We shouldn't be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can't do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity

Not that there's any direct correlation, but you can't help but think of this when you read that:

Don Coorough, 58, who sat two desks in front of Mr. Loughner in a poetry class last semester, described him as a “troubled young man” and “emotionally underdeveloped.” After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a “terrorist for killing the baby.”

That kind of rhetoric is so common that we hardly even notice it anymore, even when fanatics gun down abortion doctors, as happened just a year and a half ago. But you'd think it would still be just a little bit unusual for a member of Congress. And yet it's common. Just listen to Trent Franks himself on the floor of the House:

All morning I'm hearing the media and the politicians decrying the rhetoric on "both sides" with Matt Bai leading the charge in his NY Times article in which he dredges up the bogus "Move-On Hitler" nonsense (thus proving the case that there is very little equivalence on the left.) It's maddening.

Meanwhile, last night, Erick Erickson of Redstate tweets this:

The left and media, in perpetuating the lie that the shooter was a tea party activist, may wrongly incite violence against the right.

I kid you not.

There are certainly left wing people who spew incendiary and violent rhetoric. But they are few and far between compared to the drumbeat of hatred and consequential acts of violence we've seen over the past two years and none who make the kind of profit at it that the right wing noise machine does. There is no comparison, it's ridiculous to frame it that way. And it ends up distorting the truth, which is that we have a violent right wing political movement developing in this country with the help and acquiescence of a major political party which refuses to police its own.

This is the kind of thing Democratic office holders have been facing at every public meeting since Barack Obama was elected:

They sell t-shirts that say this at tea party rallies. Google it.

Perhaps the meaning of that has finally sunk in after yesterday's horror. I'm sure it crossed the minds of the congresspeople who were targeted with those signs at Townhall meetings. And since the media are continuing to normalize these statements by suggesting that it's all part of some incoherent left/right extremist rhetoric rather than a very specific intimidation tactic by a newly powerful right wing faction, they'll undoubtedly succeed in intimidating a few. The fact that some impressionable, mentally ill kid did the dirty work doesn't change that.

Update: If they succeed in forcing Sheriff Dupnik to resign because he told the truth, we are well and truly fucked, my friends.

By Digby | Sourced from Hullabaloo

Posted at January 9, 2011, 3:01 pm

Guns and Terrorism: Two Unasked Question in Tucson Mass Murder

by Bill Quigley / January 10th, 2011

Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy an assault weapon?

The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was an assault weapon — a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol, with an extended magazine. That weapon was illegal to sell in the US from 1994 to 2004 under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. It is now legal to sell and own. The National Rifle Association reports there are tens of millions of assault weapons is private hands in the US.

The federal background check for people purchasing such weapons only prohibits selling such weapons to people who have been legally determined to be mentally defective or found insane or convicted of crimes. This man had not been found legally mentally defective or convicted so he was legally entitled to purchase an assault weapon. In Arizona he was legally entitled to carry the weapon in a concealed manner.

The US has well over 250 million guns in private hands according to the National Rifle Association. That is more, according to the BBC, than any country in the world. In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States according to the Brady Campaign.

Does the US really need tens of millions of assault weapons and hundreds of millions of other guns? We already put more of our people in prison than any country in the world, and we spend more on our military than all the rest of the world together. How fearful must we be?

Question: Why is there so little talk of terrorism?

Apparently when a mentally unstable white male is accused, terrorism is not the first thing that comes to mind.

When Clay Duke, a white male, threatened Florida school board members with a gun and shot at them before shooting himself, in December 2010, he was mentally imbalanced.

When Michael Enright, a white male, was arrested for slashing the throat of a Muslim NYC cab driver in August of 2010, his friends said he had a drinking problem

When Byron Williams, a white male, was arrested after opening fire on police officers and admitted he was on his way to kill people at offices of a liberal foundation and a civil liberties organization, in July 2010, he was an unemployed right wing felon with a drinking problem.

When Joe Stack, a white male, flew his private plane into a federal building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, he was angry with the IRS.

When a white male is accused of mass murder, terrorism is not much talked of; rather it becomes a terrible tragedy but not one where race or ethnicity or religion need be examined.

Now if the accused had been Muslim, does anyone doubt whether this would have been considered an act of terrorism? US Muslims could have expected increased surveillance and harassment at home and the places where they work and worship. They could have expected a Congressional inquiry into the radicalization of their people. Oh, Representative Peter King (R-NY) has already started that one!

Bill Quigley represented Pere Jean-Juste many times in Haiti along with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Port au Prince and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Bill is on leave from Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans serving as Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He can be reached at: quigley77@gmail.com. Read other articles by Bill, or visit Bill's website.

This article was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 7:00am and is filed under Guns, Media, Racism

Jared Loughner Seems to be a Right-Wing Extremist

AlterNet.org

Southern Poverty Law Center / By Mark Potok

Is Jared Loughner a Right-Wing Extremist?

While it's hard to say, there are some clues to Loughner's worldview in his writings.

January 9, 2011 |

Photo Credit: AFP

Is Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged mass murderer who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, a right-wing extremist?

It’s hard to say. When you look at the Internet material he purportedly produced, the first impression you get is that the 22-year-old now in custody for the shooting of 19 people in Tucson was completely out of his mind, or at least mildly deranged. His writings will be virtually impossible for most people to understand, what with his references to unexplained numbers, his fondness for weird syllogisms, his unexplained references and his apparent semi-literacy.

That said, there are some clues.

At one point, Loughner refers disparagingly to “currency that’s not backed by gold or silver.” The idea that silver and gold are the only “constitutional” money is widespread in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement that produced so much violence in the 1990s. It’s linked to the core Patriot theory that the Federal Reserve is actually a private corporation run for the benefit of unnamed international bankers. So-called Patriots say paper money — what they refer to with a sneer as “Federal Reserve notes” — is not lawful.

At another, Loughner makes extraordinarily obscure comments about language and grammar, suggesting that the government engages in “mind control on the people by controlling grammar.” That’s not the kind of idea that’s very common out there, even on the Internet. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that Loughner is taking ideas from Patriot conspiracy theorist David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee. Miller claims that the government uses grammar to “enslave” Americans and offers up his truly weird “Truth-language” as an antidote. For example, he says that if you add colons and hyphens to your name in a certain way, you are no longer taxable. Miller may be mad as a hatter, but he has a real following on the right.

Loughner talks about how you “can’t trust the government” and someone burns a U.S. flag in one of his videos. Although certain right-wing websites are already using that (and his listing of The Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books) to claim that Loughner was a “left-winger,” that does not strike me as true. The main enemy of the Patriot movement is certainly the federal government. And so-called Patriots have certainly engaged in acts like burning the flag.

Finally, I think Loughner’s reading list, although it included children’s books and a few classics, had an underlying theme — the individual versus the totalitarian state. Certainly, that’s the explicit central theme of Ayn Rand’s We the Living and Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, among others. I would argue that that’s the way Loughlin seems to be reading The Communist Manifesto and Hitler’s Mein Kampf — as variants of a kind of generalized “smash the state” attitude.

Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, which does similar work to that of Hatewatch, points out in a post earlier today that Loughner also makes a reference to a “second American constitution.” As Chip notes, that is commonly understood to refer to the Reconstruction amendments that freed the slaves and gave them citizenship, among other things. Chip says that “raises the question of a possible racist and anti-immigrant tie” in the Arizona shooting.

On top of that, Fox News is reporting on an internal Department of Homeland Security message suggesting some tie between Loughner and American Renaissance, a kind of white-collar racist group.

I can’t speak to those allegations. Outside of what Chip pointed out, I didn’t see anything that suggested racial, anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant animus in Loughner’s writings. Certainly, there’s nothing I saw at all reminiscent of American Renaissance, which focuses heavily on the alleged intellectual and psychological inferiority of black people.

At this early stage, I think Loughner is probably best described as a mentally ill or unstable person who was influenced by the rhetoric and demonizing propaganda around him. Ideology may not explain why he allegedly killed, but it could help explain how he selected his target.

One thing that seems clear is that Giffords, who was terribly wounded but survived, was the nearest and most obvious representative of “the government” that Loughner could find. Another is that he likely absorbed some of his anger from the vitriolic political atmosphere in the United States in general and Arizona in particular. Perhaps no one made that point better than Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, speaking to a press conference yesterday. “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 and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Mark Potok is the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report.

Our Children are Trained to Kill

"Trained to Kill"

Virus of Violence

To understand the reasons behind Jonesboro, Springfield, Pearl, Paducah, and all the other outbreaks of this "virus of violence," we need to understand first the magnitude of the problem. The per capita murder rate doubled in this country between 1957--when the FBI started keeping track of the data--and 1992. A fuller picture of the problem, however, is indicated by the rate people are attempting to kill one another--the aggravated assault rate. That rate in America has gone from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957 to over 440 per 100,000 by the middle of this decade. As bad as this is, it would be much worse were it not for two major factors.

First is the increase in the imprisonment rate of violent offenders. The prison population in America nearly quadrupled between 1975 and 1992. According to criminologist John J. DiIulio, "dozens of credible empirical analyses . . . leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious crimes." If it were not for our tremendous imprisonment rate (the highest of any industrialized nation), the aggravated assault rate and the murder rate would undoubtedly be even higher.

Children don't naturally kill; they learn it from violence in the home and most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, movies, and interactive video games.

The second factor keeping the murder rate from being any worse is medical technology. According to the US Army Medical Service Corps, a wound that would have killed nine out of ten soldiers in World War II, nine out of ten could have survived in Vietnam. Thus, by a very conservative estimate, if we had 1940-level medical technology today, the murder rate would be ten times higher than it is. The magnitude of the problem has been held down by the development of sophisticated lifesaving skills and techniques, such as helicopter medivacs, 911 operators, paramedics, CPR, trauma centers, and medicines.

However, the crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is true worldwide. In Canada, according to their Center for Justice, per capita assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993, attempted murder increased nearly sevenfold, and murders doubled. Similar trends can be seen in other countries in the per capita violent crime rates reported to Interpol between 1977 and 1993. In Australia and New Zealand, the assault rate increased approximately fourfold, and the murder rate nearly doubled in both nations. The assault rate tripled in Sweden and approximately doubled in Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales, France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland, while all these nations had an associated (but smaller) increase in murder.

This virus of violence is occurring worldwide. The explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. There are many factors involved, and none should be discounted: for example, the prevalence of guns in our society. But violence is rising in many nations with draconian gun laws. And though we should never downplay child abuse, poverty, or racism, there is only one new variable present in each of these countries, bearing the exact same fruit: media violence presented as entertainment for children.

Violence in American Society

Probe Ministries

Violence in Society

Kerby Anderson

Children especially confront an increasingly violent world with few limits. As concerned parents and citizens we must do what we can to reduce the level of violence in our society through the wise use of discernment and public policy. We need to set limits both in our homes and in the community.

Does Media Violence Really Influence Human Behavior?

Children's greatest exposure to violence comes from television. TV shows, movies edited for television, and video games expose young children to a level of violence unimaginable just a few years ago. The average child watches 8,000 televised murders and 100,000 acts of violence before finishing elementary school. That number more than doubles by the time he or she reaches age 18.

The violent content of TV includes more than just the 22 minute programs sent down by the networks. At a very young age, children are seeing a level of violence and mayhem that in the past may have only been witnessed by a few police officers and military personnel. TV brings hitting, kicking, stabbings, shootings, and dismemberment right into homes on a daily basis.

The impact on behavior is predictable. Two prominent Surgeon General reports in the last two decades link violence on television and aggressive behavior in children and teenagers. In addition, the National Institute of Mental Health issued a 94-page report entitled, "Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties." They found "overwhelming" scientific evidence that "excessive" violence on television spills over into the playground and the streets. In one five-year study of 732 children, "several kinds of aggression-- conflicts with parents, fighting and delinquency--were all positively correlated with the total amount of television viewing."

Long-term studies are even more disturbing. University of Illinois psychologist Leonard Eron studied children at age eight and then again at eighteen. He found that television habits established at the age of eight influenced aggressive behavior through childhood and adolescent years. The more violent the programs preferred by boys in the third grade, the more aggressive their behavior, both at that time and ten years later. He therefore concluded that "the effect of television violence on aggression is cumulative."

Twenty years later Eron and Rowell Huesmann found the pattern continued. He and his researchers found that children who watched significant amounts of TV violence at the age of 8 were consistently more likely to commit violent crimes or engage in child or spouse abuse at 30.

They concluded "that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime and violence in society. Television violence affects youngsters of all ages, of both genders, at all socioeconomic levels and all levels of intelligence."

Since their report in the 1980s, MTV has come on the scene with even more troubling images. Adolescents already listen to an estimated 10,500 hours of rock music between the 7th and 12th grades. Now they also spend countless hours in front of MTV seeing the visual images of rock songs that depict violence, rebellion, sadomasochism, the occult, drug abuse, and promiscuity. MTV reaches 57 million cable households, and its video images are even more lurid than the ones shown on regular TV. Music videos filled with sex, rape, murder, and other images of mayhem assault the senses. And MTV cartoons like Beavis and "the other guy" assault the sensibilities while enticing young people to start fires and commit other acts of violence. Critics count 18 acts of violence in each hour of MTV videos.

Violent images on television and in the movies do contribute to greater violence in society. Sociological studies along with common sense dictate that we do something to reduce the violence in the media before it further damages society.

Television Promotes Not Only Violence But Fear As Well.

Children see thousands of TV murders every year. And the impact on behavior is predictable. Various reports by the Surgeon General in the last two decades link violence on television and aggressive behavior in children and teenagers. In addition, the National Institute of Mental Health issued a 94-page report entitled, "Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties." They found "overwhelming" scientific evidence that "excessive" violence on television spills over into the playground and the streets. In one five-year study of 732 children, "several kinds of aggression (such as conflicts with parents, fighting and delinquency) were all positively correlated with the total amount of television viewing."

Confronted with such statistics, many parents respond that their children aren't allowed to watch violent programs. Such action is commendable, but some of the greatest dangers of television are more subtle and insidious. It now appears that simply watching television for long periods can manipulate your view of the world-- whether the content is particularly violent or not.

George Gerbner and Larry Gross working at the Annenberg School of Communications in the 1970s found that heavy TV viewers live in a scary world. "We have found that people who watch a lot of TV see the real world as more dangerous and frightening than those who watch very little. Heavy viewers are less trustful of their fellow citizens, and more fearful of the real world."

So heavy viewers were less trustful and more fearful than the average citizen. But what constitutes a heavy viewer. Gerber and Gross defined heavy viewers as those adults who watch an average of four or more hours of television a day. Approximately one-third of all American adults fit that category.

They found that violence on prime-time TV exaggerated heavy viewers' fears about the threat of danger in the real world. Heavy viewers, for example, were less likely to trust someone than light viewers. Heavy viewers also tended to overestimate their likelihood of being involved in a violent crime.

And if this is true of adults, imagine how much TV violence affects children's perception of the world. Gerbner and Gross say, "Imagine spending six hours a day at the local movie house when you were 12 years old. No parent would have permitted it. Yet, in our sample of children, nearly half the 12-year-olds watch an average of six or more hours of television per day." This would mean that a large portion of young people fit into the category of heavy viewers. Their view of the world must be profoundly shaped by TV. Gerbner and Gross therefore conclude: "If adults can be so accepting of the reality of television, imagine its effect on children. By the time the average American child reaches public school, he has already spent several years in an electronic nursery school."

Television violence affects both adults and children in subtle ways. While we may not personally feel or observe the effects of TV violence, we should not ignore the growing body of data that suggests that televised imagery does affect our perception and behavior.

Obviously something must be done. Parents, programmers, and general citizens must take responsible actions to prevent the increasing violence in our society. Violent homes, violence on television, violence in the movies, violence in the schools all contribute to the increasingly violent society we live in. We have a responsibility to make a difference and apply the appropriate principles in order to help stem the tide of violence in our society.

Some Suggestions for Dealing with Violence in the Media

Christians must address this issue of violence in our society. Here are a number of specific suggestions for dealing with violence.

1. Learn about the impact of violence in our society. Share this material with your pastor, elders, deacons, and church members. Help them understand how important this issue is to them and their community.

2. Create a safe environment. Families live in the midst of violence. We must make our homes safe for our families. A child should feel that his or her world is safe. Providing care and protection are obvious first steps. But parents must also establish limits, provide emotional security, and teach values and virtue in the home.

3. Parents should limit the amount of media exposure in their homes. The average young person sees entirely too much violence on TV and at the movies. Set limits to what a child watches, and evaluate both the quantity and quality of their media input (Rom. 12:2). Focus on what is pure, beautiful, true, right, honorable, excellent, and praiseworthy (Phil. 4:8).

4. Watch TV with children. Obviously we should limit the amount of TV our children watch. But when they watch television, we should try to watch it with them. We can encourage discussion with children during the programs. The plots and actions of the programs provides a natural context for discussion and teach important principles about relationships and violence. The discussion could focus on how cartoon characters or TV actors could solve their problems without resorting to violence. TV often ignores the consequences of violence. What are the consequences in real life?

5. Develop children's faith and trust in God. Children at an early age instinctively trust their parents. As the children grow, parents should work to develop their child's trust in God. God is sovereign and omnipotent. Children should learn to trust Him in their lives and depend upon Him to watch over them and keep them safe.

6. Discuss the reasons for pain and suffering in the world. We live in the fallen world (Gen. 3), and even those who follow God will encounter pain, suffering, and violence. Bad things do happen to good people.

7. Teach vigilance without hysteria. By talking about the dangers in society, some parents have instilled fear--even terror-- in their children. We need to balance our discussions with them and not make them hysterical. Kids have been known to become hysterical if a car comes down their street or if someone looks at them.

8. Work to establish broadcaster guidelines. No TV or movie producer wants to unilaterally disarm all the actors on their screens out of fear that viewers will watch other programs and movies. Yet many of these same TV and movie producers would like to tone down the violence, but they don't want to be the first to do so. National standards would be able to achieve what individuals would not do by themselves in a competitive market.

Violence is the scourge of our society, but we can make a difference. We must educate ourselves about its influence and impact on our lives. Please feel free to write or call Probe Ministries for more information on this topic. And then take time to apply the principles developed here to make a difference in your home and community. You can help stem the tide of violence in our society.

© 1995 Probe Ministries

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About the Author

Kerby Anderson is the president of Probe Ministries International. He received his B.S. from Oregon State University, M.F.S. from Yale University, and M.A. from Georgetown University. He is the author of several books, including Genetic Engineering, Origin Science, Living Ethically in the 90s, Signs of Warning, Signs of Hope, and Moral Dilemmas. He also served as general editor for Marriage, Family and Sexuality.

He is a nationally syndicated columnist whose editorials have appeared in the Dallas Morning News, the Miami Herald, the San Jose Mercury, and the Houston Post.

He is the host of "Probe," and frequently serves as guest host on "Point of View" (USA Radio Network). He can be reached via e-mail at kerby@probe.org.

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What is Probe?

Probe Ministries is a non-profit ministry whose mission is to assist the church in renewing the minds of believers with a Christian worldview and to equip the church to engage the world for Christ. Probe fulfills this mission through our Mind Games conferences for youth and adults, our 3-minute daily radio program, and our extensive Web site at Probe.org

Further information about Probe's materials and ministry may be obtained by writing to:

Probe Ministries
2001 W. Plano Parkway, Suite 2000
Plano, TX 75075
(972) 941-4565
info@probe.org
www.probe.org

Copyright (C) 1996-2011 Probe Ministries