I consider Glenn Beck to be dangerous, untruthful, and hugely irritating. So even though I don't like to see his name get used more often than it already does, I was pleased to see that "Becking" has become a new word.
As in, the Becking of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
From a moral viewpoint Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is the victim of demagogues such as Glenn Beck and his allies at Fox News and in the Tea Party Movement. This is not about legal liability but about moral culpability. This is about a nation that has lost its moral compass.
...Now the shootings have created a new word floating across cyberspace: “becking.” To be “becked” is to be held up as such an evil and destructive person that someone, somewhere, will interpret it as a call to eliminate that problem through violence.
Now, it seems obvious that both mentally ill and mentally healthy people are affected by public discourse and messaging. If this wasn't true, advertising wouldn't work. Or political ads. Or inspiring speeches.
Surprisingly, though, quite a few people have been arguing that Jared Loughner (who shot Congresswoman Giffords and killed six others) wasn't influenced by anything in our nation's increasingly divisive, vitriolic, and hate-filled political culture.
This makes no sense. Which is why "Becking" is a word that does make sense. Let us count some of the reasons why.
(1) A CBS poll found that 28% of Republicans feel it is justified to take violent action against the government (only 11% of Democrats and Independents felt the same way). And the poll was taken after the Giffords shooting. When over a quarter of a major political party says violence against the government is justified, won't this attitude affect people like Loughner who are inclined toward picking up a gun and shooting a government official?
(2) Jon Stewart had a terrific The Daily Show commentary on the shooting last Monday. Here's part of what he said:
I do think it’s important for us to watch our rhetoric. I do think it’s a worthwhile goal not to conflate our political opponents with enemies. If for no other reason, than to draw a better distinction between the manifestos of paranoid mad men and what passes for acceptable political and pundit speech.
It would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn’t in any way resemble how we actually talk to each other on TV.
Let’s make troubled individuals easier to spot.
Absolutely.
The non-sensical ramblings of Glenn Beck aren't much different from the non-sensical ramblings Jared Loughner left on the Internet. For example, they both are big on gold and mistrust the government, big time.
(3) Crazy violent stuff has gone on in Gifford's district for a long time.
The rampage on Saturday that left six dead and Ms. Giffords gravely wounded may prove to be an isolated act of violence by a mentally disturbed man. The suspect attended at least one of Ms. Giffords’s town meetings before the event Saturday.
Still, the shootings came after a disconcerting run of episodes in this district of mountains and desert, raising temperatures here in a way that some of Ms. Giffords’s friends argue fed an atmosphere that might encourage violence.
(4) Tea Party supporters need to own the rhetoric of their movement, which has been filled with angry threats. So says Nick Christensen, who wrote a great piece for Blue Oregon:
"If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” – Sharon Angle
For a good deal of America, the Second Amendment represents freedom – freedom to protect yourself, freedom to hunt. For many, it also represents freedom to protect your family from the government, if and when such a time comes that it's necessary to take up revolution.
Make no mistake – the message has been clear. From Glenn Beck's "If you must shoot, shoot to kill," to Sarah Palin's "Don't retreat, reload," there's been an thinly-veiled pushing of a right-wing agenda for revolution, a coddling of the notion that everyone has their limits, an embracing of the idea that sometimes, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.
So here's where I get confused. The war drums have been pounding for almost two years, with the implication that sometimes, armed revolution is justified. Then someone goes and follows through, someone gets just enough crazy in them to start shooting at a congresswoman and a federal judge and a little girl, and somehow they've crossed the line?
The Tea Party is having it both ways! You can't in one breath say there's a time and a place for warfare, and in another breath disown it every time it happens. Take it one way or the other, Tea Party.
(5) Arizona has become #1 in the nation for political vitriol and bile. How likely is it that Jared Loughner was unaffected by all this crap?
When news bulletins first flashed on Saturday that a congresswoman had been shot at a public event, it didn't take too much imagination to correctly surmise that it was Arizona, and that the victim was Gabrielle Giffords. Nor were you shocked, as some clearly were, when Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik declared his home state to have become "a mecca for prejudice and bigotry." The grim, blood-soaked crossover from death threats and broken windows to actual murder and mayhem seemed inevitable.
(6) Jared Loughner's political views were closer to far right than leftist, says a LA Times story.
The ramblings of accused Arizona killer Jared Lee Loughner are difficult to tie to a coherent political philosophy, yet in them can be discerned a number of themes drawn from the right-wing patriot and militia movements, experts said.
...Most wind up concluding that Loughner suffered from mental problems. But experts said that several oft-repeated phrases and concepts — his fixation on grammar conspiracies, currency and the "second United States Constitution" — seem derived from concepts explored with regularity among elements of the far right.
...Berlet wrote an article this week noting that similarly disjointed talk of government currency and money manipulation plots was found in the case of antiabortionist John C. Salvi III, convicted in the 1994 clinic shootings in Massachusetts that left two women dead and several people injured.
Potok said it appeared that Loughner's frequent references to government control of the public through grammar ("The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," Loughner said in one video) were drawn from David Wynn Miller, a far-right activist in Milwaukee.
(7) Mental illness experts say that we should be asking whether the political climate in Arizona and the nation helped trigger the shooting. Greg Sargent wrote:
A leading expert in mental illness tells me that asking whether the Arizona shooter's violent behavior might have been partly triggered by the nation's political climate is a wholly appropriate line of inquiry -- even if the shooter is found to be insane.
"It's a reasonable question to ask," Dr. Marvin Swartz, a psychiatry professor at Duke University who specializes in how environment impacts the behavior of the mentally ill, said in an interview this morning. "The nature of someone's delusions is affected by culture. It's a reasonable line of inquiry to ask, `How does a political culture affect the content of people's delusions?'"
..."We know the manifestation of mental illness is affected by cultural factors," Dr. Swartz said. "One's cultural context does effect [sic] people's thinking and particularly their delusions. It gives some content and shape to their delusions. While we don't know whether there was a specific relationship between the political climate that he was exposed to and his thinking, it's a reasonable line of inquiry to explore."
...In other words, even if the shooter is a complete nut, we should be asking whether the tone of our political discourse might also have played a role in triggering the shooting -- and if so, whether such a thing could happen again.
I appreciated your analogy to advertising. If the repetition of messages on the public airwaves didn't change the probability of behavior, a multi billion dollar industry would disappear.
Posted by: Valerie Tarico | January 13, 2011 at 05:12 PM
Came across this blog. I disagree with the premise here. I think one could just as easily say "Tea Partiers are ready for civil discourse, are Progressives?"
However, we need STRONG debate. If we are all namby pamby, nothing will get done, or the wrong thing.
The conventional wisdom of the media establishment that strident and outspoken political debate catalyzes violence is an absurdity! Telling people to “kill pigs” as the sixties radicals did, in fact, encouraged violence. But vigorous political debate and strongly or even passionately held views have nothing whatever to do with the decision of some nut to kill a Congressman or a president.
Fantasies about Jodie Foster, instructions from Son of Sam, or delusions of omnipotence all can cause violence, but heated political debate doesn’t. To stigmatize strongly articulated opinions on the left or the right and blame them for the insane attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is outrageous.
Oklahoma City was an act of political terror, incited by resentment against federal tactics at Waco. It was not some speech that ignited Timothy McVeigh but a massive act of violence.
Ft. Hood was an act of political terror. No speech incited the attacks, but a culture of violence spawned throughout the Islamic world. The same is true of the shoe bomber, the Detroit airplane bomber, the Times Square bomber and, indeed, the terrorists of 9-11.
Neither the left nor the right should confuse political terrorism with the random insanity of a crazed gunman. The attack on Giffords had as little to do with ideology as the attack on the students of Virginia Tech or Columbine High School.
Daniel Greenfield makes a key point:
There has not been a single act of Muslim violence in the last two years that the media was willing to identify as motivated by Islam. Each and every time they had to be dragged kicking and screaming, past their cover stories, through groundless claims that the attackers were motivated by psychological problems, bullying, imaginary medical conditions or financial problems– to some adjunct of the truth. And at the same time over the last two years, each prominent act of violence by non-Muslims was followed by an attempt to identify the attacker or attackers with mainstream Republicans in a cynical attempt to demonize and criminalize the political opposition.
But what if the killer had been a political conservative? What if he had attended Tea Party rallies or – for that matter – been active in Moveon.org or a left-leaning union? Would the killings have made the movement fair game? Would it be right to cast aspersions on tens of millions of nonviolent citizens exercising their democratic rights in the name of discouraging violence?
Posted by: Mike Dunn | January 13, 2011 at 05:22 PM