23 November 2022 (Washington, DC) - It seems I just cannot keep up with the gun massacres here in America.
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I usually begin writing my daily "thoughts over morning coffee" the night before, choosing 2-3 stories from my tsunami (see explanation of the tsunami at the end of this post) and writing a short lead paragraph on each, then waiting until the morning to see if anything else of interest has popped onto the grid.
I awoke to news of the massacre in Virginia. I flipped on my hotel TV and heard a reporter say "the Virginia shooting reminds me of the 'going postal' killings of the Reagan era, when people who had been screwed over by their employers brought a gun to work and shot up the place". My God, I did not know that mass shootings in America actually had historical periods.
But I get his point. That made a certain sort of easy sense. These type of events distill a whole world into a single point.
I'm not going to repeat my long monograph on gun massacres in the U.S., written last year for the law enforcement roundtable on the future of firearm technology. But I want to pull out one short bit from that conference, and expand on my comments about the LGBTQ nightclub killings.
One of the presenters at the gun technology event was a psychoanalyst and she has spent several years interviewing and treating survivors of U.S. shootings at schools, workplaces, religious institutions, etc. And that has included analyzing their dreams. Enough has been written about how technology + those little screens we blankly stare into are rewiring our minds. But not enough has been written about how gun shootings are also rewiring our minds.
The world by itself does not make sense, and this is why we dream. Waking life is just a succession of events - five dead, three dead, twelve dead, twenty dead - loosely held together by the vague frenzy of conscious thought. But in dreams, she found that the experiences of the last day are more integrated into the anxieties that have ruled your entire life, sewn tight into the fabric of your neurotic little mind. Dreams draw together things that seem to have the same shape, or that echo each other in a way the daytime mind can’t quite explain. A perfect knowledge of the facts is not enough; it needs to be turned into a parable, a little story. And so your mind creates the story "this is just normal life". At least for survivors.
There have been 877 recorded mass shootings in the U.S. this year, 127 since May. I shall not list all of them but let's just look at the "major" ones.
On the 24th of May, someone walked into a school in Uvalde, Texas and murdered nineteen children, along with two teachers, while the police stood around outside and did nothing. Ten days previously, someone had walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and murdered a security guard and nine customers, most of them elderly. Six weeks later, on the Fourth of July, thirteen people were shot in New York, six people were shot in Kansas City, six people were shot in Richmond, five people were shot in Sacramento, two people were shot in Philadelphia and in Highland Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, someone climbed to the roof of a building during an Independence Day parade and opened fire. He shot and wounded 48 people. Seven died.
And now we are entering the Thanksgiving weekend which over the last three years has seen 438 killed (2018), 566 killed (2019), 205 killed (2020; COVID saved people), and 622 killed (2021). This data is a composite from the FBI and The Washington Post U.S. gun shootings database. And not all shootings are reported.
As I noted in the earlier version of this post, I am more focused on the Colorado shooting where guns and hatred collided once more in America. Some of the following has been tweaked a bit from my original post, but the Postscript is new.
Those who feed the hate, stoke the vitriol, and profit off of its divisions hide behind meaningless expressions of thoughts and prayers. For them, there is no pause for reflection, no sense that we can do better. Anger, waves of anger, sweep over a deep trench of hopelessness.
We have mourned before, and we surely will again. A cycle repeats. The words we uttered for the last tragedy will be reprised for this one, and likely the one to come. In what sane world do we accept a national impotence in the face of unending bloodshed?
And if Americans were brutally honest about their history, they'd know that hatred and violence have been a constant in its national story, its history seeped in it. Even in colonial times leaders of the resistance to British measures and leaders for the continuance of British rule did not rely only on abstract arguments about taxation and representation but also relied on extra-legal committees and violent mobs; opponents were tarred and feathered. They each terrorized their critics. And well into the 20th century, Southern blacks who wanted to exercise the right to vote faced violent retribution from the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups.
Let’s get over it: racism, violence, scurrilous attacks on opponents, etc. were part of American political culture from the outset. But so too have been valiant attempts to rise above it, to make progress toward a more just and equitable nation, to really strive for that “more perfect union.”
Those days are over. As a coherent, socially viable "civilization" America is finished 💀. The "entrepreneurs of outrage", the "barons of bigotry" have created gale-force winds against black, immigrants, women, LGBTQs, etc., etc. As just one example, someone pointed out to me that Fox News’ ultra-conservative host Tucker Carlson said after the mass shooting at the LGBTQ club in Colorado “violence and cruelty should always horrify us every single time" - words that ring hollow given his years of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric routinely peddled to the millions of viewers of his prime-time show. One such show was just 3 nights before the actual shooting when he said viewers must "fight back" against the LGBTQ community and its allies "however you can, no matter what the law says".
Because now Americans are distinguished not by the fact of being American but by the ancillary characteristics that reduce them to a commodity: gun-carrying American, female American, white American, gay American, transgender American, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, swing-state American, Christian American, alienated American. Said Lewis Lapham in his book "Age of Folly", a definitive text on how we got here, noting the approach of the "barons of bigotry":
“The subordination of the noun to the adjective makes a mockery of the democratic premise. It promotes bitter separation, not the binding together of a public good.”
The attack in Colorado didn't come out of nowhere. Those “enduring” American voices of reason, compassion, tolerance, liberty, free enterprise, courage, strength and hope are now proven what they were all the time, just gloss … drowned out by the voices of hate.
On the world stage, a different American story. Its success has rested somewhat on the blunt fact of power: the country’s unrivaled economic, technological, and military capacities. The United States will remain at the center of the world system for awhile, in part because of these material capabilities and its role as a pivot in the global balance of power.
But the appeal of its ideas, institutions, and capacities for “building just societies” is kaput. Nobody really cares about that part of America, anyway.
The U.S. will remain an indispensable economic and technological force in the years ahead. No other state has enjoyed such a comprehensive set of advantages. This has always been, and will remain, the secret of its power and influence. In that regard the prophets of American decline are wrong.
But that is all due to the idiosyncratic nature of the development of that power: America has benefited from its geography (no threatening power on its north or its south, bordered by fish east and west) and its unique trajectory of political development. It (literally) stands oceans apart from the other great powers and any threat from those powers, and its advantages accrue influence by playing a unique role as a global power balancer. A too-simplified explanation, perhaps, of a very complex dynamic, but the thrust is true.
While back home cultivated terror is the poison that infects its society. Once unleashed, it is impossible to control. It easily explodes in violence, as it did in Colorado Springs.
There will be yet another set of criminal charges to mark, another court case to cover, another verdict to await. But we can already pass a verdict on a society that allows this to continue.
POSTSCRIPT
