The Arizona shootings on Saturday brought to me a distressing clarity.
When I was in elementary school, it was a common recess practice for kids to provoke an excitable and vulnerable child into doing something stupid, something nobody else dared to do. It seems evident at this point that Jared Loughner was insane, but it also seems impossible to avoid the straight line of reasoning that suggests his madness was amplified and focused by the politics of his culture.
There is culpability here.
Democracy serves the majority, and for a couple of centuries the majority in America was comprised of white Christians. The interests of this tribe were well represented and served, and now that they’re fading into a demographic minority, they claim the democratic system is broken and the government must be overthrown.
It’s not much more complicated than that.
The most boisterous amongst this tribe– like The Tea Party– call for a return to a mythic American past. Rejecting secularism as a perversion of God’s natural laws, they “metaphorically” call their constituents to arms, taking up a Holy War in the name of returning to a past they never knew but imagine glinting in the eyes of the founding fathers.
It’s nakedly theocratic, and it has more in common with Islamist terrorists than it doesn’t. In the parlance, if you replace the word “martyr” with “patriot,” or “hero,” then you have a pretty good idea what’s taking place.
With an utter certainty that the next life is better than this one– with everybody living in a 6,000 square foot home with a trophy wife and a full head of hair– the Christian right is apocalyptic in both nature and intent. They are not afraid of dying for they will be called to paradise.
The terror that America must confront is not external– abstracted on foreign shores and in alien tongues– but internal. It’s from the people who would manipulate the angry and vulnerable to serve their own means, and in my opinion, this is what happened, however indirectly, to Jared Loughner.
One of the devastating ironies in all of this is that one of the people killed on Saturday was a nine year-old girl who was born on September 11, 2001. Christina Taylor-Green was featured in book called Faces of Hope, Babies Born on 9/11. The collection of photographs and inspirational gloss, appears to be a sentimental and patriotic attempt to see some light in a dark time, and on the entry for Christina’s baby picture (already a symbol for something she did not choose), these words are written:
“I hope you know all the words to the Star Spangled Banner and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles.”
The little girl was a member of student council at school, was present at the Gifford event because she wanted to learn more about politics, and was the granddaughter of Dallas Green, whom I remember as the truculent manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. She could hardly have been more “American” or more representative of an inspiring future– perhaps even one the political agitators and revolutionaries would have wanted– but now her potential is gone, collateral damage to a desperate, even delusional battle that didn’t strike America on 9/11, but rose from it.