In any sane, self-respecting nation truly concerned about
reducing violence, this procession of violence at every level, within every
class, across every inch of our nation's history, and across every societal stratum,
would be seen at least as a small clue that maybe there is something wrong with
the society itself? Maybe with its established norms? With its rules? With its
own collective denial about the role of violence within the culture? Perhaps
even with the very basis of its humanity?
But no, perish the thought! For in the twisted logic of what has become the "established American norm," it is always a case of "never mind the reality out there" in our everyday cultural interactions: That reality is not what it looks like, but it is "whatever we define it as, or whatever lens we choose to look at it with, or the angle we choose to turn it, or what we choose to call it.
As George W. Bush Jr., once in a fit of unguarded honesty said: We are an empire, we get to make up our own reality: reality is whatever we choose it to be.
No matter what Junior says, one thing we know from our blood-soaked history, Sandy Hook did not "come from out of the blue." We are no longer virgins, that list above is who we are. It is American reality staring back at us from behind the flag-draped mirror on the wall.
But twisted defensive logic, like the lies about why we have 310 million guns, is our own private collective lie too. For the truth is that we stand alone as the country that has been in more wars than any nation in the history of the world; that the murders we commit against each other every year since WW-II (and average of more than 25,000 per year) is by a "factor of ten" more than all of the European countries (with Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Australia thrown in) combined; that we are one of the most ego-sensitive yet hate-filled nations in the world; and that random, wanton and rampant gun violence such as occurred at Sandy Hook, Connecticut is just the "new normal" for us. [We'll get over it and go back a new normal in a few days, right?]
Each year, the threshold of American violence just getting lower as we become deader and deader to the violence committed in our collective names. We become numb in reverse order to our race-based hierarchy. Only when white kids are killed in large numbers do our hackles rise above the noise level, or causes our President (mulatto or otherwise) to shed a solitary tear down his left cheek.
That is why the guns in Tarrantino's movies keep getting louder: He is trying to get our attention: to awaken us from the deep sleep of our own inner fantasies about ourselves and about how good we are (minus a few nutcases, of course, that is). He does this even as he makes tons of money off of our collective fetish. Tarrantino's overarching message is that ours is a "profoundly sick culture." Period! (No, not period, exclamation mark !)
Already, our second term "faux progressive" mulatto President (who managed to shed one tear) has "outsourced" the investigation of Sandy Hook to his Vice President to "study the problem," and we know what happens when Barack Obama outsources a problem to Joe Biden, or a Presidential Commission is formed to "study a problem?" (You've got it, absolutely nothing!)
Anyone who really wants to know why the "Sandy Hooks" keep occurring in the U.S. should read David Courtwright's book "Violent Lands." In Courtwright's book we get a very different and I think a more honest angle on U.S. history -- from the frontier up through the urban violence that we have long since become completely numb to.
Courtwright's theory is a compelling one. It is that the genesis of American violence has nothing at all to do with video games and Hip-hop music, or violence in movies since these are just symptoms of a deeper much more primitive and pervasive cultural problem. That problem, according to Courtwright has to do with the consequences of the lop-sided male-to-female demographics of the European Settlers and the effect those demographics have had long-term on our cultural development and evolution.
The fact that both North and South American frontiers were populated ten to one in favor of large numbers of armed young mostly dumb but adventuresome and sexually aggressive colonial white men, with excessive amounts of testosterone, and a survival need to dominate, to Courtwright's mind, proved to be the seminal constellation of factors in America's social development that explains everything anyone ever needs to know about American frontier life. In short violence is in America's DNA. Even if there were no guns, due to Americans violent DNA, we would still be trying to find ways to kill each other.
It was this tableau that led inexorably to the U.S. becoming a violent white male dominated colonial culture. Once removed, it is still that today. Add to this Frontier tableau of a drastic shortage of women, especially white women and the fact that a handful of wealthy white men had imported four times as many physically robust and sexually potent black slaves as there were white men on the continent, and 100 times the number needed for white men to control them, and it does not take Rocket Science to understand where the fears that require constant gun vigilance in the U.S. comes from.
When race, sex, and religion intersected on the frontier, the white man had a serious "penis management problem." Gun vigilance and gun violence are well known for their ability to solve many penis management problems, a "draw," and a duel are but good examples. This is especially true when the penis management problem resides primarily inside the heads of sexually-repressed men, especially white men with a "small penis complex" and fragile egos to match. If you don't believe it ask some of those white women we are still unable to find every other week in the USA? Or those kids whose pictures we see weekly on the milk cartons?
But these are matters best left out of the news cycle. They are to forever be left unsaid. They will be ignored, and Joe Biden's study of Sandy Hook will be orchestrated by a compromise with the NRA --which is to say no compromise at all. And Mr. Obama will announce, with great fanfare, solemnity and another gauzy limp-wristed speech, that the size of the clips in those automatic weapons "so sorely needed for our sacred white hunters," will be changed from 100 bullets per clip to 50 per clip. Obama will declare it a historical victory for us Progressives, and the Sandy Hook wheel will just keep on turning, rolling on America's river of violence.
Where is Michael Moore when we need him?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
