January 11, 2011
THE ONE THING THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT CAN AGREE ON...:
American Nihilism (Lee Siegel, January 11, 2011, NY Observer)
After a fleeting online eternity of each side giving gainful employment to the other, a sort of synthesis of opposites was reached by some liberal and some conservative pundits. It wasn't right-wing hatred, or left-wing hatred, or the general lack of civility in American politics that had caused Loughner to unleash his slaughter in Tucson.No, it was the "shadowy" world of "crazy" inhabited by American's assassins, a hermetically sealed Da Vinci Code realm sealed against all outer influences and driven by an internal logic all its own. Strangely, this vision of a select group of assassins guided by esoteric notions of conspiracy and injustice was strikingly similar to American assassins' own self-image as special aristocratic persons. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman, Jared Lee Loughner-the three names reflect a fantasy of specialness that perhaps corresponds to the fantasy of absolute power these figures experience in murdering a special person.
The discourse following the Tucson shootings was all the more mind-numbing because no one wanted to talk about the elephant in the room. The uncomfortable fact is that we share the same culture as Loughner. We swim in it; we bask in it. Loughner's YouTube ravings are like a perverted reflection of ideas and sentiments that are our daily bread.
...is that the political climate is not their fault.
