Our Angst

“Oh, How Unrevealing Our Angst Is”

Peter Schultz

February 4, 2011

In the latest edition of the Provoc, what passes for a newspaper at Assumption College, Mr. Jeff Starr has written an impassioned piece criticizing “liberals”, unnamed, for criticizing Sarah Palin and other conservatives claiming that their, that is, the conservatives’, rhetoric is to blame for the shooting in Tucson of recent vintage. “If one wants to blame an entire political movement or political rhetoric for an action of one man with the ultimate goal of silencing people, one is an enemy of the First Amendment, and the same goes for throwing the Second Amendment away.” So writes Mr. Starr.

Apparently, Mr. Starr thinks that his argument distinguishes him from his “liberal” counterparts and, as a result, his politics is different, even better, than the politics of those “liberals.” However, I would and will assert that Mr. Starr is engaging in the same kind of analysis as those “liberals” he is so worked up about. That is, both Mr. Starr and those “liberals” analyze the Tucson shootings in a way that makes them sui generis or a one-off event.

The “liberals” that so exorcise Mr. Starr argue that the shooting in Tucson can or should be blamed on the rhetoric of the likes of Sarah Palin and other conservatives. Palin, it was pointed out quite frequently, had used “crosshairs” to “target” certain congressional districts where some politicians needed, in Palin’s mind, to be defeated. Of course, to me as to Mr. Starr, this is quite absurd, as absurd as those who argued years ago that the two people guilty of burning down a house had done so because of an episode on Beavis and Butthead or as absurd as those who argue and argued that John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Reagan because he watched a movie too many times or as absurd as those who argue that Mark Chapman shot John Lennon because he read The Catcher In the Rye. Contrary to what both “liberals” and “conservatives” say or think, Sarah Palin has virtually no power to influence behavior in this country, to say nothing of being powerless to motivate a young man to try to assassinate a congresswoman. No one, not even her own children apparently, pays much attention to what Sarah Palin says and this includes especially the young or the crazy.

But in the same way that the “liberals” try to turn Tucson into a one-off event, an anomaly, to be blamed on a particular person or persons and, therefore, of no real importance to how we live our lives, Mr. Starr does the same thing. What happened in Tucson was the “action of one man,” and a man who was “by all accounts a lunatic.” Ok, there you have it, end of story, no reason to think further about what happened in Tucson as it was the result of the actions of lunatic. Let’s just get him into a mental hospital or prison and be done with it.

Now we Americans – and others – do this all the time. It is how we makes those things we don’t want to think about disappear. We did it with the Vietnam War and we did it with the presidential scandals of JFK, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George Bush….with Obama waiting in the wings I suspect. Nothing about our foreign policy led us into an inhumane and criminal war in Vietnam but, rather, just a series of mistakes made by particular individuals at a particular time. Nothing is wrong with the institution of the presidency but, rather, each of the above named presidents was flawed and those flaws led to the scandals of their administrations. Similarly, nothing happened in Tucson that we really need to think about, as those events tell us nothing about how we are living as a people. And, here, both the “liberals” and Mr. Starr are in agreement and we continue on our chosen road, blissfully ignorant of what we are really doing or where we are really going.