It's time for Americans and our politicians to seek unity for the sake of the nation, and "instead of re-fighting the battles of the last two years, let's fix what needs fixing and move forward." That was the theme of President Barack Obama's second State of the Union address that he delivered to the nation tonight. More than once he used the phrase "move forward," appealing to Democratic and Republican Party legislators to work together, and finally, invoking the American Dream, he relayed a stream of images designed to inspire striving for our ideals.
He delivered his message with the recent Arizona shootings hanging in the air as psychic backdrop. That recent tragedy has caused America to examine what some may call a vociferous polarization poisoning American politics. In the opening of his speech, he mentioned Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords by name, who was shot that day but is recovering, and he referenced Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old who died. ... Continue reading at BlogHer.com.
Pima Community College released the following video of Jared Lee Loughner rambling and ranting around its campus, and media enterprises are calling in more experts to decipher meaning behind his jumbled words and bizarre behavior. The school suspended Loughner last year after he showed myriad signs of being mentally disturbed and possibly a danger to himself, college staff and students. Multiple sources report college security was called five times to disturbances concerning Loughner while he was a student at Pima.
College officials told Loughner that he could not return without a mental health clearance from a psychiatrist. They also visited his parents, Randy and Amy Loughner, they've said, to discuss Loughner's case. However, the college did not try having Loughner committed.
Months after that suspension, Lougher shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 of her constituents on January 8 in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people. The FBI considers the act to have been an assassination attempt after finding plans at the 22-year-old's home. Among the six killed were a federal judge, John Roll, and 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Greene, who was born on September 11, the day of the World Trade Center attack.
In the video above, Loughner roams the Pima campus accusing its administration of denying him freedom of speech and of committing genocide against its students. He definitely does not seem to be functioning within the range of reason.
Time.com has a full profile of Lougner, "The Troubled Life of Jared Loughner," with an altered graphic of that spooky picture the media's running of him. Time has taken the spookiness a step further, coloring him red, and so, he looks more like some kind of devil.
I refuse to put that mugshot of Loughner, red or otherwise, on my blog. It's just too creepy.
Also, CNN.com had a guest on a day or so ago saying he thinks Loughner was into lucid dreaming, something I said in my first post that I published the day of the shooting, "Conscious not Conscience." It's not that mysterious. To dream lucidly simply means that you become aware that you are in a dream and can change the course of the dream's story, move objects, change the scene, etc.
I can't find the CNN video with the guest discussing conscious/lucid dreaming, but the person interviewed speculated that Lougner may have gotten to a point of not being able to tell whether he was dreaming or awake because he was obsessed with the phenomenon. If that's true, then Loughner could have been shooting the people at the Safeway and thinking it wasn't real, he suggested. But we don't know what Loughner may have been thinking because he's still refusing to speak, sitting in a federal prison with a smirk on his face, say sources.
A CNN article gives directions for having one's own lucid dreams. As someone who came of age in a household with a mother studying various spiritual paths that incorporated meditation and also dream studies—keeping dream journals, etc., I'm familiar with the techniques; however, I think CNN is sensationalizing an experience that became far removed from its ordinary use in the mind of a madman.
In a video below, a former girlfriend tells ABC News what she remembers of Loughner.
And in other news, today all over the nation people celebrated the life and message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose most popular speech is "I Have a Dream."
I did not want to overload my blog with another lengthy post about Sarah Palin. However, the controversy over her use of the term "blood libel' in her "America's Enduring Strength Speech" and reports that death threats against her are increasing spurred me to write something anyway.
I pray that no physical harm comes to Palin for the sake of her children and peace in this nation. However, I also hope that Palin will pay attention to the hate mail and phone calls she may be getting as a result of this controversy and begin to realize that nasty words, even figurative language suggesting calls to violence delivered in an environment charged with animosity and other negative emotions, can indeed lead to violent acts. After all, picking up a telephone or sending an email to threaten a person's life is also a form of violent action surpassing a passing thought. Will she connect these dots?
Some conservatives have been critical of Palin's word choice in the speech; however, far more have been supportive. Even Jews for Sarah Palin and Alan Dershowitz still defend her. Read more.
With the tragedy in Arizona and challenges to vitriolic rhetoric, Obama's opponents are pulling up the relatively few examples of him speaking forcefully and Palin's defenders are pulling out an old 2004 bullseye graphic from a nonprofit Democratic action group, but the American debate challenging politicians, the media, pundits, and bloggers to dial back the ugly tone of our political rhetoric should not become a "you did it too" discussion. There's too much at stake.
It's true that political speeches have long used militaristic rhetoric. I say this up front because in evaluating the current debate about violent rhetoric and the Arizona shootings, I've already seen people who think that in order to silence discussions about dialing back the nastiness, they simply need to point out the use of violent figures of speech on both sides.
I'll even present this olive branch and admit that some progressives have also used "targeting" language when writing about or speaking of conservatives. For example, the Democratic Leadership Council used a graphic in 2004 that had bullseye images on a map about gaining back control from Republicans. I learned of this graphic because a member at BlogHer.com, Adrienne Royer, took issue with the graphic six years later when she wrote in 2010 about Sarah Palin's "Take Back the 20" poster.
The DLC is a group with which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords herselfhas had some association, but we know that Giffords does not embrace the loose ownership of guns nor use incendiary rhetoric habitually. We can also learn that the Democratic Leadership Council (which is not the DNC as some misreport) is considered to be centrist, not extremist. For instance, they support the rights of Americans to own guns, but promote enforcement of ownership criteria and safety, the kind of laws that would have kept the mentally-ill Arizona shooter from having a gun in the first place. (As you will see later in this post, that's part of my point. We decide meaning and intent based on context and what we know of a person's beliefs, practices, and character. Conversations about toning down rhetoric must not become a tit-for-tat style debate.)
In addition, I am not one saying that one person's rhetoric or even one group's rhetoric pushed Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, federal judge John Roll, little Christina-Taylor Green, and others Saturday in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords is recovering, but Loughner allegedly killed six and wounded 14 people.
I don't blame a particular public figure or group because making such an argument without compelling evidence such as discovering Loughner built shrines to the Tea Party or Palin in his home is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, an argument that connects dots carelessly. We might feel in our bones that certain kinds of rhetoric directly influenced the shooter's rampage, but we can't know exactly how the shooter's disturbed mind worked to drive him to that grocery store because he's not talking and who can trust what he may say should he speak?
Nevertheless, as someone whose graduate focus is rhetoric, I must disagree with the use of another fallacy that's arisen as we try to make sense of tragedy, the tu quoque ad hominem argument that is being used to quash a much-needed discussion about hate speech and inflammatory rhetoric in America. As one scholar defines it, the tu quoque ad hominem logical fallacy is the "so's your mom" fallacy; others call it the "you too" appeal:
Like the appeal to authority and ad populum fallacies, the ad hominem ("against the person") and tu quoque ("you, too!") fallacies focus our attention on people rather than on arguments or evidence. In both of these arguments, the conclusion is usually "You shouldn't believe So-and-So's argument." The reason for not believing So-and-So is that So-and-So is either a bad person (ad hominem) or a hypocrite (tu quoque). In an ad hominem argument, the arguer attacks his or her opponent instead of the opponent's argument.
In the current situation, with Sarah Palin in particular falling under the microscope, any argument about speech must naturally look at people. It's people who speak and so they and their words are the evidence. However, as we look at people in the context of how their rhetoric creates a positive or negative political climate that persuades others to take action, we should focus on patterns, tendencies to use violent rhetoric and to speak irresponsibly (twisting facts to create hate, etc.) to inflame others. It's the pattern of speaking provocatively with little concern about facts or consequence that's at issue here.
After seeing CNN's interview with Libertarian radio talk show host Neal Boortz, who by the way was immediately cocky with Don Lemon (Boortz was flattered that CNN follows him on Twitter and made a point to say that he does not follow CNN), I decided I needed to write something again about the tit-for-tat argument style of some conservatives.
At the Wall Street Journal, I guess they've discovered that so many people are looking for dirty rhetoric from President Barack Obama that the WSJ has annotated a post about a 2008 Obama comment he delivered in Pennsylvania. In the speech, Obama said said, "If they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun."
I remember that. Even then the right was attempting to throw onto then presidential candidate Obama the criticism the left and moderates had thrown at Republicans, which is that they promote and create climates of fear. It's a common tactic with them to resort to this kind of arguing or rock throwing when they want to deflect attention from complaints against the kinds of harmful speech they tolerate or at least try to convince the general public that there's nothing wrong with shades of hate speech. (Clinton seized on it as an opportunity to criticize Obama as well, thinking he had put his foot in his mouth with white, small town voters and that would help her win.)
But when we look at Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh (Limbaugh, btw, has a page up at his website now called examples of Obama hate speech)--when we look at these kinds of public speakers, we observe a pattern, a history, and a practice of either an inflaming to entertain strategy or a willingness to yell fire at a paranoid electorate. So our concern is not about occasional slips into edgier rhetoric or using militaristic figures of speech sometimes when getting out the vote. It's about the rhetorical term ethos, the appeal of their persuasion through their character to the pathos--the beliefs and emotions--of their identified audience.
Palin, Beck, and Limbaugh in particular know that their audiences identify with people who hide behind the Second Amendment to defend keeping guns and a desire to use them and also a fear that they will become oppressed under a socialist takeover. The latter is a fear that these pundits/speakers have exploited.
President Barack Obama, however, has a reputation for compromise, for not being extremist, and for being cool-headed. He doesn't court the NRA crowd and speak of the joys of gun-ownership, killing moose or turning back the clock in America through an active militia. He has not been reasonably associated with people who today talk in terms of overthrowing the government by violent means.
In fact, it was in Pennsylvania that he got into trouble with his "clinging to guns and religion" statement about certain kinds of people who oppose him or feared him taking office. The U.K. Guardian back then called the statement "an uncharacteristic moment of loose language" for Obama. "Uncharacteristic."
He's not been the one dividing America with rhetoric about "pro-America areas of the country" versus, I suppose, "anti-America" sections, as Palin has done. He's not like Beck, who worked people up into thinking Van Jones is a die-hard communist to be McCarthyed out of his position with the White House. Nor has Obama ever suggested that any group of Americans had engaged in a plot to hurt America the way Rush Limbaugh said African-Americans have been in a plot.
In fact, the president had to be pushed to use stronger language during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last summer as some critics called him "too nice" and "not passionate enough." See the "whose ass to kick" video. Remember, Gen. Colin Powell even endorsed Obama for office because the man seems level-headed.
So, people know--I think that includes people on the right, too--they know when Obama's speaking figuratively and using a popular cliché to make his point. Too many on the right are being disingenuous when they seize on his words that are uncharacteristically fiery because unlike Sarah Palin, Obama does not have his people create websites like Take Back the 20 with gun sights over states and a list of opponents' names (a website she's removed from the Net since the Arizona massacre), and unlike Obama's opponents, he does not attract the kinds of supporters who proudly sport guns in public spaces. He and his family are the ones whose lives have been considered most endangered by the kinds of hateful rhetoric that started with his run for office. But the potential bullets claimed others.
This post is not intended to be a defense of Barack Obama. I am using the president's rhetoric and considering his ethos because some on the right are using his rhetoric as an example to defend themselves while not addressing the issue of ethos.
What I'm saying is that people are looking at people like Palin, who thinks she can win the Oval Office from Barack Obama in 2012, and the commonly-accepted talk of conservative pundits such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and even Bill O'Reilly, because these speakers have a reputation for wild speech. When we consider their histories of using inflammatory rhetoric to get attention, we by nature consider their ethos--their character--and that is part of why we cringe at the words coming out of their mouths. We think they use fighting words craftily with ill intent.
Added link, 11/14/11: At Pam's Coffee Conversations, Pamela Lyn has written the poignant post, "When Should I Believe You? - an ode to political discourse in America."
As I said in my first post on the Arizona shootings when I posited that the shooter means "conscious dreamer" not "conscience dreamer"—I see no evidence that directly links Sarah Palin to shooter Jared Lee Loughner. Still, I add that we should be able to look at Palin's rhetoric and decide whether she is responsible and wise or callous and unfit for national public office.
I think that Palin has contributed to the climate of fear and anger with some incendiary rhetoric, and I've been saying so since she appeared on the national scene with John McCain in 2008. But people far more qualified than I am have evaluated her rhetoric as well. Anil Dash discussed Palin's use of language in his 2008 essay "What Sarah Palin is Saying." So, even though the media and bloggers are scrutinizing in particular one Palin message that features gun sights as the nation grieves over Saturday's Arizona tragedy, Palin's Take Back the 20 cross hairs campaign is only one loop on her rhetorical roller coaster.
I also have suggested that while Loughner may not have been influenced directly by the former Alaskan governor, his obsession with currency not being backed by gold seems a reflection of Glenn Beck's buy-gold punditry (God, Gold & Guns) and some of Palin's nonsense implying that the Obama administration, in a fit of "socialist" manipulation, is changing our money. I recall that back in 2009 even her Fox News buddies fact-checked her "coin conspiracy" wackery and found it wanting.
In December he (Loughner) posted on YouTube a statement reading, “The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the United States of America’s Constitution.”
Two days before the shooting, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who Loughner shot in the head and the FBI says he targeted for assassination, read the First Amendment during a public reading of the document in the House, a ritual promoted by conservatives entering Congress who feel Americans are ignorant of the Constitution.
However, as I said in my first piece, both sides, the right and the left, are trying to associate Loughner with their opponents and make it stick. He is a registered Independent though and can't be pinned to one party or ideology. Furthermore, he is an unstable man, mixed up about what he believes in any way that would make sense to a rational personal.
Does an acknowledgment that Loughner seems insane and concession that no one can be blamed in a concrete way for the shooting other than him mean that we should not take time to reflect on the vitriolic, political rhetoric that's taken hold of the nation? Does it mean we ignore that Arizona seemed excessively crazy itself last year with xenophobic pitches and racist throes flooding rallies and the air waves?
No, we must observe; we must examine.
While Palin may be crying foul in email to Glenn Beck over people pointing the finger at her, she's fed her share of conspiracy theories beginning with her "Barack Obama pals around with terrorists" statements during the 2008 presidential campaign. Remember that.
And yet, I agree with Barbara Walters, who said Palin hasn't said nice things, but people shouldn't blame Palin for this incident. Well, I agree in part. We can blame Palin for her attempts to bolster the kinds of conspiracy theories that feed the madness of people like Jared Lee Loughner. She should choose her words considerately, get her facts straight, and craft her rhetoric more carefully. Her supporters need to face that.
In a clip near the end of this post from The View on ABC, the panel and its moderator, Walters, focuses on Palin's infamous cross hairs poster. As reported at Business Insider:
Elisabeth Hasselbeck then showed the NY Post cover from the very morning of the shooting -- which happened to depict Peyton Manning with his head in cross hairs. "Are they then to blame if, god forbid, anything were to happen to Peyton Manning?"
Sherry Shepherd then made an excellent point that if after that front page someone had shot Manning, America would be asking the same questions about the front page as they are asking about Palin's cross hairs poster: was it a factor in the shooting?
I think it was also Sherry, or it could have been Whoopi Goldberg, who said people are focused on Palin because she may run for president. GOP strategist John Wevaver had a similar take, saying Palin is held to a different standard:
"You can't put the actions of this insane person on her doorstep or anyone's doorstep," he said in Palin's defense. But, he added, "having said that, there's a difference between how people judge the conduct of a blogger and a political leader or someone who may want to run for president of the United States."
People are wondering whether her decision to publish and promote the Take Back the 20 cross hairs graphic shows she's not fit to lead the nation.
Remember not too long ago, Whoopi and Joy Behar were in the spotlight because they walked off the set of The View in October 2010, saying that some of conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly's language was irresponsible. Walters disapproved of her colleagues decision to storm off. An angry Walters said to the audience that Whoopi and Behar should not have left the stage, but then she turned to O'Reilly and told him that his language that painted all Muslims as culpable for the 9/11 attack was "extremist."
Now, I'm wondering will Bill in the future blame all young white males for the shooting in Arizona?
One of the saddest pieces of the Arizona shooting story is the death of Christina Taylor Greene, the 9-year-old who died and who was also born on the day of the 9/11 tragedy. Her brief life is something to think about, perhaps with her death we will see how fragile we are, how we destroy the future with ill-chosen words, loose gun laws, and reducing services to help the mentally ill. We humans are not as smart as we think.
First, let's get this out the way. The word is "conscious" not "conscience," but I don't think the shooter knows the difference between the two words. I say this later in the post as well and tell why I think he means "conscious" not "conscience". He was going for "conscious dreamer" not "conscience dreamer" in my opinion.
I am including Congresswoman Giffords's comments from last spring in which she said she felt targeted because she was included on a list of Democrats in Sarah Palin's crosshairs. According to CNN, Sarah Palin has said she didn't mean for anyone to take the crosshairs imagery literally, and a March 25, 2010 post at a supporter's blog, Sarah Palin Web Brigade, declares that any accusations that the list with the crosshairs image is dangerous rhetoric is just "silly."
I think it's clear that some people don't understand what rhetoric encompasses. At BlogHer.com, for instance, on the post about today's shootings, some person has left nasty comments, but claims not to understand why anyone would say he or she has been uncivil. I continue to say that some people don't grasp fully the power of the messages they create or the words that come out of their mouths.
As for Jared Lee Loughner, given his writings and list of favorite books, I don't think he knew what he believed and there's no evidence yet that he even knew Sarah Palin had posted this list or even that it existed. So, while I think Sarah Palin's hit list was in bad taste and irresponsible, I can't say that it had any direct bearing on Loughner's actions. The young man may just be a natural born fruit loop who met Giffords once and was disillusioned when she showed him no special attention.
Along with the rest of the nation, I am greatly saddened by the shootings in Arizona. My heart goes out to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords's family as she recovers, the loved ones of federal Chief Judge John Roll and the parents of the nine-year-old who died. To all the shooting victims of Jared Lee Loughner, I send prayers.
Also, even though I think he was speaking from a place of grief and anger, I agree with Clarence Dupnik, Sheriff of Pima County, who thinks we Americans indulge too much vitriolic political rhetoric and that creates a climate where unstable people may be tipped toward committing violent acts. Arizona has merely winked at its growing clime of hate speech. And yet, already Dupnik is being slammed for his statements, as I suspected he would be as soon as the words left his mouth.
Someone writing at the Tucson Citizen under the label "Arizona conservative intellectual" said:
It's outrageous that Democrat Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik is exploiting this tragedy for political reasons. He said about Arizona, "We have become the capital, the mecca for prejudice and bigotry." In reality? Loughner's classmate described him as "he was left wing, quite liberal."
That's a case of a guilty dog howling loudest. Dupnik didn't single out a particular party or ideological wing when he made his statement, and yet that conservative assumes Dupnik is speaking only to the right wing. Is that really a case of that conservative subconsciously acknowledging that he knows people on his team like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin frequently make statements that imply a call to violence?
But I'll have to write about that another day. I already said on Facebook that I think the right wing will shout that Loughner is on the left's side and the left wing will shout that he is on the right's side. The fact is that he's just another nut who has been obsessed with a variety of ideologies, and that brings me to my next point, which is that Loughner projects his insecurities onto others.
They (his online writings) speak of being a “conscience dreamer”; becoming a treasurer of a new currency; controlling “English grammar structure”; mentioned brainwashing and suggested that he believed he had powers of mind control.
Loughner fancies others to be unintelligent and illiterate, even the Congresswoman, and himself to be a student of English grammar. So, he may suffer from some kind of mania that makes him think he is superior to others. In addition, his writings sound like the ramblings of someone with paranoid schizo-affective disorder. For instance, he thinks that the CIA has been watching his MySpace.com page.
But what I noticed most, after his twisted syntax, was his use of the word "conscience." I would bet money that he means the word "conscious" and doesn't understand the difference between the two words. Many people say "conscience," the "inner sense of right and wrong" when they mean "conscious," to "be fully aware." The people most likely to make this kind of error consistently, in my opinion, are those with reading comprehension challenges.
Furthermore, "conscious dreaming" is lucid dreaming. That would fit more with Loughner's ideas about mind control, the kind you would see associated with conscious or lucid dreaming in movies such as Inception. He is very concerned that the government will be able to control his mind, and as you can see in this video of his, he thinks he's mastered the power to control minds himself. (His obsessions about currency being backed up by gold and his belief that the Constitution is in jeopardy, however, do make me think of some of Beck's and Palin's rhetoric.) Given the strange range of his book selections combined with his logic issues in his writing, I think that he has problems with understanding language, which is why he is preoccupied with the literacy and intelligence levels of others. Sad.
But now on CNN, Don Lemon is reading the names of the victims who died; Arizona authorities are searching for an accomplice and that is all I can grasp at this time.
A friend posted this to Facebook, and I decided to add it to this post. It's the same interview with Giffords on MSNBC posted up top about inflammatory rhetoric and her offices being vandalized during the height of the health care reform debates. But just in case the YouTube video vanishes, I want to still have a working one here. It's that important.
It's time for Americans and our politicians to seek unity for the sake of the nation, and "instead of re-fighting the battles of the last two years, let's fix what needs fixing and move forward." That was the theme of President Barack Obama's second State of the Union address that he delivered to the nation tonight. More than once he used the phrase "move forward," appealing to Democratic and Republican Party legislators to work together, and finally, invoking the American Dream, he relayed a stream of images designed to inspire striving for our ideals.
