The tenet: 2nd Amendment Absolutism, a tenet of the Republican Party. Mix with the religious zealotry known to infect the Republican Party. Apply to an irrational man-child and let loose.
And we have the sickening tragedy in Uvalde, TX, where twenty one were killed, and an unfolding aftermath, where the husband of one of the dead has already died of a heart attack, brought on by the violent killing of his wife.
Not “the passing.” Let’s give up that particular euphemism as a filthy way to hide the truth of the matter – these people died in terror as a madman ran around a school, killing children and adults, armed with a military-grade weapon.
So what do the zealous do when one of their tenets proves to be false? Not “under attack by the Godless liberals,” but actually leads to a tragedy such as Uvalde?
A zealot is someone who believes, without regard to evidence, in some sort of a tenet, a proposition if you will. Found often in the intensively religious and their theocratic leaders, along with the deeply arrogant, and the devotees of ideological positions who have built an intellectual castle of logic, often based on poor assumptions. When more than one of these positions come together in one group, and is seasoned with the anti-intellectual metric of extremism, aka You’re more pure if you’re more extreme!, then we see what we’re seeing now.
And what would that be?
If you consider Alex Jones, proprietor of the ridiculous InfoWars website, to be a conservative, rather than simply an amoral grifter and conman who’s now on the hook for immense monetary damages for his spreading the false idea that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre was a hoax, then here’s sample #1:
1/Yes, America, Alex Jones is already insinuating that the murder of #Uvalde elementary school children today is suspect & was caused by some underlying politically opportunistic motive.
Alex #SandyHook Jones’s phone lines are open.
America, give him a piece of your mind: pic.twitter.com/JL5v2iQgFD
— Kelly Jones (@RealKellyJones) May 25, 2022
It’s the mindset that Surely it couldn’t happen without deliberately bad actors out to get us, so let’s call it that, ignoring the parallel conclusion that, in a world of bad actors and irrational people, which includes you and me, putting weapons into everyone’s hands simply encourages massacres.
More to the point is Texas Attorney General, and man indicted for misconduct in said office, Ken Paxton’s opinion:
“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things. We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.” [Fox News via Maddowblog, the latter providing transcript]
Thus exposing students to the dangerous, even fatal results of gun accidents and, yes, angry teachers. Worse yet, this is a teaching environment: what are students being taught? That students are worthwhile targets? What if one of these students is the proverbial bad apple?
Is this a good thing?
Let’s go back to the 1950s and ask the Republicans if all the teachers ran around with guns on their hips, did the students attend schools with existential anxieties?
No. Not that I’ve ever read. Except in the context of nuclear war, of which there will be more anon.
And this is back when lead poisoning remained an issue. Lead poisoning, brought on by leaded gas, causes violent behaviors.
But gun training and gun control were a part of gun culture at the time. Before the accession of Wayne LaPierre to the NRA (National Rifle Association) leadership in the 1970s, the NRA was a leading proponent of gun control – that is, of being responsible gun owners, of teaching same, and of being a responsible society in the context of guns. After LaPierre and his cronies took control, the NRA became all about, well, quite honestly, selling guns.
But let’s get on with some examples of Republican responses to Uvalde. Lt. Governor of Texas Daniel Patrick wants to go military:
Obviously we have to do more. We have to harden these targets so no one can get in ever except through one entrance. Maybe that would help. Maybe that would stop someone.
“But it’s really bigger than that, Tucker. We’re a core society. We’re a society that’s just at each other’s throats all the time. And we’re better than this as a nation.” [CNSNews]
First, let me note that, despite early reports, apparently there was no engagement with the shooter by a school security officer prior to the shooter’s entry into the school building. The early suggestion that “hardening” had already been implemented and failed is false.
But, returning to Patrick’s response, yes, extremists are often at someone’s throat. Extremism is a performative art, designed to gain power through manipulation of a vulnerable audience, and a classic performance technique is to attack someone, no holds barred, no holding back.
And that party of Daniel Patrick? It’s a party of extremists.
But his tone is definitely of someone who is really short on ideas. More and more guns was supposed to lead to a polite society, as some conservatives have put it, where the madman is swiftly gunned down with minimal damage. No kidding, this is a point I often ran into in my libertarian readings.
Hiroshima, Japan, after the American nuclear attack on the city in 1945.
It’s quite akin to MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, actually, the Cold War doctrine in which we assured the Soviet Union that if it engaged in a nuclear attack on us, we’d return fire and we’d, them and us, would all be dead, and they assured us of the same. The shooter in Uvalde, TX, did in fact end up dead, along with his numerous victims. But he achieved his objective, a revenge on children, a performance to be longed talked about, while we did not: we lost our children. MAD did not work, as it didn’t in Sandy Hook or the other school massacres. It’s logically wrong to declare MAD never works, as when it does work it doesn’t get the same news headlines, but it’s fair to say that it fails with dismaying and unacceptable frequency.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) takes one of Patrick’s ideas and mistakenly runs with it:
… Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (who’s speaking at the NRA’s convention this Friday) argued yesterday that the problem isn’t that there are too many guns out there, it’s that schools have too many doors–more specifically, more than one door.
Harvard Law School, which awarded Cruz a magna cum laude, must be very, very embarrassed, because this guy can’t argue his way out of a paper sack. Oh, he’s got the performance part down, I saw a little bit of his verbal arguments for rejecting electoral votes during the January 6th counting of the electoral votes, and he has the tone of voice and arm-waving down pat, but this untidy bit of nonsense, which he’s repeated several times (see the TPM link), is unfit for public display. Shall we consider windows, multiple shooters, fire regulations, distributed campuses, school trips,and no doubt quite a few others, against his proposition? What a load of bullshit. But, for him, …
Anything, anything, but questioning that tenet of the Party. It’s worth recalling that Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, is a preacher of the born-again variety, and to wonder how much bleed over from that absolutist belief system into the secular belief system occurs.
This is getting over-long, but the response of Georgia Senate GOP nominee and former NFL star Herschel Walker is priceless and must be cited:
“Do you support any new gun laws in the wake of this Texas shooting?” [CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju] asked Walker and repeated the question when Walker indicated he hadn’t properly heard him.
“What I like to—what I like to do is see it and everything and stuff,” Walker replied.
“I like to see it,” Walker said before moving away. He may have been indicating that he wanted to know more about the incident.
“He didn’t engage further,” Raju wrote. [Newsweek]
And did Walker clarify his indecipherable response? In the next day or two, this came popping out:
Herschel Walker's solution to school shootings involves "a department that can look at young men that's looking at women that's looking at social media." pic.twitter.com/WAi7a4mwgz
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 26, 2022
I can say that, for myself, it’s just more gibberish.
But it’s worth noting that his response is congruent with someone who’s been told that any pro-gun control response will result in losing this chance to regain the fame that he had in his football days. He’s obviously not otherwise prepared, so he gushes utter nonsense and hopes no one notices.
This is the GOP nominee for Senate. How can anyone even consider voting for him?
Where is this leading?
Certainly, a few more members of the GOP will be leaving. But not many; those willing to embrace irrationality, so long as it leads them to wealth, power, and/or prestige, will remain, and those not so willing have generally already left.
For independents, some will buy the line of More guns! More guns!, but others will look at the truly irrational response of the Republican Party to this and other mass shootings, and ask why they should vote for Republicans who espouse such positions.
Which leads to the question of Why should they vote for Democrats? Some, for whom I have little sympathy, will point at the pro-choice position on abortion of the Democrats, forgetting that we are a secular, diverse society, and not a theocracy, and refuse to vote for a Democrat; others will point at the autocratic way transgenderism issues have been implemented by Democrats when in charge, and object to voting for such a political party, and for them I have considerable sympathy, believing that the Democrats abrogated their responsibility to have a debate on the issue, as dictated by the liberal democracy political model to which the United States aspires.
Some will sit out elections, tired of the perceived dirtiness of it all. Extremism on the right has ruined the Republicans; the Democrats have not been properly wary of extremists on the left, but are at least partially aware of them. That dirtiness, that rigidity, leads to negative perceptions, of autocratic impulses, theocrats of the wrong stripe, or better yet at all, and of disregard of public opinion and public debate. I can’t say I blame them.
And some will look for alternatives. I have to wonder if an independent candidate or two might win seats. We do have two nominally Independent Senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. Could there be more? Might we see some House seats come unexpectedly into the hands of Independents in 2022?
And will we see a new and popular party form? I accidentally ran across the last five minutes of a PBS documentary on the Nonpartisan League of North Dakota, existing 1915-1956, which controlled the North Dakota legislature and governor’s seat in roughly the 1916-1918 time frame, and had a mildly quasi-socialist flavor to it. For my purposes, the Nonpartisan League serves as an example that the major parties can be thrust aside, even if only temporarily, by angry mobs, aka parties, of citizens.
Both Democrats and Republicans had best be careful, or they may suddenly discover themselves excluded by citizens who want to be included in public policy discussions (transgenderism, gun control), who want parties that are responsive to citizen concerns rather than corporate profits (gun manufacturers, fossil fuel subsidies), and are generally responsible institutions.
The Republicans have already proven to be third-, fourth, and – see Herschel Walker – fifth rate politicians, in that they can win elections, but they have lost their way when it comes to actual governing, prizing extremism over moderation, arrogance over humility, purity over compromise. If there’s a Divinity, I would be surprised if it doesn’t appear one day, open a yawning chasm, and sweep all the Republicans into it, offended at what has been done in its name.
The Democrats, partly due to a legislature frozen by Senate Republicans’ intractability, also look less than impressive. The transgenderism blunder has an autocratic flavor, repugnant to Independents, and Critical Race Theory and the far left is full of arrogance that is easily punctured, except that the arrogant refuse to reform. If you want more on intrinsic Democratic woes, send Andrew Sullivan some money and read him, he’s more knowledgeable on that than I am.
Voting for Republicans and their inchoate responses to the disasters brought on by their heretofore unbreakable allegiance to Party tenets seems like madness to me. Especially if you’re in Texas, or voting in the Georgia Senate race. But are Democrats good enough alternatives? That’s the sad conundrum of today.
