The curious case of Gordon Brown Leading article …

Bonus-go-round

The economy
Alf Young

Why the politicians dare not challenge the bankers

Also:
Rear Window in Burntisland

Death in Arizona

America
Andrew Hook
A society in which they reload

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The Cafe

Mrs Batty

Person of the Week
Christina Foyle
Profile by Barbara Millar

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Islay McLeod

13.01.11
No. 353

The Cafe

Andrew Hook rightly laments the withdrawal of The Daily Show (SR, 12 January).
     Anything that reveals the non-ominous side of America has to be a good thing, particularly now, with lunacy taking a threatening step further forward. The US website called Truthout is a useful daily antidote, I find. Though not exactly funny, it is filled with acerbic comment and the standard of writing is very high, from people as eminent as Noam Chomsky, and often blistering in its opinions.      Yesterday’s open letter on the Arizona shootings was the angriest thing I have read for years. A new edition of the site appears daily, free, though they do of course beg for contributions in order to keep going. 
     Knowing that there are people of courage and high principle in the States brings a touch of stability and makes me feel just a little less shaky – though no less furious. The Christmas pictures of war pensioners chaining themselves to the White House railings in protest over Afghanistan was strangely absent from the British press, but this website showed a long gallery of them. Definitely worth a look.

Alison Prince

Wow, doesn’t Robin Downie (SR, 12 January) make the parable of the Good Samaritan painfully and urgently topical, crucially making the point that Jesus chose the Good Samaritan because he did not share the faith of the victim?
     In this catastrophic age of, it seems, not many fewer than 57 varieties of religious funda-mentalism, warring against one another with all too fatal results, I loathe Christian fundamentalism even more than the other varieties, because I love Jesus Christ, who, after all, was crucified by that very fundamentalism, of the premier Pharasaic variety.
     Above all else, Jesus celebrated a humanity, which humanity itself has been so slow to accept.

Ian Petrie

America

Death in Arizona

Andrew Hook

In recent days I’ve been contributing to a Facebook debate over the horrific shootings in Tucson, Arizona. And the first point I’d like to make is that its appearance on Facebook in no way prevents the discussion from being serious, searching and intelligent.

     The main point at issue is the rightness or wrongness of linking the 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner’s killing spree to the vitriolic and violent language and imagery which now characterises the confrontation between left and right in the US. Is the killer to be seen as no more than a deranged loner, a mentally unstable individual, who regarded himself as a political terrorist, and finally acted upon his delusional obsessions? Or is it entirely legitimate to see a connection between his deadly behaviour and a political climate in which right-wing rhetoric in particular seems to be perilously close to promoting violence against those its exponents see as the enemy?
     One contributor argues that there has been an unseemly rush to judgement in associating the killer’s lethal actions with the attitudes and opinions of some Tea Party members and commentators on the extreme right of the Republican party. ‘The clamour to blame Palin’, he writes, ‘is a massive distraction and a form of political opportunism’. By ‘a massive distraction’ he means that the real issues raised by the tragic episode – and the ones we should focus on – concern gun control and mental health intervention. And indeed both of these should be major concerns.
     For anyone who is not living inside the gun culture of Arizona, it is barely credible that the killer was able to walk into a store last November and buy over the counter, no questions asked, a powerful automatic pistol. This is a young man who had recently been suspended from college for erratic and inappropriate behaviour, and told that he would not be readmitted until he had undergone a mental health check that showed he would not be a danger to himself or others.

Whether or not it was merely ‘political opportunism’ for commentators on the left to raise the question of a link between this outrage, and the use of violently vituperative language by those on the right, is much more problematic. I’m inclined to think not.

     But then it is now lawful for anyone in Arizona over 21 to carry a concealed weapon in public without any kind of licence. Its legislature is even debating the notion that professors and students on college campuses should be allowed to carry concealed weapons – presumably so that they can defend themselves from mad assailants. Ironically of course, Congresswoman Giffords, the main target, supports the right of all Americans to bear arms, as the second amendment to the constitution is alleged to legitimise. Of course fighting a Tea Party Republican in a very red state, the Democratic Giffords probably had little alternative. (However on other major issues such as abortion, Obama’s healthcare reforms, and the need for legislation to provide a road to citizenship for illegal immigrants, she is defiantly liberal.)
     Whether or not it was merely ‘political opportunism’ for commentators on the left to raise the question of a link between this outrage, and the use of violently vituperative language by those on the right, is much more problematic. I’m inclined to think not. As more and more details begin to emerge, it is clear that this attempted assassination was a political act. Gabrielle Giffords was the target. She was shot first. It is only the other victims who were shot at random.
     Recovered from Loughner’s house are materials saying ‘I planned this’; ‘Giffords’; and ‘my assassination’. A well-known far-right activist in Milwaukee – David Wynn Miller – is now saying that much of the material in Loughner’s rambling videos comes from his website: he’s ‘repeating things I’ve said for years’. (Things about government’s mind control, alternative realities, grammar and truth, the gold standard, etc.) So however mentally unstable Loughner was, his disturbed state of mind ran along political lines.
     Trying to explain the violence itself, one Facebook contributor reminded us that ‘political assassination is a tradition in America’. And it is hard to disagree. One British prime minister has been assassinated: Spencer Perceval in 1812. Four American presidents have been killed in office: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F Kennedy in 1963. There have been at least 20 other attempts to kill sitting or former presidents.
     One scholar investigating the role of violence in American politics has come up with a figure of 4,381 deaths as a result of racial conflicts, labour disputes, bombings, riots, lynchings etc, in the 20th century alone. Congresswoman Giffords’ father, asked if his daughter had any enemies, replied ‘Yeah, the whole Tea Party’. Given that Sarah Palin, on the day that the Obama healthcare bill finally passed, told her supporters, ‘Don’t retreat. Reload’, he may well have a point.

Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University

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