American Hysteria: Speech v. Violence
If you read the newspaper headlines, watch TV or the movies, you might think America today no longer refers to itself as a “God-fearing nation” but as a “Gun-toting Nation.” The sacred “G,” the God of Abraham and a merciful Jesus have been transformed into a profane “G” or the God of the NRA. The NRA’s own spokesmen, actor Charlton Heston, moved easily from the role of Moses or lawgiver to that of huckster for guns.
(See Breaking News, “Five Dead; Teen Acccused in Killing Spree,” Albuquerque Journal, Monday, Jan. 21, 2013. Background checks, anyone?)
Due to interpretation, the U.S. Supreme Court transformed corporations into persons, while defying any number of traditional evolutionary theories or religious traditions via the First Amendment in Citizens United speech case. The Court also, in Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), transformed the right to raise homegrown militias, meant to resist armed invasion by foreign enemies, into an individual right to bear arms, thus unleashing chaos.
While the Citizens United case effectively undermined democracy and confirmed the current governing class as servitors of the plutocracy, Columbia and McDonald effectively confirm the rights of the angry, alienated, and the unwell to purchase guns of magnitude and conduct massacres of children.
Call it the sacrifice to Our Moloch, as Garry Wills recently pointed out in a piece at The New York Review of Books.”Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind.”
Much has been written in recent weeks on the conflict between the First and Second Amendments, how the presence of a gun limits discussion. Machiavelli himself commented on the difference between an armed and unarmed man. Basically, twenty five hundred years of erratic progress toward civil society are being reversed today. In Ancient Athens, Socrates noted that it was better to suffer harm than do harm to another. Jesus said famously that one should turn the other cheek.
The Greco-Roman Jewish-Christian traditions that undergird law and order in America are being shunted aside by convenient and expedient interpretations meant to serve the wealthy and turn the hoi polloi against each other. Just as the death penalty, torture, and death by drone defy constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment or due process, so arming the populace short circuits civil discourse and the principles of civil society.
In New Mexico itself, on Friday, Jan. 18, 2013, the Journal North published a story about Republican house member Nora Espinoza of Roswell (Bill Bars Feds’ Gun Controls by Dan Boyd) who introduced a bill, signed onto by ten other members, that “would make it a third-degree felony for any government official or firearm dealer to try to enforce federal gun laws here.”
Will a bill to secede follow?
On Saturday, Journal North writer Kathleen Roberts reported in Right to Bear Arms how some 175 protesters against [potential] restrictions gathered at the Roundhouse, with signs saying things like, “Gun Laws Only Save Criminals and Tyrants.” One woman drove up from Albuquerque with her two daughters and told the reporter, “It is my civil right to defend myself.” She lives alone and “would buy a gun for protection if she could afford one.” She says, “If teachers were able to have carried guns, I don’t believe the gunman would have killed so many people.”
A 16-year old ROTC student, who organized the rally, said that Israel stations armed guards at its schools. He apparently told the roaring crowd “No one, no matter how powerful, will ever be able to take these rights away.” Israeli and Palestinian neighbors send rockets up and out against each other—a terrific example of failed civility and a failed state. The young man, like most gun-toters, underestimates the power of urban America swat teams or battle-hardened Afghani veterans, who represent the federal government in the event of real or virtual civil emergency.
Ask the veterans of “Food Not Bombs” or protesters in the “Battle for Seattle” and Occupy representatives about police beatings. Ask the survivors of homicide victims shot down by cowboy cops in Albuquerque about “shoot first and ask questions later.”
Movies, video games, and the ramped up broadcast media deliver images of gun violence that are easily emulated and now “normed” as behavior patterns. Every parent knows how much influence peers and media have over their children—despite parental injunctions to the contrary. But adults fail to understand the differences between the warmongers and peacemakers. Despite its popularity, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Last Stand, filmed in New Mexico, is only a movie. I’m just saying.
In Book Ten of Plato’s Republic, Socrates says, “We’ll say that an imitative poet (maker) puts a bad constitution in the soul of each individual by making images that are far removed from the truth and by gratifying the irrational part, which cannot distinguish the large and the small but believes the same things are large at one time and small at another.”
But if the U.S. Supreme Court Justices today fail the “reality” question, you can hardly expect the average citizen to understand. For many people today the Gun is God. Abroad civilian casualties represent collateral damage–the cost of doing business, just like the kids of Sandy Hook at home. The fox is in the henhouse.