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Did anyone else notice that Speaker of
the House John Boehner did not shed a tear when issuing his statement about
the massacre in Arizona that killed, among others, a nine-year-old girl and
left Congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords maimed? The
new Speaker notoriously weeps when recounting his own youthful travails
rising to fortune in business and power in government. He handled this
incident like a news-caster at a Midwestern TV station reporting rush hour
traffic.
I doubt that the young
shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, will turn out to be
affiliated with the Tea Party or any other established political faction. The
evidence he left in a few YouTube videos evinces the thought disorder typical
of post-adolescent onset schizophrenia, but with a remarkable twist. He was
preoccupied with thoughts about currency, money, in particular how money is
created. In the text-and-music video available here at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGRCEIxU96A&feature=related), Loughner writes:
Every
human who's mentally capable is always able to be treasurer of their new
currency....
If
you create one new currency then you're able to create a second new currency.
If
you're able to create a second new currency then you're able to create a
third new currency.
You
create one new currency.
Thus
you're able to create a third currency.
Does this begin to
sound sickeningly like the policy of the Federal Reserve and the thinking of
its chairman, Ben Bernanke? Is the monetary behavior of top US officials now
so disordered that it is showing up as mental illness in young people?
You are wrong if you
think I'm being facetious.
Loughner
had a few other obsessions: control, sleepwalking, the
"scam" of higher education, and terrorism.
For more than one
generation it has been difficult for young American males to develop
successfully into men. They even dress like babies at 25. Their vocational
options these days tend toward corporate slavery of one kind or another.
Flipping burgers for a despotic fast food chain. A job in a cubicle. At best,
a job in a cubicle making a lot of money by swindling fellow Americans. If
they manage to get through college, many face a lifetime of tuition loan debt
slavery.
The rewards of
entering the realm beyond college are paltry-to-miserable. Solitary cab rides
to the mall. A burrito and a Big Gulp. Later, back home, an hour in the
virtual company of the Kardashian sisters via the
E-Network on your parents' cable TV. Where are the initiations into manhood?
(Try the channelized dry-wash, courtesy of the Barrio Blue Moon boyz.) I'm convinced that the reason video games and
movies aimed at young males in America are devoted almost solely to fantasies
about super-heroes and supernatural power (especially the power to kill) is
because adolescent boys feel so impotent, so powerless, so unlike real men.
The adults in this culture do not furnish any meaningful alternative scripts.
That's the market's job, I guess.
When confused and
disturbed young men do act, they sometimes act out the scripts of violent
retribution that the video game and movie business so lavishly supply to
them. This is a culture, lately, with no room whatsoever for tenderness. Look
for a moment of tenderness in the popular video game, Carmageddon. The Speaker of the House's moments of
tender reminiscence are reserved for himself. This
used to be known as a condition called feeling sorry for yourself.
It was considered, if anything, un-manly.
I don't know if the
ambient political mood of the USA is any more poisonous now than it was for
about a decade starting in the 1960s, when all those assassinations changed
history: John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace,
plus Lennon and the attempts on Ford and Reagan. The Baby Boomers produced
more than their share of lost souls. Myth still shrouds the doings of Lee
Harvey Oswald, since he was bumped off so quickly, but other shooters have
been around for decades. Surely plenty of people from FBI agents to forensic
psychiatrists have plumbed the depths of Sirhan Sirhan and Arthur Bremer over their many years of
incarceration, and all they find are a couple of human black holes yielding
nothing that illuminates their acts.
I doubt that the
shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and the many
others who attended her meet-and-greet will lead to anything like more
civility in politics. The country faces grave problems and most of the
political noise rises not from the agony of facing them, but from the
desperate efforts to avoid or deflect them. The deliberations at the highest
level in Washington sound these days like the tortured reasoning of Jared Lee
Loughner - for instance the hiring of William Daley
from JP Morgan to run a White House that is hostage to JP Morgan.
One thing the
shooter surely accomplished: it will now cost elected officials hundreds of
millions of dollars more every year to imagine they can protect themselves
with new layers of security. Not just the assignment of federal marshals, but
the deployment of all sorts of "high-tech" equipment and
procedures, since we are now in the techno-rapture phase of the long emergency,
which features massive amounts of magical thinking.
Will history
notice that Jared Lee Loughner was struggling to
puzzle through the mysteries of currency and of who controlled what in this
world, even while he was being tossed out of a community college that he was
extremely conscious of being scammed to pay for - a government-supported
school that affected to prepare young people for a career spent in a
corporate cubicle in order to fork over the weekly paycheck to pay back
college loans.
From their website:
At
Pima Community College you have access to an affordable, high-quality
education. Our Costs and Payments section will familiarize you with tuition
for credit and non-credit classes, as well as with payment methods.
Don't
let a lack of funds keep you from reaching your goals! There are options
available to help you cover tuition, including:
Federal
Financial Aid - you should apply, don't assume
you're not eligible!
Veteran's
Benefits
Scholarships
and Grants
Work
Study Programs
The shootings of
Congresswoman Giffords and all the others took
place in front of a Safeway Supermarket in a strip mall in a city of strip
malls and housing subdivisions - many of them failing financially. It must be
unbelievably difficult for a young person to make sense of such an incoherent
environment and such cruel swindling culture. A society that habitually and
incessantly lies to itself is apt to choke to death on its internal
contradictions. Jared Lee showed an unusual concern for language and literacy.
His videos were all words, no pictures. I wonder if the word SAFEWAY flashed
through his brain when he pulled the trigger.
James
Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler’s new novel of
the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
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