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Days
after the Tucson shooting, President Obama rode into town on a gooey gel of
good will, but by the time the memorial service - or whatever it was - got
underway, the president looked rather ill-at-ease. His speech was preceded by
several others, including, for promotional purposes, the President of the
University of Arizona, which hosted the event, a diversity infomercial in the
person of a Native American shaman, the pert student government leader, a
current and former governor, and the Attorney General of the US. The gooey
gel couldn't contain the crowd, which more than a few times broke out in
whoops and cheers.
The only kind of ritual that Americans seem to understand these days
is an award ceremony, and that's what the Tucson event most resembled:
a fete of congratulation and warm therapeutic self-affirmation. In the
aftermath of yet another horrifying milestone event that changes nothing
about how we live or what we do, comes the warm soothing anesthetic gel of
okay-ness. I know a lot of people felt
uplifted by Mr. Obama's remarks. I give him points for venturing out to that
politically toxic city (if that's what the agglomeration of strip malls
actually is). What he said struck me as not just lacking in an original
thought, but filled with something like pre-owned sentiment.
And Mr. Obama looked less than comfortable through the whole gruesome
show, as though he sensed there was something off about the vibe in arena,
with all its photo-op immediacy that will fade into the cavalcade of a
zillion preceding it and countless more yet to come. It all made me wonder:
what is the difference exactly between trying to comfort people and making
them comfortable? It's normal to want to comfort people who have
suffered. But I'm not persuaded that the American public beyond the McKale Memorial Center deserves to feel comfortable about
how they are and what they're doing at this moment in history. To me, the
ceremony was short on solemnity and decorum, the willingness to suspend comfort
for a little while in order to recognize that what happened at the Safeway
supermarket was not okay. Even the official moment of silence near the end
was too brief, as though they were trying to spare the crowd too much
self-reflection.
I wasn't the only person in this country who felt a little jarred by
the strange proceedings. As they wound down and the cameras followed Mr.
Obama milling with the crowd, CNN's anchor, John King came on air with a
hastily-constructed narrative designed to explain all the hooting and
hollering. His thesis was that the local folks of Tucson had been so
emotionally squashed for five days that they just had to let it all hang
out. This struck me as something between an excuse and a cockamamie story
to paper over the awkward question: how come we don't know how to act in the
face of tragedy?
Of course, we don't know how to act in the face of reality, either, by
which I mean politics, our means for contending with reality. So much of the
Tucson story was whether there is any remaining shred of something like
common purpose between the opposing political wings and the answer resolving
out of all the grief and soothing gel is no. Common purpose is AWOL in
our politics lately because whatever terrain of the issues is not occupied by
sheer lying is filled by cowardice and ignorance. We lie to ourselves
incessantly about the nation's financial condition. We've suspended both the
rules of accounting and the rule of law in banking matters (lying). We're too
frightened to go into the vaults and find out exactly how much we've swindled
ourselves (cowardice). And we aggressively misunderstand issues that will
shape our future, such as how much oil is really in the ground, and how long
people will be able to live in places like Tucson the way they do (ignorance)
- all of this prompting us to march off the edge of a political cliff where
we hang today, the cartoon coyote of nations, undone by our Acme
techno-fantasies.
Discomfort is probably the only thing that will avail to alter this
pattern of behavior. For the moment we have no idea where we're going, what
we're doing, or who will take us to the next era where life will be very
different. It could easily be some loutish spawn of Limbaugh and Beck,
stepping in to push around a land full of lost souls desperate to be told
what to do after years of forgetting how to do anything. All of Mr. Obama's
earnest, gel-like warmth does not conceal the astounding corruption of the
Democratic party and the surrender of progressivism to anything that
smells like money (in the immortal words of Matt Taibbi).
The Tucson shooting displaced two important political stories last
week. 1.) the sentencing of former House Majority Leader Tom Delay to three
years in prison for money mischief, and 2.) the
appointment of JP Morgan executive William Daley as White House Chief of
Staff. Both of these stories tell us as much about ourselves as the lethal
antics of Jared Lee Loughner, but nobody paid
attention.
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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