A propos of the recent Roseburg, Oregon, school massacre that left nine
dead, President Obama said, “we’re going to have to come together and stop
these things from happening.” That’s an understandable sentiment, and the
president has to say something, after all. But within the context of how life
is lived in this country these days, we’re not going to stop these things
from happening.
And what is that context? A nation physically arranged on-the-ground to
produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety,
and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation. Really, everything in
the once vaunted American way of life slouches in the direction of
depression, rage, violence, and death.
This begs the question about guns. I believe it should be harder to buy
guns. I believe certain weapons-of-war, such as assault rifles, should not be
sold in the civilian market. But I also believe that the evolution of our
Deep State — the collusion of a corrupt corporate oligarchy with an
overbearing police and surveillance apparatus — is such a threat to liberty
and decency that the public needs to be armed in defense of it. The Deep
State needs to worry about the citizens it is fucking with.
The laws on gun sales range from ridiculously lax in many states to
onerous in a few. Yet the most stringent, Connecticut, (rated “A” by the
Brady Campaign org), was the site of the most horrific massacre of recent
times so far, the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting. The handgun law in New
York City is the most extreme in the nation — limiting possession only to
police and a few other very special categories of citizens. But it took the
“stop-and-frisk” policy to really shake the weapons out of the gang-banging
demographic. And now that Mayor Bill deBlasio has deemed that “racist,”
gang-banging murders are going up again.
Which leads to a consideration that there is already such a fantastic
arsenal of weapons loose in this country that attempts to regulate them would
be an exercise in futility — it would only stimulate brisker underground
trafficking in the existing supply.
What concerns me more than the gun issue per se is the extraordinary
violence-saturated, pornified culture of young men driven crazy by failure,
loneliness, grievance, and anger. More and more, there are no parameters for
the normal expression of masculine behavior in America — for instance, taking
pride in doing something well, or becoming a good candidate for marriage. The
lower classes have almost no vocational domain for the normal enactments of
manhood, and one of the few left is the army, where they are overtly trained
to be killers.
Much of what used to be the working class is now an idle class that can
only dream of what it means to be a man and they are bombarded with the most
sordid pre-packaged media dreams in the form of video games based on
homicide, the narcissistic power fantasies of movies, TV, and professional
sports, and the frustrating tauntings of free porn. The last thing they’re
able to do is form families. All of this operates in conditions where there
are no normal models of male authority, especially fathers and bosses, to
regulate the impulse control of young men — and teach them to regulate it
themselves.
The physical setting of American life composed of a failing suburban
sprawl pattern for daily life — the perfect set-up for making community
impossible — obliterates the secondary layer of socialization beyond the
family. This is life in the strip-mall wilderness of our country, which has
gotten to be most of where people live. Imagine a society without families
and real communities and wave your flag over that.
President Obama and whatever else passes for authority in America these
days won’t even talk about that. They don’t have a vocabulary for it. They
don’t understand how it works and what it’s doing to the nation. Many of the
parts and modules of it make up what’s left of our foundering economy: junk
food, pointless and endless motoring, television. We’re not going to do
anything about it. The killing and the mayhem will continue through the
process of economic collapse that we have entered. And when we reach the
destination of all that, probably something medieval or feudal in make-up, it
will be possible once again for boys to develop into men instead of monsters.
