David Finkel looks at reasons behind the shooting of Us congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people.
After the initial horror, the responses to the massacre in Tucson have settled into the usual political dialogue-ofthe deaf, and like most such discourse these days it is pretty much useless all around.
Some Tea Party types are calling the shooter Jared Loughner a "leftist lunatic" because he reportedly owned books by Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx - not that there's any evidence that he's actually read, much less understood, any of them (as if Marx's writings had anything to do with individual violence in any case). Within the left and liberal-to-centre media, there's been lots of chatter that the massacre was "triggered" by the rantings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, or Sarah Palin's website crosshairs image, or the "overheated rhetoric" of the political debate. But we don't know that Loughner actually listened to Rush or visited Palin's website or paid much attention to politics
In any case, the problem with politics in America isn't that it's "overheated" or "hate- filled," but that it's largely empty, dominated from mildly liberal to hard-right by corporate power, and that the "hate rhetoric" moves in to fill the vacuum of
At first, of course, it made sense to wonder whether Loughner was actually a lone gunman or if perhaps others were involved, qualifying the massacre as an act of domestic terrorism. There's plenty of terror in U.S. history - most notably the wave of lynchings of African Americans from the defeat of Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Movement, but more recently also the Oklahoma City bombing.
It seems now, however, that Loughner was hardly an ideologically motivated terrorist. (Some of his writings apparently complain about "literacy," suggesting a racist bias against immigrants, but that's not whom he shot up in any case.) While hundreds of federal agents are swarming at taxpayers' expense over every aspect of his past life, it's increasingly clear that they'll discover what's already emerging from the accounts of his acquaintances -Loughner is an untreated schizophrenic, possibly self-medicated with drugs and alcohol that may have made the illness worse. Although he targeted Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, he could have gone after Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck, or his own parents or community college classmates.
So there are really two lessons here. The first, obviously, is that the carnage 21