I don't believe in hell

Which is momentarily inconvenient, as there is nowhere else that seems remotely fitting as a final destination for these people.

Update: I will be adding "dance on this man's grave" to my bucket list.

In search of Bartholemew Cubbins

Like just about everyone else in America, I've been thinking a lot about the horrendous assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. I don't know if it's possible to be anything but horrified and appalled by an act of violence so senseless and monstrous. As more is learned about the man who (allegedly) shot Rep. Giffords and murdered six innocent people, a clearer picture of derangement and alienation develops. We may never know what motivated him to do what he did. Anyone who would kill a 9-year-old girl is probably beyond the understanding of reasonable people.

However shocking the attack was, though, it didn't seem surprising. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems that the national reaction has not been one of "how could this have happened?" but more "why has it come to this?" It feels like this is the culmination of a corrosive process that we've all been watching. Obviously it's impossible to truly understand any point in history other than the one in which one lives, so things tend to seem unique or extraordinary simply from the accident of having been witnessed without the ability to compare with the past, but it sure seems as though our national discourse has become exceptionally poisonous lately.

Playing on both Devin's post from yesterday and a conversation I had with occasional co-blogger Elizabeth (which means you can blame my ramblings collectively on the entire Bleakonomy team), I wonder what role our opinion leaders have played. The only person who can be blamed in a real sense for the shooting is the unhinged young man who shot the people. However, is it wrong to posit that his lunacy could very well have been informed by the images he was digesting from the national media? Maybe his psychological decompensation was inevitable. But were the particulars of his attack informed by what he had been seeing and hearing about our country's leaders, Rep. Giffords among them? Did talk of "second-amendment remedies" and images of crosshairs over his district have a particularly morbid effect on the festering obsessions of an unhealthy mind?

Do I think that Sarah Palin is proximately responsible for the violence in Arizona? No. Do I think she bears some responsibility? Perhaps. One thing I do know, however, is she needs to stop insulting my goddamn intelligence. Via TPM:

An aide to Sarah Palin claims the crosshairs depicted in her now-infamous target list of Democrats were not actually gun-sights, and that it's "obscene" and "appalling" to blame Palin for the shooting.

"We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights. It was simply cross-hairs like you'd see on maps," said Rebecca Mansour on the Tammy Bruce radio show. Moreover, there was "nothing irresponsible" about the image, and to draw a line connecting Palin and Saturday's shooting is "obscene" and "appalling."

As the Gawker link above notes, the images were introduced with the words "Don't retreat, instead- RELOAD!" and a TPM reader submits that even Palin herself referred to the images as "bullseye." Anyone who has ever looked through a gun sight (or watched the opening sequence of a James Bond movie, for that matter) knows what crosshairs are and what they signify. Palin needs to start her damage control by firing Rebecca Mansour for, among other things, being an incompetent fool.

Which brings me to the title of the post. It seems I'm regressing, because I'm once again going to refer to a beloved book from my childhood. In "Bartholemew and the Oobleck," King Derwin of Didd nearly destroys his kingdom. In his hubris, he demands a new kind of weather, having grown bored with the standard varieties. This leads to the country being overwhelmed with a sticky, smothering substance that falls from the sky. As the book draws to a close, he sits glued to his throne with oobleck.

What saves the kingdom is the page boy, Bartholemew Cubbins. After having seen the situation get worse and worse, he finally confronts the king about his culpability and pride. The king bristles and blusters, but finally relents and simply says "I'm sorry." And with that, the oobleck melts away in the sun.

I am not such a numbskull as to believe that such a simplistic lesson holds all that much value for our polarized, fractious country. It wouldn't make things right if Palin were to apologize for her rhetoric. Indeed, there is no way to make the murder of innocents "right." But it would be a beginning if she (or anyone who has engaged in the same kind of brickbat-hurling, incendiary talk) could say "I'm sorry for whatever small part I've played in this." For my part, I think this incident is going to do irreparable harm to any ambitions she had either way, and the best thing she could do now is behave like a states(wo)man and sincerely express some regret.

Update: Over to you, David Frum.

Sometimes its OK to play the blame game

In the next day or two, I'm certain two things are going to come up in the wake of the assassination of the Hon. John M. Roll, as well as the attempted (so far) assassination of Rep. Giffords. The right wing is going to point out that this terrorist was mentally disturbed (likely true, as are most terrorists), and folks on the left are going to feel guilty and start pretending that it would be inappropriate to 'exploit' this terrorist act as a political issue.

I'm sorry, but after the years of the radical right intentionally undermining people's trust in government, eroding gun control, using racist slurs, and violent images (Sarah Palin just last year published an image of Rep. Giffords in the crosshairs of a gun sight), this IS political.

To pretend otherwise is no different from an abused spouse saying "If I had just been more polite, my partner wouldn't have hit me so much."

There have been increasing violent threats and attacks by the radical right in the last four years, including mail bombs just this weekend against government officials, all of them Democrats, by the way -- a distinction that, if history is any indicator, will spread to moderate Republicans next, followed by any elected official. We can thank, among others, the Supreme Court's decision that the second amendment provides individuals with the right to take violent action against the government

In the meantime, after-the-fact platitudes by Tea Party folks will ring hollow, unless they follow it up with concrete action in their rhetoric, membership, and funding.

"I do not think it means what you think it means"

Well, it's rare that I agree with Rep. Steve King (R - Mountains of Madness), but today I cannot help but concur. Via TPM:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) literally accused the Republican leadership of the House of being a bunch of big old liars on the floor of the House last night. But that isn't exactly what he meant.

[snip]

"As I deliberate and I listen to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader or another member, there is an opportunity to rise to a point of order, there is an opportunity to make a motion to take the gentleman's words down, however many of the members are off on other endeavors and I would make the point that the leader and the speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress and I don't believe it can be effectively challenged and those who do so actually cast aspersions on themselves by making wild accusations." [emphasis giddily added]

No arguments here, Rep. King. The mendacity of the leader and the Speaker is impossible to effectively challenge.

Because words matter

I'm going to meander my way toward my point today, I think. Thank you for bearing with me.

In Orwell's "1984," there's a scene toward the end wherein Winston is faced with another man incarcerated with him in the Ministry of Love. The man is there because he failed in his job, which was to redact literature to suit the purposes of the Party. He left the word "God" in a poem, because there was simply no other word that would have made sense in its place. The desperate man couldn't make sense of nonsense.

Back in the real world, I own a copy of Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories." It is one of my favorite books in the whole world. I love it. My copy contains a publisher's note at the front, explaining that the edition contains Kipling's original language and was published thusly because it reflects the actual words of the author. (I'm paraphrasing a bit.) This note is there because, in one of the stories, the word "nigger" is used.

I plan to read all of these stories to the Critter when he is old enough for them, because they are charming and magical and some of my best childhood memories comprise having them read to me. When I get to the story that includes the word "nigger," I am going to explain to him that it is a word that was used a lot when Kipling wrote the book. I will explain that the word is an awful word that people shouldn't use, because it was meant to insult and oppress black people back when white people thought they had the right to do so. I will explain that using that word today would be very wrong, and I would be very angry to hear the Critter ever use it.

What I won't do is pretend that it isn't there.

I mention all of this as preamble to sharing my thoughts about this:

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

This is so very wrong-headed.

First of all, the two words don't mean the same thing. One is a slur, and another is a social condition, albeit an awful one. One has no use other than as a term of abuse specific to one kind of person, while the other could be used to describe anyone who is in a state enslavement. They do not communicate the same concepts and replacing one with the other is intellectually sloppy and does naive readers a disservice.

I will abashedly admit that I myself have not read "Huckleberry Finn." (As chance would have it, my ignorance of Twain's writing was a subject of much surprised parental conversation over the recent holidays.) But my understanding is that Twain's use of the word "nigger" is not for the purposes of perpetuating the degradation of black people, but as a reflection of the language and attitudes of the society he is depicting. Isn't one of the primary reasons for introducing children to great literature to instill the ability to read critically and with discernment, to understand the layers of meaning in written communication? By depriving them of books that challenge their assumptions and experiences, are we not making them less able to function as mature and intelligent adults?

And even if Twain were using "nigger" with approval, the approach to objectionable speech isn't to silence it or pretend it doesn't exist. It is to thoughtfully and carefully explain what makes the speech objectionable, to counter it with better, more convincing and moral speech. It's not to take an eraser to it.

I obviously object to Gribben's efforts, and hope this edition dies a quick death. But I believe his intentions were good, and meant to counter the ridiculous exclusion of one of America's great novels from our schools. Our history and culture are complicated, and contain much that is ugly and troubling and difficult. Our children deserve nothing less than an honest understanding of this reality, and they deserve to read the literature that reflects it.

How's that for timing?

Well, if that doesn't just beat all. I make a little joke about Johnny Weir, and he makes the news with the least surprising announcement in the history of homosexuality:

Never a fan of labels, Johnny Weir is giving himself one: He's gay.

The figure skater says in an excerpt of his new book, "Welcome to My World," that being gay is "the smallest part of what makes me me." But he's not ashamed of it — or anything else, telling People magazine he hopes to be an example to other people. People is publishing excerpts of Weir's book in its Jan. 17 issue.

First of all, juuuuuuuuust in case anyone stumbles across this post and gets the wrong impression, let's be clear that I'm not making fun of Weir for being gay. What with my being gay myself, and all.

No, my reasons for not liking Johnny Weir have nothing at all to do with his being gay per se. (Okay, before I go any farther, can I just say that I think it is side-splitting that Weir is saying being gay is an eensy, weensy little part of who he is? Because Johnny Weir is incredibly gay. He's like the Village People to the power of Liberace. He makes Tim Gunn look like Steve McQueen.) I don't like Johnny Weir because he is impossibly obnoxious.

I can't find the link right now, but in a recent issue of Out magazine (which I find pretty damn obnoxious itself, for that matter), Weir responded to criticism of his wearing fur by saying he's not "passionate" about animals but he is "passionate" about fashion. Which means, I guess, that in Weir's world all that one needs to justify one's actions is "passion." I'm sure the toads at Westboro Baptist Church are plenty passionate, but somehow that fails to make me like them.

Anyhow, he's out and we can all stop wondering. Good for him. Now does this mean his fifteen minutes are finally up?

When you wish upon a star...

Oh, Blue Fairy*, if get my one wish on a star, let it be that this is true:

Could it be -- could Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), the darling of the Tea Party right who has claimed to get her political marching orders directly from God, emerge as a sensational new entry into the presidential race?

ABC News reports:

A source close to the three-term congresswoman said Bachmann will travel to Iowa this month for multiple meetings to seek advice from political forces there and party elders close to the caucus process before coming to a final decision regarding a potential presidential run. Bachmann, a native of Waterloo, Iowa, also is set to deliver a keynote speech at an Iowans for Tax Relief PAC fundraiser Jan. 21 in Des Moines, Iowa.

I fervently hope that this comes to pass.

First of all, it would be hilarious. Not since Lyndon LaRouche has there been a candidate for President with as... let's say "glancing" a relationship with reality as Rep. Bachmann. I would have material for months. It would be like a day at Barney's with someone else's American Express Platinum card.

But if there's any candidate whose run would cannibalize a Sarah Palin bid, it's Bachmann. The Ladies from Crazytown will split the hard-core social conservative Tea Party vote, and anything that makes former half-term Alaska Gov. Palin less likely to come within a grizzly bear's whisker of the White House is OK by me. (I know that she's supposedly unelectable, but even a remote chance that she could get elected is too close for me, and the GOP nomination would make it far too possible.)

Run, Michele, run. If you and your buddy can rip each other to shreds, the better for everyone else.

* by which I mean, of course, Johnny Weir