Where's The Love?

Jared Loughner gave liberals something they desperately needed: a political distraction, and as an added bonus, a platform from which to proclaim their superior values. They haven't had such a gift since Oklahoma City. Prizes like this are rare, and liberals will rub it out long after the coating's worn off, cheap tin exposed to toxic air.

Loughner's murderous rampage, shocking and awful, is well within the American grain. He's not the first nor the last lunatic to snap and shoot up a room. Armed inhabitants of a declining imperial power where politics are privately owned are bound to be itchy, if only a handful bother to scratch. In a brutal sense, public assassins provide the few flashes of reality left in this country.

After JFK's death, Malcolm X observed that the chickens had come home to roost. Malcolm, vilified from all corners, was correct. JFK was bombing South Vietnam while backing death squad violence in Latin America. Oswald, or whomever, brought some of that bloodshed back to the source. For a few minutes in Dallas, there was little difference between a US president and his puppets in Saigon.

Of course, politics were more in play in 1960s. Young liberals and radicals openly, actively challenged their Democratic elders, from LBJ and Hubert Humphrey on down. JFK's assassination did little to alter their course. Today, most liberals embrace those who despise and use them. No amount of Dem "betrayal" (i.e. performing their systemic function) will loosen liberal grips. The Arizona shootings justify liberal surrender while reactionaries seek solid footing between "respectful" discourse and their own ballistic fantasies. The corporate media reinforce these scenarios, feeding on the dead for whatever ratings they can grab.

Same shit, different day, as the Stoics put it.

It may be gauche to point out that those trying to politically exploit Loughner's madness care nothing for the anonymous victims of Obama's foreign policy, death scenes far grislier and more common than what was seen in Tucson. Besides, IOZ got there first.