This time it was a gunman shooting and
wounding a security guard at the Family Research Council headquarters in
Washington, D.C. The fact that the
target was a right wing organization and that the assailant briefly argued with
the guard over the FRC’s homophobic politics has brought out trolls of all
stripes on the Yahoo! News website.
I probably shouldn’t pay attention to readers’
comments on online news items.
Too much time on my hands, I suppose, though the impending start of the
fall semester will surely take care of that.
Meanwhile, I’ve uncovered a malignant trove of comments on the FRC
shooting story. A typical gem reads, “Thanks,
Obama, for emboldening gays.” Many
others are simply unrepeatable.
Several threads ask if the shooter is going
to face hate crime charges, with a few comments making the risible claim that liberals
are violent and should not be trusted with guns. I also had a good laugh at the posts linking
the incident with Occupy Wall Street. True to their penchant for reductionist
thinking, the wingnuts on Yahoo! have conveniently lumped their sundry liberal
and progressive bugbears into a single, inchoate target for their bile.
Rather than make a keening plea for greater
civility on the Interweb, I will dig in my heels and answer back.
A number of Yahoo! posters complained that
liberal tolerance is a double standard. It’s
clear that these people equate the desire for tolerance with moral weakness or,
worse, a willingness to passively suffer abuse.
(This is not a baseless claim—Jonathan Rieders’ sociological study of working
class, conservative whites in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Canarsie during the
1970s found that many of them associated liberalism with masochism.) In other words, gays and lesbians and their sympathizers
should be glad to take any maltreatment their stronger, more masculine brethren
dish out. This is a dangerous
assumption. The truth is that if a
particular group of people are singled out and pushed around long enough, a few
of them are going to push back. Not
every member of a marginalized minority is going to subscribe to the ethos of
Gandhi or King.
There is also the very strong possibility
that maybe, just perhaps, the gunman wasn’t so much making a political
statement as he was answering his inner demons.
I won’t speculate on what troubled the FRC assailant. It may well be the same pathology that infected
the movie theater and Sikh temple murderers. Or, it could be something even more inscrutable. Not every violent act has to have meaning.
Finally, the political right has no one to
blame for the erosion of civility but itself.
The so-called class war that conservative pundits accuse their opponents
of waging was begun not by liberals or progressives (two distinct political species
conservatives frequently conflate) but by this country’s moneyed elites. It’s a simple matter of divide and conquer:
Divert attention from substantive issues such as corporate fraud and political
manipulation by scaring workers into believing that what little ground they still
hold is being lost.
The unwashed foot soldiers for the 1% are an
ideologically reliable mass, unswayed by the evidence around them that the
system is riddled with rot. Instead,
they worry about taxes on wealthy “job creators” who in fact export jobs and
secret their wealth in the Caymans, about nonexistent plots to take their guns
or drive God out of their lives, and about “illegals” and “welfare queens”
receiving unearned “handouts” from government programs.
Conservative media act as an echo chamber
that amplifies popular resentments. Rush
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, et al., engage in agitprop to
divert their audiences’ ire from its rightful targets. It is little surprise that they have come to
shape and define the political discourse, and we are all the poorer for that. What we need in our national dialogue are
more Houyhmhms and fewer Yahoos.
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