And so the story appears to grow more and more murky and complicated. A high-school friend tells Mother Jones that Loughner’s mother is/was Jewish; he acted in ways that terrified people in his immediate vicinity in the months before the shootings; he had obsessions with grammar and lucid dreaming and the notion that the world around us is an illusion.
He may, in other words, have found his intellectual solace not in political ideology of any sort but rather in the false-reality fantasies of writers like Philip K. Dick, who all but invented a science-fiction genre about how the powerful have the rest of us living in a dream world in which we are manipulated. The most commercially popular version of this worldview is The Matrix, the 1999 film with Keanu Reeves as a computer hacker who discovers that he and all of humanity are actually trapped in a gigantic machine in which they are serving as energy sources for other machines.
The Dick view was, it turns out, quite literally out of the brain of a paranoid schizophrenic, as biographies of the writer himself reveal. But given that tens of millions have read Dick’s work and probably hundreds of millions of people have seen The Matrix and its sequels, not one frame of The Matrix nor one word in Dick’s hand can be blamed for the fact that they may have deepened one singular individual’s madness. As was true Saturday and as is true today, the villain is not “violent rhetoric” but the diseased and evil brain of Jared Loughner.
I offer some more perspective in today’s New York Post:
His apprehension means we will eventually have a definitive explanation for this act — that it won’t be left to ideologically interested parties to stitch together a politically convenient explanation from a diary entry, a MySpace page, a YouTube video…. Alas, that fact is insufficient or unsatisfying for the chattering classes. Our compulsive hunger always to know first, speak first and decide first has only been amplified by the fact that we can now all participate instantly in a virtual version of a national cocktail-party conversation on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. We must say something, even when we know nothing.
Ah, but the “humanitarian impulse” in Kosovo was applied by a Democrat President; whereas in Iraq it was applied by a Republican…
Seems like it’s impossible for Democrats to see anything “humanitarian” coming from the Republican party.
The Democrats have always have been the party of hypocrisy. N’est pas vrai?
That is on the money.
But did a Zbigniew Brzezinski really oppose the war for geopolitical reasons and not rather for ideological and political reasons?
If anything, the geopolitical reasons in favor of the war eclipsed the humanitarian reasons.
Those who doubt that should ask themselves, what would America’s power position in the world look like today, if Bush had been afraid to break Saddam’s neck?
Fortunately (in this case at least), it doesn’t really matter who we send to the UN, does it? Turtle Bay is for all practical purposes a lost cause. Better to allow Rice to flail about there than put her in a position where she could do some real harm. Which is pretty much how I feel about Obama’s nominee for SOS. I’d rather have Herself mucking about in Foggy Bottom than in the US Senate. Which is probably how her future boss feels as well.
Let’s keep in mind that SOS (though appropriate in this case) is a distress call. Hilself’s perch-to-be is known in WashDC as SecState, just as the Aggie remains SecDef.
What “moral and humanitarian impulse” do you have, Wehner? Your boss’ invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of its people.
Your boss’ invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of its people.
Or it didn’t, since the study you seem to be relying on had that as the upper bound of a highly unprecise estimate. Just as accurately, you could claim the study showed only a couple of thousand of people have died in Iraq at all since 2003, of all causes.
Best estimates are that the civilian casualties, excluding insurgents and foreign terrorists killed, are lower than they were during Saddam’s “peacetime.” Much lower.
So I’d say Wehner’s moral impulse is on far sturdier ground that your own, “hurf.”