What is it OK to say?
Who gets to decide what's OK to say?
Are Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and/or Bill O'Reilly responsible for any of the tragic mass shootings of the past couple of weeks?
I have my answers to those questions. I'm think a lot of people here would not agree with me.
There have been a bunch of diaries recently condemning extreme rhetoric on the right. There have been several diaries directly accusing right-wing celebrities (including Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly and Chuck Norris) of responsibility for the actions of gunmen who have wreaked havoc.
I don't think the connection is as clear as those diarists propose.
First, I'd like to point out that every political era of the 20th and 21st centuries has been witness to mass killings. It's true we've had a really disturbing cluster just lately. But, I don't think it's because Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are on the air.
The people who carry out these horrible actions are sick. Very, very sick. They're not all men. Some of them hear voices in their heads that tell them to kill. Think of Andrea Yates, who killed her children -- for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some of them think the voices on the television are telling them to kill. Some of them think the government is beaming microwaves into their brains.
What they have in common is that the impulse to kill originated with their disease, not the 24-hour news cycle.
The Unitarian church shooter might just as easily have thought Barney the Singing Dinosaur was telling him to kill Unitarians because they don't follow the Pope. The Alabama shooter might as easily have thought his dog was his inspiration.
I could sit down and watch Glenn Beck on a continuous loop for several weeks, and I still wouldn't try to kill anybody. I might throwup a lot of times, but that's beside the point.
I see Glenn Beck, or O'Reilly, or Hannity and I change the channel, because I think they're tools.
That's how free speech works. I've heard enough of these guys' schtick that I know they don't make a bit of sense. I thank THEY know they're making it up. They push the extreme line because they know it attracts attention and gets them ratings.
If I was a conservative, I would probably watch them more and nod my head at times. But there isn't ANYTHING any of them, even Rush Limbaugh, could say that would make me load a gun and start looking for someone to shoot.
I'm sane. (Or, at least, I'm pretty sure I am.)
It's true that there is maybe one person in a million out (probably less) who adds up 2+2 and gets 35. Make no mistake, the conservative commentators are only saying "4". They're being very careful not to step over the line and say "Kill the liberals." If they do, they couch it in terms that make it clear to SANE people that they are doing what passes for joking in some circles.
Yes, that one paranoid schizophrenic in a million may hear these guys and add what they say to the generally crazy chatter in their heads and come up with a plan to kill people.
But the question is, what do you do about it? Do you take O'Reilly off the air because a crazy person might tune in?
Take, for example, a case that happened during the 2004 election.
BTW, nobody was killed in this example.
But a lot of people who use the social networking site LiveJournal.com heard about this one.
An LJ user, on election night, was expressing her deep frustration that George W. Bush was re-elected, in the face of overwhelming evidence that he was incompetent and a danger to the world. She posted some comments in her journal that were a bit over the top -- like, "I'd like to shoot him," over the top. Or maybe just, "I wish someone would shoot him."
Somebody who read her journal turned her in to the Secret Service, who showed up at her door a couple of days later.
The person in question owned no firearms, had no history of violence, and after a mostly friendly chat, the Secret Service agents agreed that she was no threat to anyone. However, this person, who simply exercised her right to free speech in a slightly extreme way (I'm making a distinction here between "I'd like to shoot him," and "I'm going to shoot him."), was very aware that she was in danger of ending up on the No-Fly List.
I don't know whether she ended up on the No-Fly List or not, but I think it would have been a very unfair result if she did.
The point I'm making is that extreme rhetoric is not the exclusive domain of the right. We do it, too. Someone out there is right now saying "But we aren't inciting anyone to kill!"
Maybe you think you aren't. But you can't tell how a mentally ill person is going to interpret what you say.
I don't view this as being much different from pornography. What shocks the shit out of me, may be the soft-core stuff to you.
Glenn Beck's tearful, "I'm just a person who cares about my country and is afraid," just sounds a bit stupid and silly to me. Others are interpreting it as a call to armed insurrection.
But why have there been so many of these awful massacre events lately? Is it because the defeated Republican Party is whining a lot? Or, is it because with our economy in the dumper, with millions of people out of work, with millions of people wondering how they're going to feed their families, buy medicine, hold on to their homes -- there's a lot of free-wheeling angst bouncing around out there.
In good times, when someone starts slipping over the edge, friends, family, neighbors, reach out to help them. They get into community mental health programs, they get help dealing with what's driving them toward violence. Not every single time -- a few slip through the cracks in the best of times.
But now is not the best of times. Community mental health facilities are being cut. Friends and family may be too wrapped up in their own struggle to survive to see the person who is slipping into madness.
And, when the guy with the fragile sanity turns on his TV, he hears about the guy who ambushed the police because he thought they could no longer protect the population (logic anyone?), or the guy who killed 13 people, or the guy who shot people at the community center because he imagined they were making fun of his broken English.
If you're already almost there in the tinfoil hat department, seeing news coverage of a shooting may make it seem like a more acceptable course of action (if you're mentally ill).
Is the answer silencing the right-wing commentators? Stopping TV news coverage of the shootings? I don't think so, any more than outlawing all nudity, no matter the context, is a reasonable response to porn.
IMHO, the answer is two-fold:
- Get this economy back on its feet so people don't feel so threatened.
- Increase mental health resources in the community, so people who are slipping off the edge have a safety net.
Will these two (and I realize that first step is a doozy) things stop all mass shootings by mentally ill gunmen in the future? Of course not. Someone is always going to fall through the cracks.
But we've got to realize that we can't be the judges of what is extreme and what is too extreme. During the Bush Administration, saying the war in Iraq was wrong was defined as an "extreme left-wing" position.
You can't have the people in power defining what is "extreme." Even on our side, there are plenty of people who would silence opposition if they could -- and that is never a good thing.
To reiterate my three questions from the introduction:
What is it OK to say? Just about anything except 'overthrow the government by armed insurrection' and 'kill him.'
Who gets to decide what's OK to say? The Constitution
Are Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and/or Bill O'Reilly responsible for any of the tragic mass shootings of the past couple of weeks? No. Mental illness was to blame.