I think we're the tombstone of the United States of America
-Sheriff Clarence Dupnik
The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city fathers they're trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere's horse
But the town has no need to be nervous
It's hard to say, based on the context, if Sheriff Dupnik understood the double entendre implicit in comparing his state to the infamous town of Old West gun-fighting fame. But a more apt description of the implications of the violence, racism, and insanity that have bubbled up in Arizona like some witch's brew could perhaps not be found if we tried.
Arizona is ground zero for the rise of populist fascism in America as corporatists grab power by scaring gullible white people into believing at any moment they will be dragged from their homes, raped, and beheaded by roving packs of rabid "illegals" (a term so racist and dehumanizing, yet so blithely accepted in civil political discourse that it marks anyone who's ever spoken it but whispered the euphemism "the N-Word" as a hypocrite of the worst kind). The corpofascist popular front known as the Tea Party is well represented in Arizona, but they are far from the only ambassadors of rightist extremism. Beyond them is an esoteric collection of anti-government bigots, white supremacists, and paranoid lunatics who's politics are inscrutable and bewildering to all but those who make an active effort to keep score. It is from this latter number that the cauldron was finally brought to a boil as a man who had recently went through a messy divorce from his sanity attempted to assassinate a member of the US House, shooting nineteen and killing six.
That the Arizona Assassin Jared Lee Loughner had no particuler political connections is irrelevant. He is the sort of pitiful creature that is incubated in times and places where political extremism has been normalized. One need look back no further than the 1960s and 70s, when political assassination were almost a normal occurrence to find proof of this principle. And while none can say, given how removed from reality the Assassin appears to be, that he would not have made the same decisions in a gentler age, the plain fact was Representative Giffords had been the target of reactionary violence before -her office vandalized and a gun left at one of her previous public meetings. Those who would use Loughner's lack of firm political ties to "disprove" the existence of a violent extremist underbelly to the Republican Party's populist base are actively denying that the forest contains trees.
But to dwell on the Assassin and his motives is to miss the larger story. The story of our once open society drawing a bit more closed as Fear envelopes more of our citizens, and the Security State opportunistically exploits the tragedy for even more power. In a story that broke hours before the tragedy and which was in course eclipsed by it, it was revealed the the United States government has cast a massive dragnet over anyone who's maintained online associations with Wikileaks, yet another part of the Government's campaign to intimidate and harass allies of the website. Had it not been for the Arizona Shootings, this might have been the weekend's big story, as Americans stopped to ask hard questions about just how far they're willing to let the Stazi reach into their lives. Instead, those individuals most predisposed to balk and dissent have rallied around the flag and have lost the stomach to criticize the President and his soft-authoritarian tendencies.
Yes, President Obama has handled the crisis remarkably well, with the dignity and gravitas expected of an American President at a time of National Suffering. The Healer-in-Chief took center stage Wednesday, and for a brief, shining moment we forgot about all the incompetence and betrayal; the pandering to Wall-Street and the disconnection from the American working class; the fatwa against Julian Assange for having the gall to point out that the America Empire has no clothes, and the institutionalization of George Bush's security apparatus.
For a few moments we once again saw the young State Senator who stood up in Boston and against all the conventional wisdom of the Village, asked us to refuse to be isolated into Red States and Blue States, but instead to unite with each other as American Citizens. For a few moments we were able to forget the Neoliberal "austerity" measures being worked upon us at this very moment to strip away what few protections working people have against the vicious market forces rigged by the Corpofascist cadre to turn us into modern-day serfs. For a few moments we saw again the first-term US Senator who stood in Philadelphia to give the most elegant appeal for racial understanding and solidarity any public figure had given since Martin Luther King had a Dream. We could forget that this president has put the New Deal up for sale and see him once again as the Change-Agent. The one who would end the Corpofascist infiltration of our government, disband the Stazi, and bring the troops home.
But now that the speech is over and and majesty of the President's elevated dialogue has faded from the air, we are left with the same meat hook realities that existed the day before the shooting. And all the President's lofty ideals, when examined in the harsh light of these pernicious truths, are no more an answer than the advice given by Bob Dylan's absurdist caricature of LBJ that "the sun's not yellow, it's chicken"
Mama's in the factory
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for the fuse
And I'm in the kitchen
With the tombstone blues
We are entering a grim period of history. The six dead and thirteen wounded in Tucson were not the first, nor the last victims of America's slide into fascism. Many challenges lie ahead, and still to come will be news more horrible than that which greeted us last Saturday.
If we wish to honor the victims and oppose the evil that demented the mind of a sad and sick boy into an assassin we can not surrender to our emotions or let them obscure the truth. We can not surrender to our anger or to our desire to rally round the flag and dismiss this tragedy as some inscrutable horror, some terrible aberration, divorced from the political reality of the second decade of 21st Century America. We must continue to resist the rise of fascism in all its forms even if that means opposing the agenda of the President who spoke so elegantly and with such heroic empathy in remembrance of the dead. We can not allow democracy and the rule of law to be supplanted by the fait of the corpofascist cadre, no matter who it puts us in opposition to or how hard or unpopular the struggle.
If we fail in this task, then from Arizona, where rests America's heavy tombstone, will come the nation's death rattle as the Kingdom of Terror expands its domain until its darkness blocks out the sun.
This post was originally published on Amerikana Magazine, and is part of a series on The Kingdom of Terror in which we live.