This essay about America's culture of violence and addiction to guns was originally written in December 2012, days after the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre.
THE MONSTERS WHO WALK AMONGST US
As I watched with horror and rage the news coverage of the mass murder of children that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut, the old suppurating wounds opened again. Such psychic wounds never really heal. It is often so if your family has been effected by gun violence. And with every new incident, you revisit your own private tragedy again through others in the public forum of the news media. Your tears flow into their's and you form a strange bond of intimacy with people you will never meet, separated by years and a thousand miles, yet united by a terrible, shared experience. You have been there before and know you will visit that dark landscape of the soul again before long. It is only a TV broadcast or a newspaper column away. There are those amongst us who make it so and make their fortunes from our pain. It is of those men I wish to write.
Monsters do indeed walk amongst us. I do not wish to focus on the sadistic, the lonely depressive or the lost deluded souls who shred the fabric of our lives by lashing out at a world that has turned its back on them. No, I wish to speak about the real monsters behind the tragedies at Columbine, Virginia Tech and, now, Sandy Hook Elementary. The real monsters are not the losers of Life's lottery skirting the margins of society. No, the monsters responsible for this latest slaughter are the sweepstakes winners of Life - they who are the pillars of the business community, they who make the guns that have shaped the American consciousness and destiny. Their millions depend on spilling your children's blood.
It's quite a booming industry and my own connection to it is no less typical than many of the families victimized by gun violence. You could say it is quintessentially American.
My uncle John Chiarelli, the manager of a Goldblatt's on Chicago's Westside, was critically shot in 1976 when some demented moron casually strolled into the store's employee lounge and began spraying the room with bullets. From what our family could glean, the guy who did the deed had been obsessively stalking one of my uncle's female employees. Rejected, this freak returned the favor by attempting to remove her from the dating pool - permanently. The trouble with his master plan: she wasn't even in the building, let alone the lounge, on the day of the shooting. Apparently in America it's easier to buy a gun than it is to read an employee schedule posted on the manager's office door (back in a less paranoid time when such information wasn't closely guarded).
However Life has shortchanged you, there's always a local gun peddler eager to help you redress this imbalance of justice. (Feeling unlucky in love, punk? Make her day with a Makarov! Not packing enough heat in your pants? A .357 Magnum Colt Python will help you rise to any occasion.) Besides, American free market capitalism demands that a profit must always be made . . . . even if that endeavor is driven by hatred and insanity and its end result is the death of innocent people.
Ask the Nazis: they knew all about the market forces behind madness. So did the industrialists and armament manufacturers who backed them politically and profited from the Third Reich's policies of war and genocide. But it was the common soldiers on both sides, men like my uncle John - not the apparatchiks, accountants or academics - who received a thorough education in this brutal economic reality. They paid for the corporation's profits with their own blood.
Uncle John was a powerfully-built man with an iron constitution and a will forged from the same stuff (think of a Sicilian version of Mr. Clean and you'll get a feel for his physical presence), a guy who served honorably as a master sergeant in the army during World War II. What the whole German Wehrmacht couldn't do after three grueling years of combat was nearly accomplished twenty years later by some candy-ass Clint Eastwood wannabe throwing lead into the air with a snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver.
In a supreme irony, my uncle was a legal gun owner. And like many victims of gun violence, it did him absolutely no good when it came time to defend himself. So much for the N.R.A.'s biggest rationalization for buying more guns: personal responsibility for one's own safety.
John survived the initial shooting to live out his remaining years in what is best described as a living death. Broken of his otherwise robust health and unable to fully recover from his wounds, he became a shell of the man he once was. His massive bull neck now replaced with a mass of wattled scar tissue, the deep chest sunken, his once commanding bass voice now thin and raspy. But the razor-hard glint of his eyes still remained and they spoke more eloquently than any words could of the pain, pity and humiliation he was undergoing. One night, several years after the incident, robbed of his health, his career and his dignity, his life was finally taken from him too. After so many years of stress placed on his heart, it gave out on him in his sleep in 1982.
Ironically, a few years before this shooting occurred my uncle had given me a German helmet as a Christmas present. For an eight year old boy who had been spoon fed a steady diet of Hollywood warfare on TV - beginning with John Wayne swaggering up the sands of Iwo Jima and ending by The Duke telling America to circle the wagons against the Vietcong - it felt like I had been handed my manhood. It was not a pretty collector's grade, early production model with rolled edges and its insignia still intact, a helmet used in the pseudo-pagan rallies the Nazis loved so dearly. No, the evidence indicated that this one had seen the rigors of combat, its leather lining stained and rotted by contact with perspiration, the natural effusion of human terror. I wondered about the person who wore this helmet and the story it told: did my uncle kill its wearer or had they been taken prisoner? Since it was a late production model used during Germany's desperate last years of the war, its wearer could have been a member of the Volkssturm, a boy my own age or an old man. Had he been a forced conscript or a hardline Party fanatic? I will never know. Certainly my uncle wouldn't or couldn't divulge the answer. When I asked him about his experiences during the war he did something completely foreign to his blunt nature: he blanched and went eerily silent. A part of this intimidating man withered before my eyes. As the totemized souvenirs of war passed from one generation to the next, so too the baton of America's culture of violence.
In America, the gun is considered a talisman of the highest egalitarian principles because it empowers the weak, degrades the elevated and coarsens the social discourse. Advanced technology has given the lowest of the low the instruments necessary to bring the highest, most noble and beautiful things in life down to their cesspool level. This explains its great popularity in America, a nation intoxicated with the narcotic illusions of populism, a place where the bullet is considered a suitable finis mot to any dispute. Trouble is, disputes end and the reasons they started are soon forgotten, but the pain remains, in a world already so full of it. A conclusion with consequences that are hardly conclusive, a bullet keeps on murdering long after it has sent its intended victim to his or her grave. It murders civility. It murders peace-of-mind. It murders integrity. It murders our humanity, victim by victim, one piece at a time, until nothing is left even for the cockroaches.
Why is America’s attitude towards guns so markedly different from the rest of the industrialized world? Perhaps if you've ever had a platoon deploy through your backyard, watched helplessly as your friends were executed by firing squad, seen your neighbor’s children walking around with hollow eye sockets and empty sleeves or had to pick through the rubble that was your home to collect pieces of your loved ones in a wicker basket after an artillery barrage you might feel less affection for them. The last time we've ever experienced such horrors on American soil was during the Civil War, an event beyond living memory. So, it’s possibly the last word in decadence and perversity to celebrate this run of good historical fortune by inflicting upon ourselves a gun-related homicide rate that exceeds ten thousand lives every year.
Our neighbors to the north, the Canadians, have as many, if not more, guns per household than Americans. They view and play the same violent movies and video games we do. So how can we explain the higher rate of gun-related violence in our own country? The correlation is simple: produce a society with higher levels of economic inequality and provide the populace with easy access to firearms. Then, pressurize the social climate further with a greater emphasis on status competition, materialism and immediate impulse gratification while saturating our popular media with images of carnage. Stir in poor critical thinking skills due to cutbacks in education, swap out the facts and their logical analysis with cant and conspiracy theory paranoia and our inflamed primal survival reflexes will do the rest.
Now, observe the fat cat industrialists on the terrace of their manse in a gated community as they watch the ensuing slaughter over perceived limited resources in the world's richest country . . . . while they continue to profit financially from the results. Their lapdog, the news media, spoon feeds the great unwashed the usual, sing-song decoys through the conduit of institutionalized racism. The "natural criminality" of African-Americans and illegal immigrants (code for Hispanics) is always fingered as the culprit, yet most of these mass murders are perpetrated by white Christian males. This racial profiling is a distraction and a false lead to throw us off the scent, but who are the real criminals, the éminence grise working the levers behind this tragedy? To find out, follow the trail of money.
The corporations, in gaming our domestic policies for their own financial advantage, have created this monstrous dynamic. They enable our country's high murder rate because their bottomline counts on it. Corporate greed has transformed this nation into a model of ruthless, Spencerian Darwinism and the many who pay the highest price for the profits of the wealthy few continue to be the poor and the middle-class. It is just another way in which to keep the people in their place. It is class warfare in its purest form because the ammunition is live and its victims remain very much dead.
As I write this essay, my uncle has been resting in his grave for thirty years and the bastard who put him there has been out on parole walking the streets of Chicago for the past twenty, but the ones who made and sold him the gun have basked in the community's esteem before and since. Thanks to the corporate gun lobbyists working so closely with our morally bankrupt legislators and justice officials, my uncle John, after faithfully serving his country, finally has his piece of the American Dream: a slab of real estate 6 feet long by 4 feet wide by 6 feet under.
Monsters walk amongst us. In the real world, monsters do not shamble out of the shadows in tortured forms, but come to us in comely shapes with a warm smile, reassuring words . . . . and eyes as black and soulless as a shark's. Their shirts are starched and crisply pressed. Their cars are expensive and their lawns well-manicured. They smile and wave at their neighbors when they walk out to the mailbox. They appear to love their families - they just don't give a fuck about your's. They have material success and are admired, but they are hollow inside and unrepentant. Their wealth is made by impoverishing our world, by making and selling devices that end innocent, productive lives. And our society applauds them for it.
Make no mistake about it: the pushers and pimps of America's gun addiction would scalp season tickets to the Children's Crusade for a quick buck and a fast laugh . . . . and wind up being toasted from one coast to the other for their efforts, instead of being the recipient of a Federally-sponsored vacation in Leavenworth, Kansas. They are the closest thing to a monster that you or I will ever encounter because they do not acknowledge boundaries and feel no empathy for others and the only god they worship is the Almighty Dollar.
They pontificate and prevaricate, bloviate and bluster and wag their fingers at us about personal responsibility. They solemnly lecture us about our sacred American traditions of Second Amendment rights and frontier justice. How the carnage of these mass executions could have been mitigated if only the industry had been deregulated and everyone - including small children - were armed to the teeth with their products.
To them it is all a delightful game with the American public as their pawn. They snigger deliciously and check their online balances when every redneck cretin rushes out to buy the same model of handgun used to shoot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. They smirk with secret satisfaction at how our gun laws never toughen and bills are stalled in Congress because our representatives know that their careers will be deep-sixed if they go up against the N.R.A. and the corporate interests they protect.
These men seem to be a model of civic order, but, in reality, they are the agents of horror and chaos. They claim to honor the spirit that made this country great, but their disrespect for human dignity and life belies their contempt for it. They mock America and those who died defending its freedom.
The politicians and lobbyists tell us now isn't a good time for a dialogue about gun control. I have news for them: it is ALWAYS a good time for a discussion about sensible gun control. The time is ripe for America to end this cycle of abuse by ending the N.R.A.'s stranglehold. The American people need to remember that the agendas of the corporations are subordinate to the will of the people, not the other way around. Americans need to seize control of the discourse and reassert their fundamental rights; to petition our representatives to pass legislation that reflects the welfare of the public, not the politics of corporate greed.
Copyright © Curt C. Chiarelli