More than one full day after a senseless yet premeditated murder where a next-door neighbor (who’d been asked to stop shooting his gun after 11 o’clock at night) killed five people of an entire family, including a nine-year-old boy, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he was adding $50,000 to the reward money for the killer. But in the statement announcing this, he pointedly labeled the slain as illegal immigrants. He stated the status of the killer as the same.
What is the point of doing this? Joe Scarborough and two of his guests bemoaned the callousness and cruelty embedded in the governor’s words. Why would Abbott go out of his way to insert that information when it had absolutely no bearing on the incident whatsoever? Why mention it now, instead of expressing grief with, and sympathy for, the family members?
This is a strategy.
When it comes to sacred priorities like support for the Second Amendment, no sympathy can be extended to victims if it can be at all avoided. Once upon a time GOP lawmakers would offer hollow “thoughts and prayers”—they do none of that anymore. They won’t even take time to grieve. After the school shooting of a private Christian academy in which three nine-year-olds were killed, GOP House members touted miniature AR-15s on their lapels.
A decade ago, the GOP had chastised then-president Barack Obama for neglecting to wear an American flag pin on his lapel. Now the party is so depraved that they honor the weapon immediately after a slaughter instead of respecting those who were massacred, or taking any steps to ensure fewer instances like that ever happen in the future.
When it comes to sympathy, no quarter.
It brings to mind the immediate reaction online in response to the horrific bludgeoning attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was the Speaker who was targeted in a political terror attack of pure mayhem–with a hammer–by an unbalanced right-wing fanatic who’d actually fantasized about kidnapping and doing mortal violence to the Speaker; it was only when she was not available that Mr. Pelosi became a victim by proxy. The reaction from RW actors was inhuman. Some comments were driven by cruelty, but some were driven by humor, some dark capitulation to a spirit of absurdity where not even life and limb are of concern.
It’s an extreme nihilism that gives rise to that kind of “humor,” but those who laugh have no room for sympathy for the butt of the joke.
This is a strategy. This labeling, this categorization of people as things and not humans is a campaign to help reduce those people into something that can neatly fit into a box and get mentally filed somewhere, compartmentalized, no longer worthy of one’s heart or even of consideration. “Those people were illegal immigrants. Oh. I don’t need to care about this story anymore.” And it gets filed away.
Conservatives for so long have demonized immigrants, along with their denigration of immigration as a policy issue, that all of these negative associations now come automatically attached to that phrase. So Abbott utters the magic words “illegal immigrant” and suddenly whole swaths of people ignore this gun crime, this cold-blooded murder that happened on their own doorstep, in their own backyard.
It’s a pre-emption, a way to keep their voters from considering the real carnage that is piling up due to their inordinate devotion to the gun. These people must be diverted, their eyes averted, so that they do not feel a human connection with those who were slain in such an unceremonious fashion, nor with those who survived and who must now deal with the pain.
It’s all of a piece in this language game. Illegal? Not valid. Immigrant? Foreign. Alien? Not even human. Who cares about their pain? Can they even feel pain the way we do? They’re illegal—outside of the law. Are they even civilized? Do they rise to the level of attention?
“Illegal immigrant.” May as well utter: “Heart, become stone.”