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Monday, January 10, 2011

"BANDE DE ZOUAVES" (SEE COMMENTS). Bad enough that we have another pointless mass murder by an obvious lunatic. Worse that the so-called intelligentsia immediately presume to make sense of it as an expression of the politics of their own political enemies. A senseless act cannot be forced to make sense because some species of rationality is applied to it after the fact. The irony is that the most highly educated liberals would agree with this statement wholeheartedly if the context were different. For example, if I were discussing the Creationist interpretation of the Big Bang, they would be cheering me on and congratulating me for my sagacity and impeccable logic.

But we're not talking about the Big Bang. We're talking about the bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang in Tucson, Arizona. Which can be retroactively imbued with all kinds of sense even though the perpetrator -- who, thanks to MySpace, is abundantly on record with his 'writings' -- has never expressed a sensible thought in his short, ignorant, drug-addled life. He's simply a living, breathing oxymoron, with the emphasis on moron.

Ironically, that's where the emphasis should usually be placed when this term is applicable. Except in the hands of (a handful of truly talented) poets, an oxymoron is an impossible contradiction: an illiterate who rails about the illiteracy of others, a fan of Mein Kampf who lists the Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books, a sadly unformed -- even stillborn -- mind that fears the societal dangers of mind control. This isn't poetry or a metaphorical indictment of a nation that quarrels sharply about sharp differences in political philosophy. It's insanity.

The poetic resonances aren't attributable to the event itself or its perpetrator. They're attributable to the phony wave of meanings imposed afterwards in order to justify (or somehow leverage) what came before. And the operative literary term isn't oxymoron but irony. Of which there are almost too many instances to count. The sudden rush to condemn military metaphors in politics because a military reject who doesn't know enough about language to discern the difference between 'grammar' and 'diction' picks up a gun and shoots 20 of his fellow citizens indiscriminately. The equally sudden rush by Democrats (the people's party, don't forget) to constrain freedom of political speech because a high-school dropout incapable of articulate speech of any kind resorted, in his frustration, to gunfire instead. The instantaneous equation between this deviant advocate of incoherent, atheistic anarchy and the predominantly Christian Palin/Tea Party/Constitutionalist faction in American politics which has just demonstrated the most effective use of grass-roots free speech in the New Media yet seen in an electoral campaign.

I could go on. But you get the picture. Any conversation which employs an act of insanity as a basis for political analysis, criticism, or reform is itself insane. And I fault everyone in the MSM, specifically including Fox News, for even giving such conversations house room. There's a term in the law known as "fruit of the poisoned tree." In courts it means that inferences drawn from illegitimate sources are impermissible as bases for argument.

Every word you hear about the Tucson shootings that somehow indicts or questions the rest of us is the fruit of a poisoned tree. Unless you personally happen to be a psychotic high-school dropout with a history of irrational/violent eruptions in public places, a grandiloquent MySpace page that begs for unearned attention, an obscure prejudice against Jews and all mind-control-oriented governments that are neither Nazi nor Communist, and own a gun with a big enough magazine to shoot 20 people at random.

In that case, you should probably pay attention.

Me? I'm just waiting for the ultimately impotent Stupid Wave to subside. And praying for the people who were shot and their families. They're the ones who deserve our thoughts, empathy, and other higher human faculties right now.


No comment about the above. I just thought of it today (actually, truthfully, last week) and can't (couldn't) get it out of my head or my dreams. The sound quality isn't good, so I'm just gleaming the original stream to a mind we know is still fighting hard to come back to us. Come back from the snow and cold. No matter how beckoning the beyond might be. We pray...

Amen.

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