CSotD: Shooting Pains
Skip to comments
There have been times when emigrating to Australia seemed like a good idea, but it doesn’t take a lot of reflection to recognize the futility. After all, Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach in 1957 and Stanley Kramer turned it into a movie in 1959 in which Australians waited for death to arrive in a post-nuclear cloud of contamination from someone else’s war.
Given the developments in communication — not just the Internet but instantaneous TV-by-satellite and global telephoning — over the past 67 years, there aren’t so many of us who can even remember when the Antipodes dwelt in splendid isolation.
The whole world is not only watching but is forced to participate, unless, like the fortune teller in Fiona Katauskas’ cartoon, they make a conscious, perhaps futile, effort not to.
Well, if it’s any comfort, a lot of us up here feel the same way.
Morten Morland suggests that Saturday’s assassination attempt has sent America into a state of terrified chaos and I wish I thought he were right. Perhaps he is, but, if so, it’s not because the event was unprecedented.
As Robert Ariail points out, we’ve got a long tradition of at least trying to kill our leaders, though we haven’t always proved terribly good at it. Part of the problem is that most of the would-be assassins have been considerably unhinged, starting with the fellow who, in 1835, attempted to shoot Andrew Jackson only to have both his pistols misfire.
Garfield and McKinley would likely have joined Reagan in recovering from their wounds, had they had his level of medical care available, but, then, he’d have likely joined them in death had he lived in their times. It’s a different sort of luck, but luck is a factor in most things.
Right now, there are questions about why the Secret Service didn’t have a wider security radius around the site, which is reasonable, but also about why they didn’t spot the guy with the gun in time to stop him, which amounts to demanding a miracle.
It reminds me of a fellow who appeared on Front Page Challenge because he’d been in the reception line when McKinley was shot. He said that, just before the assassination, he’d said to someone that he wondered how that fellow in line ahead of them expected to shake hands with the president, since he had his right hand wrapped in a towel.
If the kid Saturday had climbed up there with a camera to get a picture of Trump and the Secret Service snipers had shot him, we’d be asking all sorts of other questions.
And the fellow who grabbed Lynnette Fromme’s arm wound up being outed as gay, which at the time resulted in saving Gerald Ford’s life and ruining his own.
Well, perhaps if Thomas Crook had a funny nickname like “Squeaky,” we’d write off his attempt as absurd, the way her futile effort was dismissed, though that doesn’t explain why we also wrote off Sara Jane Moore as a nutjob.
Perhaps we were made of sterner stuff back then, or maybe we just didn’t have so much media, both social and commercial, to get us all het up.
Plus maybe being marinated in a continuous, unrelenting bath of Dirty Harry and CSI and so forth has left us with greater, but totally unrealistic, expectations of both armed lunatics and unfailing law enforcement.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Well, it’s a lovely thought, and also if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t keep bumping their little asses on the ground.
After JFK was killed, TV networks canceled some Westerns and cop shows, and toned down the gunfire on those that remained. And following the attempt on Reagan’s life, the name of the character on Greatest American Hero was changed from Hinkley to Hanley.
This time around, as John Cole notes, the GOP didn’t even cancel an appearance by gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, who recently declared that “some folks need killing.”
Not, John Deering reminds us, that Robinson was setting a new standard for violence-inspiring rhetoric.
And with the sudden outrage over Biden having said we should “put Trump in a bulls-eye,” am I the only person who remembers that Republicans defended metaphors, back when Sarah Palin’s PAC ran an ad putting Gabby Gifford’s district in the crosshairs?
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
As for toning down the rhetoric, Mike Lester rightly points out that Trump’s Democratic opponents have been publicly grateful that he escaped all but unscathed, and he’s correct that they previously compared his plans and his approach, particularly Project 2025, to the rise of the Nazi movement in ’30s Germany.
But in terms of pots and kettles, Brodner notes that the GOP has just nominated for vice-president a man who texted his former law school roommate, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a****** like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
I guess he came down on the unprintable-but-useful side, but he’s still a curious choice, given that Haley, Rubio and DeSantis were available. Not that they hadn’t said a few negative things about Dear Leader, too, but they hadn’t compared him to Hitler.
Who, I should note, is still considered a bad person by those who don’t embrace the Great Replacement Theory and hope to arrest and deport 20 million immigrants.
Juxtaposition of the Day #3
Slyngstad notes that insane conspiracy theories sprang up with the speed of a bullet following the assassination attempt, and he’s right, though they weren’t slowed down by having elected officials join in spreading the public delusions.
But Wilcox points out that rejecting plain facts and denying obvious realities has long been a hallmark of Trump’s approach to campaigning and to governing, and that, if he has cried wolf for the past eight years, it’s little surprise that his listeners have taken up the practice, even when their delusions work against his interests.
Still, it’s an ill wind that blows no good, and while Clay Jones may be overreaching to attribute to Trump the sales of T-shirts he saw in Milwaukee, there’s little doubt that the near-tragedy will be used for promotion rather than to inspire moderation.
Comments 11
Comments are closed.