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David Seaton's News Links
The obligatory theme for a political blogger this week has been the Tucson shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Wading through the papers, columns and the bloggers, everything I have read about is a stew of the same cliches that appear after every shooting of this kind. Among all the flood of cliches I found one, single, memorable quote from (as often happens) "Saint" Bob Herbert of the New York Times:
I remember having lunch with Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a few days after the Virginia Tech tragedy. She shook her head at the senseless loss of so many students and teachers, then told me: “We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”
At the bottom of it all lies what is, in my opinion, the marker, the key, to all of America's present day political dysfunction:
Because of an amendment to a sclerotic 18th century document (a time when it took about a minute to muzzle-load a single-shot, flintlock pistol) a 21rst century, gibbering maniac can purchase, carry and fire a semi-automatic pistol with a 30 bullet clip.
Here is the tragic key:
I get the feeling that much of the entire document is about as relevant to contemporary American life as that treasured Second Amendment and with similar results in all fields touched by political organization.
The chance of any of this ever getting changed?
Practically nil.
Another doctoral thesis for my "future Chinese historians"?
Because of an amendment to a sclerotic 18th century document (a time when it took about a minute to muzzle-load a single-shot, flintlock pistol) a 21rst century, gibbering maniac can purchase, carry and fire a semi-automatic pistol with a 30 bullet clip.
Here is the tragic key:
I get the feeling that much of the entire document is about as relevant to contemporary American life as that treasured Second Amendment and with similar results in all fields touched by political organization.
The chance of any of this ever getting changed?
Practically nil.
Another doctoral thesis for my "future Chinese historians"?
Amidst the sadness and the sick feeling that senseless violence brings, I noticed something underneath, a feeling that was obscenely inappropriate to the tragedy of the occasion: boredom.
I find myself not wanting to write about American politics anymore. Political news from the US seems increasingly, to my ears at least, to be the Shakespearean, "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
I write about politics for two basic reasons: because people tell me that I have some understanding of it, but mostly because I have discovered late in life that I love to write...
I love the mere act of writing itself, the putting together of appropriate words in the appropriate order in such a rich and beautiful language as ours... and political commentary is vaccinated against the terror of writer's block. There is something to write about every day. But what is coming out of the States is so hopelessly repetitive and so locked and loaded in its ideological matryoshka that it produces for me a "Larsen effect" of stupefying dissonance.
The world's a big place and I am going to give more attention to other problems, in the words of Robby Krieger, "The time to hesitate is through/ No time to wallow in the mire"... I hope my regular readers will bear with me while I work this out.. DS
