In the wake of this shooting and the admirable attempts to hold the right responsible for creating an environment where targeting of politicians for violence is bound to happen, some efforts have taken the form of policing metaphors for violence.  I’ve seen people go as far as to quarrel with using language of the battlefield that has been drained through repetition of all its impact.  I promise you, saying things like “target” or even “set your sights” isn’t really contributing to the problem of political violence.  I do think that gun nuttery raises the temperature, but not just because it suggests violence as a legitimate response to losing elections, but it also raises the level of paranoia.  I do think there’s value in talking about the use of inciting language, like Sarah Palin is fond of doing, but I have to say that is probably less of a problem than paranoia. The violent rhetoric encourages people to see violence as a solution, but it’s the paranoia that gives them cause to get that wound up, or in the likely case of Loughner, to latch onto right wing paranoia as a delusion.  It’s therefore more important to target lies and paranoia when holding the right accountable than anything else.  They’d probably prefer it if we stuck to just talking about violent language, because that they can mostly give up without giving up too much.  But abandoning lies?  That’s definitely not something they want to put on the table.  But it’s way more critical. 

I’m not the only person who is focusing on this aspect.  Jon Stewart, after doing that irritating thing where liberals pretend to be responsible by not holding the right responsible, did get a valuable point in. 

I disagree with him that hyperbole is a problem in and of itself; as a humorist, he has to know that hyperbole is a valuable satirical tool.  “The Daily Show” uses it all the fucking time.  But hyperbole is a problem when it’s not hyperbole, if that makes any sense—-if it’s used to actually hoodwink an audience and make them believe things that are not true, as opposed to exaggerating to make a point through humor.  (Understatement works in a similar way—-it’s not literally true, but it can reveal greater truths through humor.)  But his larger point, that rhetoric should match reality, is the meat of this.  By far, the lies and paranoia that are increasingly becoming the majority of right wing rhetoric are the issue here.

This is why it misses the point to quibble over the specifics of Loughner’s delusions and saying that if there’s not a direct link between stuff he said and stuff Sarah Palin said, that means we should cease all operations of holding the right accountable.  The problem is that if paranoid thinking gets mainstreamed, it creates an environment where paranoid people get even more paranoid and delusional, and it dramatically increases the odds that someone is going to snap.  Tim Wise wrote about this here:

For while Loughner would never have likely contemplated political assassination in a culture where the most pressing issue was, say, a simple philosophical disagreement over tax policy, or the proper balance between interest rates and full employment, or the percentage of GDP dedicated to debt service as opposed to long-term infrastructure investment, that is not the culture in which he (or any of us) lives. Rather, we live in a nation in which it is commonplace, and considered completely rational, for elected officials to believe the President is a foreign interloper. We live in a culture where the nation’s most powerful Republican, House Speaker John Boehner, cannot bring himself to condemn the maniacal derangement that is birtherism, but is reduced instead to a mere acknowledgement that since Hawaii says the President is a citizen, that’s “good enough for him.”

We live in a culture in which it is utterly normal, to a degree that has sadly made it nearly banal, to hear multi-million dollar, best-selling authors and talk show hosts suggest that the nation is on the verge of total fascism, death panels for the elderly, door-to-door gun confiscation, and the reconquest of the American southwest by Latinos bent on ethnic war. In short, in a society where paranoia is the daily currency of mainstream commentators, and pseudo-schizophrenic ramblings are elevated to the level of persuasive argument, we ought not be surprised that such a tragedy as occurred on Saturday might happen.

What people in media and political leadership positions have a responsibility to do is to keep lies and paranoia in check, so they don’t flourish, and the right has completely abdicated this responsibility and has, in many cases, run in the other direction of promoting lies and paranoia.  Lies piled upon lies piled upon lies, and so reality becomes harder and harder for people swimming in this to find. 

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