I wrote this on Monday, the day after the crime that evoked it. The post has sat in my drafts nagging at me since. I still don’t know if I want to post it but it is a few days later and I’m still angry, so what the hell. I asked Dr. O’C to read it today and to tell me if it was too harsh. She said it wasn’t, but then Dr. O’C often does her red hair and Irish blood proud with the ferocity of her opinions.

We’re a good match:

Be forewarned – I’m pissed off. I’m sick to my stomach and I’ve got some strong words regarding my homeland. Some of my American readers may be offended, I may even lose some readers today. But to be perfectly honest I’m not in the business of stroking the egos of my fellow countrymen and I’m not in the mood to mince words.

I’m disgusted by the execution of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician gunned down at church this weekend. I’m not going to talk about abortion because ultimately, abortion is not the point. I’m not interested in an argument about abortion. My views on the subject aren’t black and white, nor are they particularly relevant.

There’s a meme circulating about some of the media that Right Wing talkers bear some of the responsibility for Tiller’s killing. As an example they cite hosts like Bill O’Reilly, who referred to him as Tiller the Baby Killer, compared him with a Nazi and went through great pains to paint the doctor as a murderer. They say that he stirred up the passions of the radical anti-abortion movement by essentially painting the doctor as a mass murderer. Between this killing and one last year in a Tennessee church in which the murderer cited a book by right wing author Bernard Goldberg it does seem that there are some truly unhinged individuals listening to the Far Right. But I think this is an oversimplification – something at which the American media excels.

For the last month, a la Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me”, I’ve been listening to some of the far right talkers on a daily basis - O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Michael Savage. And like Spurlock, with a steady diet of this tripe I feel sick and rotten inside. These people mislead for a living – plucking stories from the news and sound bites from enemies (and anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy) to support an agenda driven message. These people are frightening in their capacity for hatred of those with whom they disagree. Homophobia is rife in the Far Right as is misogyny. Savage regularly refers to homosexuals as ’sodomites’ and talks about the ‘fetid skirts’ of women in power. Levin recently suggested to a female caller that her husband ‘put a gun to his head’ rather than listen to her speak.

After a month of listening to these guys I’ve had enough. I can’t take anymore. I was interested in listening to a perspective with which I disagree and still am. I was amused for a while, then bemused. But after a month of listening I found that some of the hate that they spew into the ether was finding its way into my head. Not knowing how to process it, I started to feel a little bit dirty inside. I can’t handle this perspective. It’s too angry. Too rooted in fear and hatred. And I’m just not that kind of guy. I live pretty happily without hatred, anger and fear. I want to keep it that way. I’ve unsubscribed from all these Far Right podcasts. I’ll stick with The Economist and Counterpoint for my right wing perspective.

Appalling as these people are, as full of hate and vitriol, they aren’t responsible for Tiller’s death. They are not accessories to the crime. No more than Keith Olberman is responsible for the slaying of an army recruiter in Arkansas. Certainly not on their own. They created an environment in which it was acceptable to despise the work that Tiller was doing, but they didn’t pull the trigger.

Tiller’s murder is indicative of a greater problem, of a disease that has infected my homeland. And lest you think I’m a standard ranting Leftist, this disease isn’t just being spread by the Far Right. What about guns? The Left has muzzled itself on the issue of gun control. It seems like every week there’s one of these killings. In 2004, 81 people a day died from gun shot wounds in the United States. About half of these are suicides, but still – 81 people a day. In the last month, 57 people have died in seven different mass shooting events – dead at the hand of some madman with easy access to a legal gun. Earlier this year we commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. And the Democratic Party has been silent on gun control for about the same amount of time. We – the people who don’t fancy getting shot by some random psycho – have lost the war.

The NRA has won and sits bloated and smug on its coffers while America shoots itself – repeatedly – in the foot.

And then there’s the media itself. The media that is so obsessed with ‘fairness’ that it shows two sides (and only two) to every story – one is either for abortion or against abortion, one feels that it is either a fundamental right or murder with no room for nuance.  The media that glamourizes violence by splashing murderers faces all over the television for weeks after a grievous crime. The media that creates a carnival atmposphere whereever it goes – with bold headlines and special reports. The media that is unwilling or unable to scratch below the surface of a story, opting instead for the fifteen second sound bite to explain the news.

But do you know who bears the most responsibility for Tiller’s death?

We do. We who will watch the press coverage with disgust, outrage and sadness for a few days and then move on. We’ll think, ‘how sad’ and ’something must be done’ for a week or so. But then we’ll find another shiny object to distract us.  We’ll find some new story to briefly grip our attention. We’ll go back to watching American Idol and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. We’ll go back to moaning about our jobs and our families and the difficulty of life.

And nothing will change.

Nothing ever changes.

But something has changed irrevocably for George Tiller’s wife and children. They won’t be getting back to life as normal in a few days. I’ve never lost a spouse or a parent, so I don’t know how long it takes to mourn but I don’t imagine that they’ll be sitting down with a bowl of popcorn to watch the next episode of The Real Housewives of Wherever the Hell any time in the near future. And even if they do there is going to be a yawning hole in their lives where their father/husband used to be. How the hell do you fill that hole?

I hear on almost a daily basis about just how wonderful the United States of America is – a force for good in the world, a beacon of freedom and liberty, a noble and powerful country to be admired and imitated. I’ve felt that myself. I felt it with the election of Barack Obama very recently (that feeling is rapidly fading). I feel it when I think about the U.S. that saved the world from Hitler. I feel it when I think about the moon missions and biomedical advances and American fiction and jazz and rock and roll.

But today I call bullshit on the myth of America.

With the death of George Tiller, I see the United States of America in 2009 as a cancer patient, rotting away from the inside. The United States of America in 2009 is a parody of itself, a nation self-obsessed, a nation trillions of dollars in debt but still spending hundreds of billions of dollars for a military to protect itself from an imagined enemy while its people can’t afford to go to the doctor. The Unites States of 2009 spends countless hours arguing about the trivia of who can and cannot get married while madmen can buy guns at the local Wal-Mart. The United States of 2009 doesn’t make anything and sits idly by while jobs go overseas and people lose their homes. The United States of 2009 watches with the appropriate amount of manufactured horror while innocent people get gunned down at work, at school, in the street, in their cars or at church. And then the United States of America in 2009 changes the channel and thinks to itself…

But everybody’s gotta die sometime and we can’t save everybody
It’s the best that we can do.

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The legendary Steve Earle’s “Jerusalem” is available from Steve Earle - Jerusalem.

 
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