Calhoun’s Cannons for July 21, 12,
Summer Sequels
We forget all too soon
the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
It’s all Hollywood
now, nothing but damned sequels.
Columbine, Virginia Tech, Luby’s cafeteria in Texas
(23 people were taken out there. You forgot that one, didn’t you?),
Congresswoman Giffords, Ft. Hood,
now Aurora, Colorado, a mass shooting at a Batman premier. Here we go again. Another damned summer sequel!
Same assault weapons, same high-fire, large magazine cop-killer
handguns, same angry crazy guy, same dead people, same floor awash in blood and
bullets, same ritual of faux cries of shock and outrage, same 24/7 cathartic TV
coverage (great for the ratings!). And always the same hack dialogue, the
sad-faced pols asking us to pray for the families of all the dead people, the
excited, shocky survivors declaring how grateful they are that God was looking
out for them, at least.
Then comes
the braying calls for better gun control and the same old questions: Why do we allow the country to be awash in
weapons of war? Of course, there’s never
a serious answer to that question, but it has to be asked. Like in old war movies you just know the guy
who pulls out a photo of his family will be the next to die. It’s a cliché but it just has to be in the
script.
Yes, it’s all
a hackneyed formula, but the AK-47 question is needed to segue to the NRA and its
wholly owned Congresspeople who trot on stage to declaim their battle cry: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
This is followed by talk-radio voices from the heartland who declare that if
all those people attending that Batman movie had been carrying weapons of their
own, the shooter would have been taken out in a matter of seconds, which is
even more blood fantasy: The Hollywood vision of a theatre filled with highly
trained snipers, our very own American Leatherstockings, who can shoot the eye
out of a squirrel in a tree on a hill six miles away and do that even in a dark
theatre filled with tear-gas and chaos.
That’s a fantasy script that regularly plays out in the heads of so many out of
shape, middle-aged American males who have been watching too many Liam Neeson
movies.
Yes, Folks, it’s another episode of The All-American Komic
Kabuki Theatre of Blood with a script as preordained as a Noh theatre piece. It never changes. It’s all damned sequels
now. But we never get tired of the
reruns. Not Americans. Like little children who want Mommy to read
the same story over and over and over again, we can’t get enough of this particular
story --big guns, lots of big guns, we love those, and the Rambo, Bruce Willis,
Falling Down, Yippee-ki-yi Guy who doles out rough justice to all those people
who’ve done us wrong, we love that guy! He’s our contemporary Deerslayer, once
described by that sniffy Englishman, D.H. Lawrence, as “A man who keeps his
moral integrity hard and intact. An
isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing,
but is pure white.” Yep, that’s our
secret inner vision: Every man armed,
out there on the edge of the Indian-infested wilderness, stoic, a killer. Give
us AK-47s or give us death!
And the
violence. We love that, too. We need that killing like a coke-head needs
that spoon up his nose, then another and another, we just can’t get
enough. We’re a culture filled with anger,
paranoia and fear, addicted to the pornography of violence, living on the rage
and adrenaline. Faster pussycat, kill-kill!
In a sane
world, this state of affairs would cause despair in a normal person. Or prompt serious evaluation of the
culture. Or even an intervention. But
despair and questions and interventions only function if there’s hope that
things can change. Since things will
never change here, despair is pointless.
So are questions. And things will
never change because the sad truth is this:
Americans love their guns more than they love their children, more than
they love their friends and neighbors, more than they love their fellow
citizens, more than they love even themselves.
Since
that’s the case, the only sane response is laughter. Silly us. We’ve turned ourselves into a bloody rerun of
a bad movie that’s now on a constant replay loop. Whack-a-Mole and we’re the moles. Of course,
in a sane world, America
would be declared insane and locked up in a mental hospital to keep her from
doing harm to herself and others and be given treatment to restore her to
health. Sadly, that isn’t about to happen, because we do not live in a sane
world.
So, grab
your car keys. I hear there’s a gun sale at Wal-Mart. Time to stock up.
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