Calhouns Cannons for May 29,
2014
As harsh as this
sounds -- your dead kids don't trump my Constitutional rights."
Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher
That's Joe, "The Plumber." You remember him? A few years ago, he was the darling of the
right, the poster child of the aggrieved White Guy. His cri
de coeur comes from his open letter to Richard Martinez, whose 20 year-old
son was murdered during the recent Isla Vista shooting
spree.
Mr. Martinez also had
a cri de coeur of his own. Hours after his son was gunned down, he cried
out, "“Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible
politicians and the N.R.A.,” he said. “They talk about gun rights. What about
Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people
say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died.
We should say to ourselves: not one more.”
And there it was, those perfect bookends: A grieving father asks why we have to live
like this and a reply from America's
NRA-fueled Gun Culture: Guns trump kids.
Guns trump sanity. Guns trump everything.
Then, since nobody was willing to deal seriously with Mr.
Martinez' key question -- "When will this insanity stop?" the collective
public attention veered off to the
shooter's weird obsessions, all spelled out in his loopy
"manifesto." Instead of America's
addiction to guns and gun violence -- which nobody
wanted to deal with -- the Twitterverse pivoted onto the psycho-sexual problems
of the "Entitled White Male."
And before you could say #YesAllWomen, the site was a-bloom with women
bearing witness to another poisonous strain running through American life --
misogyny.
Did Elliot Roger, with his fancy car and privileged life,
feel entitled to all the pretty
women? Did he blame his sad, sick life
on all those women who wouldn't give him what he wanted? Well, in short order the #YesAllWomen site
was filled with testimony that Mr. Roger wasn't in the least unusual. Called
tramps and whores, blamed for every male failure, groped, insulted, dismissed, demeaned,
harassed, assaulted, raped, killed, the #YesAllWomen's
list of daily insults and assaults was long and sad and pervasive.
And, I have no doubt, for too many men in this culture, that
list and litany was completely off their self-awareness radar. Who, me?
As Jessica Valenti, a columnist with the Guardian US, noted: "We don't view misogyny as an
ideology. We see it as a given for young
men." Which means that as an
unquestioned ideology, it continues to fly under our awareness. It simply is a given in America. Just like another ideology: Our relationship with guns.
So the collective huffing and puffing veered safely off into
a related but diversionary topic --
Angry (armed) White Guy As Misogynistic Jerk-wad -- then it was time to
move on. With the final note being set
by filmmaker Michael Moore. When the shooting took place, he was asked whether
he would write or speak on this latest slaughter. His reply was quite brief: No.
He'd said all that needed to be said and now it was up to the American
people to decide whether they wanted to live like this. And unless we did that, we should "rest
assured this will all happen again very soon."
The Isla Vista slaughter took 7
lives, including the shooter. According
to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "eight children and
teenagers are killed each day" in America. Eight kids.
That's more than one Isla Vista every day.
Joe "The Plumber," would no doubt find that an
acceptable tradeoff.
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