Lost in the Empire of Guns, will America let its children (children?) lead it to a sliver of sanity?
Beau Elliot
America must love its dead.
It creates so many of them.
In the aftermath of the Parkland killings, one of the most sobering comments on American society came in The New Yorker: “Lulu Ramadan, a journalist at the Palm Beach Post, has covered three [mass shootings] in her career. She’s 23.”
One could hope, perhaps naively (or more likely, surely naively), that Congress might do something about trying to prevent our schools from turning into shooting galleries. (And, for that matter, churches, concerts, nightclubs, movie theaters, congressional baseball practices.)
But Congress, which moves like a sloth on fast days, has been stuck in nothing gear when it comes to budging optimism above absolute zero. As John Cassidy of The New Yorker points out, after the Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas, killings (seven dozen dead, many more wounded), congressional action on guns amounted to easing gun laws.
As David Jolly, a former Republican congressman, has said (via Cassidy), “Republicans will never do anything on gun control. The idea of gun policy in the Republican Party is to try to get a speaking slot at the NRA and prove to that constituency that you are further right.”
You can hope that a groundswell of public outrage could possibly start some change this time. But there have been a lot of mass shootings, and the result always seems to be change stuck in nothing gear.
And what of Our Great Leader, the tweetmeister of the Lincoln Bedroom? Well, he has previously pledged his fealty to the gods of the NRA, so. He did come out as being against the Parkland shooter (but then, who has come out in favor of him?), tweeting “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem …”
Well, that’s all good, I guess. Except that, just around a year ago, the Trumpster signed a bill rolling back an Obama regulation that made it more difficult for people with mental illness to buy guns.
So which Trumpster are you going to believe? The one who tweets or the one who signs laws easing gun regulations? You can see how change gets stuck.
Then, of course, Trumpy just had to jump all the way into Dada by claiming that the FBI screwed up the warnings about the Parkland shooter because the agency was too busy investigating the Russia affair.
The FBI has 35,000 employees. It can probably handle two investigations. The agency can probably handle them especially if the FBI person on the ground in Florida who got the warning, follows protocol, and informs the FBI office in Miami.
But details, details. You gotta admit, though, saying a foul-up in Florida was caused by an investigation almost 1,000 miles away stretches the so-called butterfly effect to the limits of surrealism.
When you’re at the limits of surrealism, what you really need is two or three doses of slapstick, and luckily, right-wing commentator Laura Ingraham was more than happy to jump into the fray.
Turns out, Ingraham was tired of some people, in this case LeBron James, criticizing Our Great Leader, so she told him to cease and desist. She went to law school (Virginia, if you must know).
But then, the portion of her brain that dozed off during law lectures decided to get down and, in a serious run of plantation mouth, she told LeBron to “shut up and dribble.”
Apparently, Ingraham believes only blowhards for hire such as her (preferably with an Ivy League education, such as her) are allowed to comment on politics and policymaking. Everyone else may speak the First Amendment from afar and admire its beauty. In the abstract, of course.
Hard to ignore that this was a well-off white woman telling a black athlete that he has no business discussing the serious items in life and he should stick to entertaining us.
Oh, she also accused LeBron of being an elitist. Probably there’s nothing quite so hilarious as an Ivy Leaguer accusing someone else of being an elitist.
Maybe she should follow her own advice:
Shut up and drivel.