{"id":13549,"date":"2011-01-09T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/01\/09\/13549.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:58:32","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:58:32","slug":"a-point-of-agreement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/01\/09\/a-point-of-agreement\/","title":{"rendered":"A point of agreement?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Here’s the thing: estimate the odds, Gentle Reader, that Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or Sharron Angle or Michael Savage or even Jan Brewer will react to the news<\/a> by taking responsibility, in their minds, for the violence?\n

No, they will think that this guy was a raving lunatic, no follower of theirs, inspired not by the voices on the airwaves as by his own breakdown.\n

And they will be correct.\n

Well, about the rhetoric, they will be correct. Not so much their support for flooding the country with weapons, but that is a different (and much more important) story. Well, and their lack of support for subsidising mental health programs for adolescents. Also true. But the rhetoric? There are millions upon millions of people who hear and use the metaphors of violence and war applied to politics who don’t<\/i> shoot their federal judges and Representatives, or little girls for that matter. This guy was not a Tea Party fanatic, he was a nut.\n

Having said that…surely, surely there must in their minds be something saying that continuing to use the metaphors of hunting and rebellion applied to electoral politics—the sights, the \"taking out\" talk, the references to tyranny and the Second Amendment—would be in very poor taste<\/i>?\n

I know they are metaphors. I know that they are talking of arming themselves with knowledge<\/i> to fight elections<\/i>. Sure. But the metaphors are terrible, terrible metaphors, and while anyone can certainly them at their discretion, choosing them has always been vulgar, crass and unworthy. This, by the way, applies to everyone; I joked in bad taste about the death of Dick Cheney, but I knew it was in bad taste. Had I been running for office, or standing in front of a microphone, or working at the library counter, I would not have done so. Come to think of it, I wasn’t entirely comfortable when a boss told me the one about Dan Quayle. Hm, was it a boss? It would have been in 1989; might have been a summer job. Anyway, the point is that the rhetoric is bad rhetoric whether it bears responsibility for the bloodshed or not. Which is a difficult question, and not one that I think prominent conservative and Tea Party figures will solve to their own guilt.\n

But it doesn’t require that to resolve not to do it anymore. Is Sarah Palin clean of the blood? Fine, but she still shouldn’t do that gunsight stuff any more. Surely, surely that we can all agree on.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger may not be ready for this new year of ours, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19280,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13549\/revisions\/19280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}