We have a president who embraces violence in word and policy; one, coincidentally, who as a presidential aspirant was an enthusiastic participant in World Wresting Federation TV spectacles of fake (and sometimes not so) brutality; quasi-theatrical events of men slamming and strangling each other with drop-kicks and choke holds for the camera — events reminiscent of watching lethal blue-on-black videos of NYC street busts for cigarette-selling misdemeanors.
Trump has a thing for orchestrated mayhem and hurt — it’s no accident his rallies are reminiscent of WWF audience-participation hoot fests which he’s skilled at ratcheting up to fever pitch. So, we should understand that his embrace of the gun culture is not just political, it’s personal. Targeting one protester during one of his sweaty, red-hat revival meetings candidate Trump spat, “I’d like to punch him in the face!” then reveled in the catcalls and fist-pumps of furious, adoring fans. But while he adopts the catchy pitch of the gun lobby that “guns are not the problem, people are the problem,” Trump and his supporters appear to think otherwise about North Koreans with nukes.
The president’s line to the nation has been that Kim Jong Un (who’s a really a nice guy after all) with whom he has, by his own words, a love relationship (says he loves him) and will, through his self-described, legendary, deal-making skills, induce Kim to surrender his nukes (his guns). The reason Trump promises this is obvious: he knows that we know Kim without nukes would be way less dangerous than Kim with nukes. The fact is, considering the mad bloodlust of white supremacist terrorists (the pink-skinned demographic here at home that has mass-murdered more Americans than have Islamic terrorists) and the planet’s growing outbreak of actual and wannabe dictators — considering all of that, both guns and nukes really are a huge part of the problem. Truth is, Since 9/11, white, right-wing terrorists have outdone terrorists of any other complexion by killing twice as many Americans of all colors in homegrown, assault rifle attacks, according to research by the New America Foundation.
The facts (in the case of Kim Jong Un) boil down to this: a lunatic who doesn’t have a nuke, can’t shoot a nuke — likewise for white-supremacist lunatics without semi-automatic assault weapons. And BTW, just in passing, another way to mitigate mass mayhem might be to reduce the rhetorical sniping opportunities available to Donald Trump’s itchy twitter finger (2020 voters should note). But we can’t do that, it’s a free country the elites keep telling us.
There is rot spreading in the USA, and spreading more rapidly now; rot that’s been eating its way through the nation’s soul since captured Africans were stacked in ships and brought here to provide free labor for white landowners, laborers who were then whipped and scourged if they didn’t like the arrangement. The effects of that practice have been historically and morally disastrous. The ripple effect is still with us. Abraham Lincoln once spoke of that ripple effect in a speech concerning a contemporary burning to death of a black man in St. Louis.
In that speech, alluding to the many possible threats of dangers to the nation from outside: from foreign attacks both military and though espionage and (by implication) corruption of our political processes, Lincoln wondered aloud,
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? … I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” — Lincoln’s Lyceum speech, Jan. 27, 1838.
What kind of a nation — no, what kind of people in the face of the chronically obvious, continues to tolerate that which threatens their own children with school-day mayhem and massacre, dance-club and movie blood-baths, and church-synagogue shootings that politicians, priests, and pastors suggest we remedy by “thoughts and prayers?”
What kind of people accept this? What sort of nation of parents do not rise up in protest against this stupidity? What kind of people sacrifice their children to the arms industry and politicians who are bought by it? What kind of political system does nothing?
It’s not just that these weapons exist, it’s not just the lunatics who use them, it’s their insane availability and the rhetoric that catalyzes their use; rhetoric that inspires lunatics to use them. Rhetoric of division. Political rhetoric.
Jim Culleny is a resident of Shelburne Falls.