Occasionally in life there are watershed moments. What happened today in the wee hours in San Francisco is more along the lines of a cultural glacial moment, an ice age moment even, where one era ends and another one begins, as ice sheers off a cliff into the sea and a new day is born.
Alas, neither literal nor cultural ice ages are traceable to one event. Rather, it’s something that you realize after the fact, in context.
You read earlier about Paul Pelosi, husband for 59 years to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, being attacked by a lunatic MAGA conspiracy theorist, in his home in Pacific Heights, in the middle of the night. The lunatic, David DePape, was a resident of storage units in Berkeley and a purveyor of hemp bracelets. He entered the Pelosi home in the wee hours and asked, “Where’s Nancy?” just as January 6 rioters had asked, as they broke into the Speaker’s office and shat on the marble floors.
On both occasions, the plan was the same: murder Nancy Pelosi. DePape’s plan was to keep Paul Pelosi tied up until the Speaker arrived home and then we can guess the rest. Mr. Pelosi has since been operated on for a skull fracture and he remains in the hospital.
The police are listing the crime as “attempted murder.” The obvious, attempted assassination is out there as well. Dan Rather wrote about it a few hours ago.
But the assault appears to represent a targeted attack on Ms. Pelosi by a man whose online profile suggests he is fully immersed in the conspiracy theories and hate speech of right-wing rhetoric. The fact that she wasn’t home might have saved her life. Thankfully, Mr. Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery.
In short, early indications are that this was an assassination attempt.
We should not be shocked that this happened. We have seen the storm clouds of political violence assemble. There is a direct line from January 6 to today. And it stretches even farther backward. We should be very careful about using the term “fascism,” but a political system plunging toward normalized violence and instability is one that is taking on very dark undertones.
Nancy Pelosi has long been a lightning rod for Republican ire. But something changed alongside Trump’s mainstreaming of viciousness and allusions to violence that were not previously acceptable in modern American political discourse. Pelosi’s personal safety and that of her peers has become less certain. That many of her colleagues on the other side of the aisle wink at or outright encourage political threats makes the situation even more dire.
There is a swelling mass hysteria on the political right.
It is lubricated by lies, bigotry, misplaced grievances, and apocalyptic rhetoric. It can be found in the memes on social media, the chants of “lock her up,” the armed patrols of voting drop boxes, and certainly the violent attempted coup at the Capitol.
Here’s the problem and this is why this tragedy happened today. We live in an age which is dominated by television. I don’t know if life is but a dream, but life is definitely a TV show. Life is absolutely illuminated pixels, whether stationary or moving. That’s the way we communicate in the year 2022 and this has been the case for some years.
The community bulletin board is the TV set. The local church is the TV set. The sewing circle, bowling alley, think of a reason for people to gather together and commune and talk about life or share activities, it’s all got its television corollary.
Television defines the culture we’re in. It goes beyond defining it, it is it. We have right-wing media lunatics go on the airwaves hour after hour, day after day and demonize various “characters” on the left. I put the word in quotea, because unfortunately that’s how it is seen. Everybody is a character, a two dimensional digital being. Because, you see, TV giveth and TV taketh away.
The world of television is a pretend, temporary, emotive and cathartic world. Actors get shot, raped, dismembered, nuked, what have you and rise again the following week in another role. Such it has always been in television. The actual REALITY of what is going on in this world is lost on the small screen. The small screen is its own world.
The small screen gives permission, somehow, to go do something crazy, so one can have one’s own fifteen minutes of fame — if you’re lucky, on television. The longing to make one’s mark, to be noticed and immortalized on the small screen, is a dramatic one and the actual realization of that longing is a life killer. Ask Ethan Crumbley, who gunned down four of his classmates and injured seven others in a school shooting in Michigan, how the fifteen minutes of fame works out. He just pled guilty yesterday. His life is gone — before it even started.
The cultural lines of human decency have been erased, for the most part. That is the horror of the Trump phenomenon. Trump is a television character. Nothing more. He wouldn’t know how to be anything more, should be ever aspire to do so, which he never would.
Television is Trump’s metier. It’s as much his normal home as water is to a fish. Trump understands TV. He gets that it’s all about ratings and soundbites and image. He’s got all that down to a science. That’s how he got where he got.
But, unfortunately, he dragged the rest of us into the maelstrom with him. We’ve all been sucked into this Twilight Zone-esque whirlpool.
And right-wing media knows it. Fox News absolutely knows it. That’s why they put out this, which is a laughing, screaming joke — or would be, if the circumstances weren’t so serious.
According to Fox News' Kennedy, the violent attack on Pelosi's husband is Biden's fault:
"The president promised to bring down the tenor of political discourse. That hasn’t happened. People are more divided." pic.twitter.com/u9HCHzM674
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 28, 2022
Nothing to see here, just Fox News appearing to justify a possible assassination attempt on the Speaker of the House and violent assault with a hammer on her husband. pic.twitter.com/ladfjuCNaU
— David Badash (@davidbadash) October 28, 2022
We live in a world of sophistry. The word means “the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.” Fox News is deceiving you. Fox News will continue to do so because it makes a tidy profit.
And on the other side of the coin, the rest of mainstream media, the way it is set up, makes its tidy profit by a phony adversarial position with Fox News. It’s like a fencing match, all for show.
The only problem with all this, with the gamesmanship and the theatrics, is that people get killed. Paul Pelosi could have gotten killed this morning. Nancy Pelosi could have gotten killed, had she been home.
We live in an ugly, perverse, bastardized culture where reality has been superseded by the depiction of reality, i.e. television. I don’t know where this goes from here. How could I? History is in the making.
It goes to hell in a handbasket as the saying goes.
faux nuz proves once again it is not a news organization. Honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t blame it on feminism, the “gays”, trans people, or some other nonsense. They certainly weren’t going to air the actual facts because that’d mean blaming their core audience.
How come ⚪ people get “the mental illness” label when they do terroristic shyt, and when ⚫ people do terroristic shyt, they get labled “animals and thugs?”🤨🤔
Even then, the “mental illness” excuse is one of the most pernicious lies ever offered up by these authoritarian freaks. I have been around the GENUINELY mentally ill and by and large, they were the kindest people I was ever around. The most danger they posed was to themselves. It therefore pisses me off to no end when someone THIS destructive gets associated with the folks I knew. EFF THOSE LIARS!
I don’t have your level of training and experience but chunks of my own life have been spent working with people with mental challenges including diagnosed mental illnesses. There has always been stigma attached to people with genuine but treatable mental illnesses and even those that are confined to psychiatric facilities are seldom dangerous to themselves or others. We had made at least some progress towards getting the public to accept that just because a person sees (or has sought) help from a mental health professional that they were ok, and not someone to worry about going off and doing some wacky or dangerous thing. But all of that has been wiped out. And, like you it pisses me off because conservatives are actually causing people to avoid getting readily available help that they need.
“Thug” became the code word/dog whistle for the N-word. It pains the racists that make up so much of the conservative movement they still have to avoid using the N-word on TV, in legislative chambers and other places. But they are soooooo close to being able to once again do so without fear of consequences, to let their racist freak flags fly they can taste it. It was a huge task to drive these folks under their slimy rocks during the 1960s and early 70s. They were still there of course, but they knew they’d have to be careful. Now they have been allowed out into the open. Worse, the GOP is openly encouraging them to run around screaming their “white power” shit!
I don’t know the outcome of this election? But I do know the outcome of the battle in 2024. The GOP will learn the lesson about their “chickens coming home to roost”
The final setpiece of Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death comes to mind, Harold. “It’s time for a new dance to begin…!”
Pelosi is loathed not just because she is a,Dem and Speaker, but because she is female, successful, and competent. They hate accomplished women who don’t know their place(submissive, prone, with their legs ooen). They love MTG and Nobody and Amy Barbie Condo man because while the first two never shut up,they do.so while backing up a man,which is,what they are supposed to do. Amy gets a blessing because she belongs to a cult that literally tells women to submit to male authority.
Pelosi stands up.to them, gets stuff done and doesn’t. back down, exactly like Hillary Clinton. Their worst nightmare come to.life in a 100pound woman just a tad over 5 feet tall.