Spin, Spin, Spin

[talon]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70B3W320110112

Although Palin is not directly responsible for the murders and violence in Arizona, she and those like her who spew out hate rhetoric and use violent metaphors foster a social climate where those who believe that rhetoric feel morally obligated to act on it. I don't think Palin for one moment really believes what she says - it's all a game to her, part of her celebrity "charm", to be aggressive and "cute" in addressing the public. It's an image she has chosen to project because when McCain first brought her to public attention, he called her a "maverick", and that image and her cutesy misinformation and verbal aggressiveness brought attention and money and fame to her, and she loves those things. She'll say whatever it takes to keep those things flowing to her, however untrue, wrong, misleading, or outright false it is. If it sounds good, and people cheer her, it must be right.

So, in her mind, she's playing a game, and the other players all know it's a game, and when someone breaks the rules of the game by actually believing the verbiage she tweets and says and writes and shows on her TV show, it ruins the game.

if she really believed what she said, she wouldn't be posing in front of turkey farms and faking shooting elks on TV or posting maps with crosshairs on them or her near constant exhortations to "lock and load."

She's not alone.

While the bulk of the hate-mongering and violent rhetoric is coming from the right, there are enough on the left that are 'fighting fire with fire" and using the same verbal assault techniques. Between the "licenses to hunt/kill" various politicians, the bumper stickers advocating violence against one party or the other, the barrage of messages spewed out to "do the right thing" juxtaposed with "this person is a traitor and what do we do with traitors?" and "abortion doctors are murderers, are we going to let them get away with murder?" Then we have the people (on both sides, I'm sure) who are saying things like "when ballots don't work, bullets will" and what are the people who believe that going to do? When an election doesn't go their way, they might decide the vote with bullets.

So, maybe the people spewing the violent metaphors and the shoot 'em up innuendos are playing a game among themselves, but they are playing it in very public venues. When people watching it get caught up in their "game" and treat it as if it were real, I do sincerely believe the "players" are indeed responsible, collectively, for choosing to use inciting words.

It goes beyond that, though. The media has a huge role in this, too, and so far I haven't heard word one about that. These criminals get their faces splashed all over the news, they're the lead story on practically every news site and paper, people clamor to speak to them, people send them gifts (!!!), and their every move is dissected and reported. For people who were previously ignored and virtually invisible, this is amazing, and all they had to do was point a gun and pull a trigger a few times. Sad that people died over it, but hey, now the criminal is as much a celebrity as all those other people on the news. All those people who talk of "lock and loading" and "reloading" and using bullets instead of ballots, they were right, it gets you fame and money, and maybe people will listen now.

So, all those celebrities (regardless of their party affiliations) are teaching us that violence brings fame and glory. Granted, the celebrities are just talking violence - their First Amendment rights, right? - and not actually committing violence, so they can't possibly be to blame for fostering a social climate where violence is the route to fame. Don't blame them, they were just speaking metaphorically, you know. They didn't go to this person's house and tell him "Hey you! You need to go out an shoot these people, here's a gun and ammo." That means those violence-spewing celebrities must be innocent, right?

I have a really hard time thinking of these people as politicians and leaders of America when they aren't thinking about what their actions are doing to America and deny they have any influence. People who want to be leaders must be extra careful in their word choices because their words do influence their followers. Leaders who use violence metaphors will have followers who act violently. It's a logical and inevitable conclusion. It doesn't even take a high school education to figure that out! Any kid who's gotten in trouble for doing what Billy said knows that. When I was much, much younger, I got in trouble [1] that way. No one got seriously hurt, but I learned to think through the consequences after that.

People who are in positions of authority or are viewed as being in positions of authority are responsible for creating the social climate. This includes radio talk show hosts, politicians, media celebrities, priests and ministers and other religious people who stand before audiences/congregations and exhort them to "do what's morally right", teachers, and parents. And the media bears responsibility when they not only report what these people say, but repeat it over and over again.

I don't know how much y'all know about neurolinguistic programming, but the really short and all too brief version is that if you say 2 things that are true, then a third thing that sounds true but isn't, that third thing will be accepted as true, and if something is repeated by 3 or more sources, it must be true. So, if we have this celebrity telling us that if ballots don't work, bullets do, and that celebrity telling us to lock and load, and that preacher telling us it's a sin to (fill in the blank) and we need to do what's morally right and then we see all these posters, bumper stickers, and "licenses to hunt/kill" this person or that party, and then see maps with targets clearly crosshaired, of course someone is going to absorb that climate of "if you don't like the other guy, shoot him". Rage comes easily, and we've seen a phenomenal increase in rage - from road rage to parking lot rage to pet rage. No one is immune - even the (theoretically) trained police indulge in rage, shooting before determining their clear targets. If even people trained to be calm in stressful situations can react with rage with very little provocation - and have that rageful action condoned and dismissed - of course other people will emulate them. Dog barking at you? Shoot it. Person got "your" parking spot at the mall? Gouge their car, that'll show 'em! Politician elected that you didn't vote for? Shoot 'em. The ballot didn't work, the bullet will! A celebrity told me so! It's OK, I did the right and moral thing, I stood up for myself. I protected my people and my country.

you don't need to belong to a particular political party to absorb all of this. America condones torture. Killing's kinder than torture.

Do any of you remember Emperor Norton? Do you think he'd be gunned down or locked up in our current society, charged with treason or called a terrorist, or would he receive the same treatment now that he received during his lifetime?

We are quick to indulge in our baser characteristics. It's harder for us to release our better natures.

Language really does affect us. Words have power. Words can kill.

"Acts of monstrous criminality" start somewhere. They do not stand on their own. They do not "begin and end with the criminals who commit them." There is an entire society of connections - TV, radio, family, neighbors, celebrities. Words, words, words fly at us from all sides and those words get absorbed into our subconscious, often so thoroughly and pervasively we can't source them anymore. They seem like they are our ideas and we suit our actions to them. That makes it easy for people like Beck, Limbaugh, Kaufman, Palin, Savage, Brown, Hannity, to deny responsibility. I looked for left wingers with the same range of audience and power these people have that are using similar violent metaphors and images and could only find individuals and smallish bloggers, and possibly Madonna (except I don't know what, if any, political affiliation she has, she is a celebrity of similar size and reach and did speak out against Bush, so I guess she qualifies even if she's not a politician or political wanna-be), and lots of people whose names I hadn't heard. They obviously aren't getting the same degree of media coverage and therefore don't have the same saturation effect on our society as Beck et al. Those words are damaging our society and the healing words aren't getting through the noise.

We need to consider the power of our words. And we need to re-direct our society so that we aren't getting inundated from all sides with "violence is the only way to resolve our problems".

It's not. We have other choices. We have many other choices.

Negotiation. Tolerance. Acceptance. Humor. Accommodation. Freedom. And more. The languages of these will provide the ultimate results we want - change and betterment and peace and prosperity and innovation and survival - no, more than survival, to thrive.

Nice matters. Kindness counts.

[1] You're going to ask. So I might as well save time and tell: I was staying with my aunt and uncle and cousins. Aunt P cooked a roast for dinner, and she was always very strict on portion control, so come the wee hours of the morning, my cousins and I were starving and snuck down to raid the fridge. Aunt P would grumble in the morning, but we'd be full and not care. While we were as quietly as possible stuffing our faces, we heard noises outside, noises that sounded like someone trying to break in. My cousins were all "we should do something" and "what can we do?" and "if we butter the floor, we'll catch the crook" and "we should sneak upstairs and get the baseball bats" and so on. I suggested getting Uncle G, but was quickly shushed because waking Uncle G meant waking Aunt P, and then she'd learn we'd eaten all the roast early and be grumpy from lack of sleep. She'd kill us with chores. I was always the one who did things, so I grabbed a stick of butter and buttered the floor. I would never have thought to do that on my own. The "thief" finally made it through the door, and promptly slipped on the slick, buttered floor. My cousin T flipped on the lights, and there was cousin A, who'd come home on leave from the Army and was sneaking in to surprise everyone. We all got surprised! Cousin A hurt his back and ended up on extended sick leave but was fine after that. Me, I had to scrub the floor clean. Do you know just how hard butter is to get off a linoleum floor? It just spreads thinner and thinner and stays slick. It was a relatively harmless way to learn that I shouldn't believe all the wild and crazy things my cousins suggested. My cousins didn't really believe the things they suggested, and they certainly weren't the ones who got out the butter and buttered the floor, but they influenced me to do that. Because of them, I can't be influenced by political rhetoric and celebrity mouthings and salesmen's pitches but all too many other people are vulnerable to that sort of persuasion.