Sunday, February 28, 2010
Obsessed & Deranged
Read Frank Rich's piece, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged. He says Andrew Stack's suicide mission is "a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen. "
Instead of calling it an "incident" & saying it will be a "happy day for America" when we "abolish the I.R.S.," how would Iowa congressman Steve King have reacted had Stack succeeded in killing hundreds instead of one Vietnam Vet nearing his retirement? What if Stack had flown into a public school, a symbol of tax-funded government indoctrination & waste? Or a Catholic church?
Consider how much Stack's rantings & the rhetoric of the Tea Partiers echo each other. Many on the right hear those echoes, & added their shouts to them after Stack's insane terrorist attack. How many more people are like him, increasingly emboldened by the open affirmations of the right to Stack's views, to casually violent talk of "revolution?" We are looking not at reform, not at a civil society of law, but at an invitation to anarchy, the very fear we had after 9/11 of solo suicide-bombers acting not on the orders of al-Qaeda, but on its terrible inspiration.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Instead of calling it an "incident" & saying it will be a "happy day for America" when we "abolish the I.R.S.," how would Iowa congressman Steve King have reacted had Stack succeeded in killing hundreds instead of one Vietnam Vet nearing his retirement? What if Stack had flown into a public school, a symbol of tax-funded government indoctrination & waste? Or a Catholic church?
Consider how much Stack's rantings & the rhetoric of the Tea Partiers echo each other. Many on the right hear those echoes, & added their shouts to them after Stack's insane terrorist attack. How many more people are like him, increasingly emboldened by the open affirmations of the right to Stack's views, to casually violent talk of "revolution?" We are looking not at reform, not at a civil society of law, but at an invitation to anarchy, the very fear we had after 9/11 of solo suicide-bombers acting not on the orders of al-Qaeda, but on its terrible inspiration.
Labels: in the news
