America 2011: Eliminationist rhetoric and political murder
9 January 2011 (Desdemona Despair) – In April 2010, actor Lance Baxter, known to many as the voice of the GEICO Gecko, left a voice mail for the “tea party” organization Freedom Works that asked how Freedom Works will “spin it when one of your members does actually kill somebody, wondering if you’ve got a PR spinning routine planned for that or are you just gonna take it when it happens.” Baxter was immediately fired by GEICO. There’s no statement yet on Baxter’s blog (or the Freedom Works site), but it’s no great inferential leap to see his question as prescient: Assassin Jared Lee Loughner clearly hewed to the delusions of the racist Right. Juan Cole spells it out in White Terrorism:
[T]he political themes of his instability were those of the American far Right. Loughner was acting politically even if he is not all there. He is said to have called out the names of his victims, such as Roll and Gifford, as he fired. As usual, when white people do these things, the mass media don’t call it terrorism.
Of the rifle sights shown in the SarahPAC graphic, Palin aide Rebecca Mansour said, “We have nothing whatsoever to do with this. We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights. It was simply cross-hairs like you’d see on maps,” she said, suggesting that it is a “surveyor’s symbol.” One wag observed, “People say they’ll never forget where they were when they first heard Kennedy had been surveyed.”
Journalist David Neiwert documents the increase in violent political rhetoric in The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. Yesterday’s mass political killings are the sad consequence of what is – let’s be clear – neo-fascist propaganda financed by industrialists. As long as we allow sociopathic corporate entities to deliver weapons of psychological warfare, such as FOX News, into the American mass consciousness, we’ll continue to see appalling political violence. Is it possible to correct the situation and recover a more civil public discourse? Desdemona suggests that as a start, extra-national actors, such as Rupert Murdoch, should be forced to register as foreign agents.
