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on tragedy
21 Apr 07
One of my favourite columnists, Rick Salutin, concludes an article in today’s Globe and Mail with:
Can our society devise a set of social controls that prevent explosions like Virginia Tech, but do not require severe repression and an impossible return to the undesirable traits of earlier eras? A teacher of mine, Herbert Marcuse, phrased this as: Can you have non-repressive desublimation? — mainly showing how hard it is to even formulate the question. Can you have a non-racist, non-patriarchal, non-sexually repressive, non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian yet orderly society that manages to control its potentially aberrant members? What would it look like and how would you get there? That’s the utopian project for our time. The two scripts in the past 50 years that claimed to have an answer — Marxism and free-market ideology — have lost most of their legitimacy. The floor is wide open. (After VT, a sense of unease – behind a subscription wall)
It’s nice to see someone in the press, and I’m not surprised it’s Salutin, digging a little deeper. If Scott Horton’s summary of world opinion in Harper’s is indicative (The Tragedy at Virginia Tech, Viewed From Abroad), the European perspective (“around the world” means Madrid, Paris, Hamburg, and London) is that gun control, or the almost total lack thereof, is the problem. I’m more inclined to think that the American refusal to implement meaningful gun control is more of a symptom, or at least a byproduct, rather than a cause. I tend to agree more with the self-described “songwriter-turned-journalist who merely finds the art world very glamorous” Momus who argues, in part, that the extent to which “the American nation (and perhaps, by extension, a little less obviously, any nation) is founded on systematic violence” must be recognized as a contributing factor (The problem lays a floral wreath at the grave of the problem):
You’re supposed to stand behind a nation when it suffers a misfortune of this magnitude, but here the “misfortune” is so hard-wired into the American system, the American way of life, that you’d be standing behind the problem, taking off your hat in honour of the problem, remaining, for two minutes, silent about the problem while the problem lays a floral wreath at the fresh grave of the problem.
Momus illustrates his point with a graphic that shows the dimunition of Indian territories in the US from 1492 to 1977, clearly underlining the violence on which America was founded, but a similar graphic of Canada would show the same pattern, perhaps to a greater degree, and yet Canada has nowhere near the gun problem the US has.
Oddly, Xeni Jardin of Boingboing on Wednesday did a round-up article similar to Horton’s, called VA Tech shootings: world perspective in which she cites Dan Gillmor, Wonkette, Keith Olbermann, The Los Angeles Times, and the Asian American Journalists Association. I guess by “world perspective” I foolishly expected Jardin might include something that was, say, not by an American.
Horton begins his article by stating that, while in America the inevitable debate over gun control is underway, in the rest of the world “the assessment is uniform.” Sadly, I don’t think there’s really any debate over gun control in America. There are certainly a number of people who would like to do something about it, but they are vastly outnumbered by a majority who don’t seem capable of realizing that there might even be ways of doing things that aren’t American, let alone considering that those foreigners might actually have a better way. Real gun control advocates, those who would ban handguns and assault rifles outright and limit the number of hunting rifles a person could own; those who would argue that guns, like cars, should be registered—real gun control advocates are the lunatic fringe in America. And in the rest of the world, America is the lunatic fringe.
Posted by pzed on April 21, 2007 at 5.56pm
Categories: none of the above
