In a country that's been tooled for violence, why does violence surprise us?

]Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"[W]hat is amazing about American political violence isn’t that there is so much of it, but that there is as little as there is."

-- Ian Welsh, in his blogpost yesterday, 
"The right wing isn’t going to stop violent rhetoric"

by Ken

I'm still trying to sort out some thoughts on the larger problems flagged by the Tucson shootings and the national response to them, including that of the Compulsive Liars of the Right. (Today, naturally, George "I Lie Because I Am" Will weighed in with "The charlatans' response to the Tucson tragedy." He has no choice, of course. His professional existence depends on maintaining the entire network of right-wing lies. Take them away, and he's just a useless pile of filth.)

One of the reasons the network of right-wing lies is so important is as a diversion from what the reality of the country has devolved into -- including the saturation of guns. There is no imaginable innocent explanation for the pervasive presence of guns in the political arena which remains one of the dominant images of the 2008 presidential campaign. That's a lot of manhood desperately trying to prove itself out there -- and the higher the level of desperation, the more hopeless it seems to me the case is. If those goons are that terrified that their manhood is suspect, surely they're on to something.

Of course it's necessary for Lie-Boy George to lie about the poisonous environment he's worked so hard to help create. With, it must be said in the case of the gun culture, massive help from the NRA, which not only pursues its own economic interests (hey, guns are big business, especially at a time when cynics point out how little the U.S. now produces -- well, we produce a heck of a lot of guns!) but is a handy vehicle for the forces of the Right who use the gun culture to consolildate their control over the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans.

I assume by now that most DWT readers have read either Dalia Sussman's NYT blogpost yesterday ("Support for Gun Control Has Dropped in Recent Years") or some other version of this story -- and doesn't is say something about how ho-hum the story is that the NYT doesn't seem to have regarded this subject as important enough to cover in the print edition?

For now I just want to come back to a bit of the post of Ian Welsh's that I mentioned yesterday, in which he sets out as well as I can imagine it being set out the state to which the manipulated masses of Americans have been reduced, a state in which they would be crazy not to be distrustful of all forms of authority. (Of course their solution is to put their trust in the very worst people imaginable, but that's not to deny the fix in which they find themselves.)

Americans live in a complete propaganda state, and don’t know up from down. The right controls every major media organ, and is able to get pluralities or majorities of Americans to believe things which simply aren’t true, like that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 (70% of Americans believed that. That didn’t happen by mistake, since there’s no evidence of it.)

Confused, lied to, living in a world which doesn’t make any sense, because it isn’t intended to make sense, and in a situation where even if they aren’t personally in financial trouble, they are only one bad bounce away from winding up on the street, being bankrupted by health care bills and then dying anyway, what is amazing about American political violence isn’t that there is so much of it, but that there is as little as there is.

The pattern is clear enough. Major corporate interests have bled the country white. Whether these are financial interests, the military industrial complex, the telecom companies or the various medical interests, the result is the same: the rich are filthy rich, corporations making record profits and ordinary people taking it in the neck. They have then bought up the major media, which they use for propaganda purposes. Fox is the major offender, but no major outlet is immune.

The political class works for the corporate class, not the other way around. It doesn’t have to be that way, all the levers are available to crush the corporate class any time the political class wants to, but the fact remains that the corporate class calls the shots, not the other way around. During the debate over TARP calls against ran from 100:1 against to 1200:1 against. It still passed. The public option was more popular than the health care bill that passed by a huge margin, but it was traded away early and never seriously considered.

There's a lot more to Ian's post, but we'll have to come back to that. This part, though, I think he's nailed.

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