At Least America Isn’t Yet Enured

There was another mass shooting in America on Tuesday, this time in the usually placid town of Thousand Oaks, California, and another out-in-the-open attempt by President Donald Trump to obstruct a duly authorized special counsel investigation into the “Russia thing,” this time by replacing the recused and thus recently defenestrated Attorney General with a man who has openly stated his desire to shut down the probe. Both of these unsettlingly routine stories somehow made the front pages of the newspapers and the top of the cable news hours, so we were at least heartened to note that America hasn’t yet come to regard them as the new normal.

All the familiar arguments about gun control and mental health care were once again repeated in the wake of the shooting at a popular bar where the many patrons were line-dancing country-and-western music, and as usual none of them changed anybody’s mind, yet it’s good news that the conversation continues.

Perhaps the Democratic majority that was elected to the House of Representatives will pass some crazy gun-grabbing bill, but the slightly padded Republican majority that was returned to the Senate will probably hew to its obstinate opposition even to such minor Second Amendment tweaks as banning the “bump stocks” were used in a even bloodier country-and-western massacre in Las Vegas about a year ago and the extended pistol magazines used at Thursday’s slaughter. It will probably take more American carnage and a couple of extra election cycles before anything  is done, and we have no confidence that either party has any effective solutions to offer, so we’ll take some solace that the country isn’t yet inured to these frequent mass murders.

We’re also pleased to note the mass outrage over Trump’s efforts to install the sort of Roy Cohn pit bull protector that he’s always openly pined for as acting Attorney General. The upcoming Democratic majority in the House and the sizable Democratic minority in the Senate are predictably outraged about itt, and tens of thousands of their voters took to the streets in mosts states to protest Trump’s move, and several prominent congressional Republicans are willing to risk the wrath of Trump’s “tweets” to state their objections, and judging by the many once-Republican House seats now held by Democrats there are a lot of well-educated and white collar suburbanite Republican women out there who are similarly disloyal to their party’s leader.

Trump has convinced most of his party and a big chunk of the country that the special counsel investigation is a “deep state conspiracy” and “witch hunt” led by “angry Democrats” and “globalists” who hate America and don’t want to see it made great again, but it’s a hard sell to the rest of the country. The guy heading the special counsel investigation is an actual Eagle Scout and decorated war hero with many decades of distinguished and scandal-free public service and a lifelong Republican, which is far more than Trump can say, and in his long and heroic career in law enforcement he’s earned bipartisan respect for his character that Trump will never achieve and doesn’t even aspire to have.

There’s also the matter of the meeting that Donald Trump Jr. admittedly arranged with Russian operatives promising dirt on the opposition, the guilty pleas of Trump’s Kremlin-connected former campaign manager and national security advisor on various charges brought by the special counsel, and the many other reasons an objective observer might not regard the investigation as a “witch hunt.” The guy who was promoted over some higher-ranked and Senate-confirmed officials to be acting director of the Justice Department has made quite clear on cable television that without any knowledge of what the special counsel might have learned he’s made up his mind and not at all an objective observer, which is obviously the reason he got the promotion, so that’s also a tough sell for even Trump to make.

A perfectly innocent president would want an Eagle Scout war hero with an unimpeachable bipartisan reputation to conduct an exhaustive investigation to vindicate him, but as always Trump is clearly intent on shutting it down. We have dear friends and family who are part of that most the Republican party and that big chunk of the country outraged that Trump is bedeviled by a witch hunt, but we’re trying our best to be objective observers and are currently sympathetic with all those well-educated suburbanite Republican women and even the angriest Democrats and most of those crucial independents. Our guess is that a slight majority of the country will be outraged if the special counsel’s pursuit of justice is unconstitutionally obstructed, and although we take faint hope in that outrage we figure that no matter how it turns out there will be further days of rage and carnage in our beloved America.

We also have dear friends and family who tell us that our posts lately are rather depressing, and this one’s admittedly glum, but that’s how we see it.

— Bud Norman

All That Gun Talk

We just can’t shake a nagging suspicion that we’re being played for suckers every time we address the latest gun control frenzy.

There are plenty of other important issues to consider, after all. The economy is currently lousy, it’s likely to get worse after the upcoming “debt ceiling” debate is inevitably resolved by committing the country to yet another trillion or two of debt, and the taking of six American hostages by the supposedly routed al-Qaida terror group is just the latest reminder that the international situation continues to deteriorate. We also remain cautiously hopeful that all of the recent noise will ultimately amount to little. The most onerous of the proposed gun restrictions will likely face stiff resistance in Congress, including a key few Democratic senators facing re-election campaigns in rural states where many of the voters still bitterly cling to God, guns, and their God-given gun rights, and the numerous measures that President Obama has imposed by imperial edict are mostly such innocuous fluff as directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “lead a national discussion” about guns.

No one can seriously believe that the nation suffers a dire shortage of discussion about guns, or that the HHS Secretary has any gift to lead it to any fruitful conclusion, but for obvious reasons Obama would prefer that we continue to discuss guns rather than any of those other important issues. He’s touting some dubious poll numbers which indicate that he’s taking only popular stands on guns, he nonetheless gets to pose as a politically courageous crusader against the all-powerful gun nut lobby, most of the media are cheering him on in the most hysterical fashion, he’s got cute kids lined up for the photo op, it’s all going to cost only a trifling few billion dollars, and at a time when the American public is reportedly demanding that he do something he is indisputably doing something. All that other stuff is so much messier for the president, too, and requires doing something that is an actual solution.

Still, attention must be paid to the gun issue or there’s no telling what the government might get away with. Included in the president’s orders and his proposals to Congress are not only serious assaults on the fundamental right to self-defense but also a potentially dangerous erosion of other liberties.

Although Obama’s directives don’t go so far as New York’s recently enacted gun law, which requires all mental health professionals to report any patient that might conceivably become violent, he does make it clear that the federal government would be quite grateful for such information. Given that Obama seems intent on giving the federal government a monopsony on all health care professionals’ services such gratitude could well prove an irresistible inducement. Those who regard psychiatry as an essential medical science should be concerned that such an arrangement will discourage the mentally ill from seeking treatment, and perhaps even rehearse all those clichés from the abortion debate about the government coming between patients and their doctors. Those of us who take a more skeptical view of the whole mental health boondoggle are entitled to worry that all manner of mental health professionals will start reporting even the patients most unlikely to become just to inoculate themselves against liability just in case they are wrong.

There’s something unsettling, too, about Ocala’s directive that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigate “the relationship between video games, media images and violence.” That’s another topic that has already been discussed ad nauseum, but when the government starts to take such an official interest it could easily to lead censorship. The Hollywood lobby seems to have better standing with the president than the gun owner lobby, so we don’t expect any restrictions on the big budget blood-soaked cinema that our supposedly conscience-stricken nation seems to love, but it’s not hard to see how more humble fare could be affected. If that strikes you as paranoid we suggest you consult Nakoula Nakoula, the poverty row producer who was sent to prison on a parole violation after his low-budget video was panned by the administration as “vile and disgusting.”

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, alas, and it looks as if it will be required on several fronts in the coming months and years.

— Bud Norman

On the Connecticut Tragedy

There’s no avoiding the subject of last Friday’s horrible massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, as much as one might wish it.

All through Friday and Saturday our usual news sources were overflowing with reports about the shootings, and even when we took refuge in an old folks’ radio station the pop standards of Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra were frequently interrupted with further updates on the carnage. Local stations “localized” the shootings, all reluctantly admitting that it could happen here, and everywhere people were talking about how terrible it was. At the very traditional church where we worship a tough old veteran of the Vietnam War was choking back tears on Sunday as he led a prayer asking that the victims’ families be comforted, and during the after-service chit-chat we saw one of the congregation’s sagest biblical scholars offering him a gentle pat on the back while admitting that there’s really nothing to say.

What is there is to say, except to offer a prayer that the victims’ families be comforted? Nothing we can think of, and no one else seems to have come up with anything new since the last mass murder, but because there’s no avoiding the subject everyone apparently feels obliged to trot out all the usual responses. So far we have not encountered any attempt to link the perpetrator to the Tea Party or any other conservative political causes, which has lately become a press rite in the wake of a mass shooting, but otherwise all the obligatory clichés have been deployed.

The inevitable cries for draconian gun control laws immediately followed, and from all the predictable people and organizations. This obliges the people who value a right to self-defense to make their case, even though they’d prefer to wait until a more dispassionate discussion is possible, and thus all the old familiar arguments get shouted once again.

All the old familiar arguments about America’s mental health system are also being shouted, as always. At the Gawker.com web site a mother offered her jarringly frank account of living with a son who suffers a madness frighteningly similar to that of the Connecticut shooter, a thoughtful reminder of the complex dilemmas involved in the issue, but otherwise the criticisms do not seem constructive.

The comments section beneath the mother’s essay are full of typical internet vitriol, much of it explicitly expressing an anti-white prejudice, most of it a strictly personal animus against a mother who seems to be struggling to do her best in a difficult situation. This also seems to be part of the new post-mass-shooting tradition, along with the ghoulish behavior of the news media, the demands to turn schools into fortresses, the occasional allusions to the murders that go largely unremarked, and the scapegoating of the parents and the schools and the police.

Of course, there are also the routine calls for national soul-searching. It is never made clear, though, what the nation should be searching for in its collective soul. As much as Americans like to regard themselves as exceptional in every way, mass murder is by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. Traditionalists who blame some aspect of contemporary society should also note the mass murder is not unique to modern times. Individuals have succumbed to the madness in every society in every age, and like all evil it has always proved impossible to eradicate.

The president, who famously promised to end the rise of the oceans and health the planet, seems willing to get the perfection of human nature a shot as well. Speaking to an audience in the town where the shootings occurred, the president asked “Are we prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that violence visited on our children year after year is the price of our freedom?” Some reporters took this to mean that the president intends to pursue stricter gun laws, which seems a fair conclusion, but the hubris of the implied answers to these rhetorical questions is even more worrisome. Sometimes a nation must admit that it is powerless against the vicissitudes of life. If the politics are too hard, it is because people are naturally protective of their rights. The price of freedom can be dear, but it will never purchase the safety and security that is promised by those who will take it away.

These things need to be said, even at time of national mourning.

— Bud Norman