POLITE SOCIETY

In today’s New York Times, there were two editorial columns concerning the connection between the shooting in Arizona last weekend seriously wounding Congresswoman Giffords (which involved the death of six people, including a federal judge) and the violently inflammatory rhetoric that the coddling of the political right has permitted. The column by Bob Herbert hit all the right notes. The column by David Brooks was shameful, but in a career of expressing shameful opinions this was no surprise.

The sorrowful Mr. Brooks is unhappy that the media, the monolithic left wing media, has the audacity to link the actions of a maniac in Arizona with the rantings of numerous political maniacs from his side of the political spectrum. After Sarah Palin, that strong frontierswoman in Gucci, was able to publish a map with the locations of left leaning Congresspersons placed in “cross-hairs” of a gun site and still be found on the crosshairs of the political radar, speaks volumes about the level of our moral sensitivity. It is incomprehensible to me that any candidate aspiring to national political office would not have been hounded off the political stage just a few short years ago for such a gesture and shows how far down the road to political oblivion we have gone. The tactic of the old right was to scare the public with minority violence. Remember the first Bush campaign and his smearing of Governor Dukakis with the likes of Willy Horton? They have graduated from deploring the violence to encouraging it. But the accusation Mr. Brooks is making is more profound than his acting the flack for an airhead cheerleader from a backward state with gun-sized fantasies.

He wants to decouple the act of Jared Loughner, the young man who brought a gun to a political meeting in Tucson and opened fire on an innocent crowd, almost assassinating a member of Congress, from all the political gun talk and violence talk that the right wing has been so free to cast about at least for the past ten years. Sorry, Mr. Brooks, your efforts are not only wasted, they are demeaning. Having taught a class in Holocaust studies and published in that area for twenty years, his column immediately made me think of another kind of decoupling that many, particularly on the right, also attempt. That is the decoupling of anti-semitism and the Holocaust. Two thousand years of vitriolic talk and accusation mounted by church and throne in Europe and somehow there is little or no connection between the murder of millions of Jews and all that rhetoric. While we are decoupling political rhetoric from violent acts, maybe 9/11 was actually the end product of a joyride that a few dozen crazy men decided to take in order to get their names in the history books. Forget all the hate and violent talk spewed into their heads by their local Sarah Palins. What an image – the lovely and demure Ms. Palin among bearded and wild-eyed imams. At least, they are the genuine article. She is a cardboard figurine propped up by a cadre of amoral flacks and now we can add David Brooks to that list.