Sandy Hook: Time to Get Furious

Okay. No more brave assertions about “our thoughts and prayers being with the victims.” No more gibberish from television commentators about “tragedy bringing us together.” (The day someone comes to me with that line when my child’s life is taken in this way, is the day I will get a gun.).

It is time to get furious. This latest shooting “episode” is repulsive. Actually, in a healthy country and culture there would be rioting in the streets. Twenty years ago William Bennett wrote a book entitled, “Outrage,” claiming that Americans had lost the capacity to be morally furious. His fury was directed at….Bill Clinton’s sex life. I wonder if we will hear from Mr. Bennett today, or from anyone on the right, where they wear their patriotism on their shirtsleeve. Because it might occur to them that this ought to be profoundly humiliating to anyone who boasts (as I do) that America is the finest country on the earth.

There will be no more fence-straddling by me on the issue of gun control. I had been inclined to give up on this one—too many decent people, including friends, are gun owners. And there are so many other things to be furious about. And, well, the second amendment says what it says. Or does it? There has been a long-running debate about whether the amendment protects the individual’s right to own a gun, or the right of states to operate a militia.

But really who can stand on legal niceties in the face of this? Read this excerpt from a fine piece of exactly the kind of outrage that ought to be universal, by the author Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker today.

After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.

Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat…

Read the full article here http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html. And I would urge you also to read his previous columns, after the shooting in Aurora this year http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/07/aurora-movie-shooting-one-more-massacre.html, and the episode at Virginia Tech http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/04/30/070430taco_talk_gopnik#ixzz2F5UTvu6.

Skyfall: Worrying About the End

“This is the end,” Adele sings in the lush title song to the latest Bond movie, “Skyfall.” Apocalyptic thinking infects even our popular entertainments. And no wonder…Hurricane Sandy may have caused even global warming atheists and agnostics (I have had my doubts myself) to acknowledge at last that nature is taking its revenge on us, that flooded eastern seaboard cities may be our future. Terrorism haunts us still from the shadows. The bottom has fallen out of Syria and (as I write this) there is a real fear that Assad will use chemical weapons on his own people. The latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only just played itself out in Gaza (and no one even pretends to think there won’t be another round). Behind the Kubuki theater of threats and counter-threats, diplomacy and crippling sanctions, lay the real possibility of a military strike by Israel (with or without the overt or covert cooperation of the U.S.) on Iran, almost certainly igniting a regional or global war. And “fiscal cliff” is now on everyone’s lips as a reminder--far, far, far, too late--that what we call "our way of life" is not a given.

     

"Skyfall," the movie, worries too about the end—the end of the usefulness of human intelligence in the face of those enemies in the shadows who wreck havoc through cyberspace. Worries about the end of the usefulness of the double-0 agents, and of Bond himself, (played again by Daniel Craig, and looking in "Skyfall" as if the miles have begun to take their toll). And in a bit of self-referential mockery it worries about the usefulness against such an enemy of all those gadgets and devices that Bond has used for 50 years to dodge death and surprise his enemies. (“What did you think you were getting, an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that kind of thing anymore.”) And the end really does come to “M” in a shootout at Bond’s childhood home in Scotland, an affecting scene (and for the sake of the series a sad one, since it seems that any movie with Judy Dench in it can never be a really bad one.) It’s also a bit disappointing to this movie-goer that the villain wreaking worldwide havoc with cyberspacial ease is not a politically or religiously motivated visionary with a global agenda, but a demented sociopath with a personal one. But that too may be true, in its way, to our apocalyptic fears: all of human history may be at the mercy of such types.

Well, this is a Bond flick and people come to the theater to get away from politics. And so of course Bond and his devices do emerge victorious (he’s even equipped with a 60s vintage hotrod with headlights that fire bullets). The series promises to go on satisfying audiences, with Ralph Fiennes newly incarnated as M. And then there is that theme song by Adele, which is its own reward.