You Cannot Outsmart Crazy
“How do you make sense of these type of senseless situations seems to be the question that’s on everybody’s mind and I don’t know that there is a way to make sense of this sort of thing. As I watched the political pundit world, many are reflecting and grieving and trying to figure things out. But it’s also true that others are working feverishly to find the tidbit or two that will exonerate their side from blame or implicate the other and watching that is as predictable as it is dispiriting.
“Did the toxic political environment cause this? A graphic image here, an ill-timed comment, violent rhetoric, those sort of things? I have no fucking idea. We live in a complex ecosystem of influences and motivations and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I would blame heavy metal music for Columbine.
“And, by the way, that is coming from somebody who truly hates our political environment. It is toxic. It is unproductive. But to say that that is what has caused this or that the people in that are responsible for this, I just don’t think you can do.
“Boy would that be nice. Boy would it be nice to be able to draw a straight line of causation from this horror to something tangible because then we could convince ourselves that if we just stopped ‘this’ the horrors will end. To have the feeling, however fleeting, that this type of event can be prevented forever. It’s hard not to feel like it can.
“You cannot outsmart crazy. You don’t know what a trouble mind will get caught on. Crazy always seems to find a way. It always has.”
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“I do think that it’s important for us to watch our rhetoric. I do think that it’s a worthwhile goal not to conflate our political opponents with our enemies if for no other reason than to draw a better distinction between the manifesto of paranoid mad men and what passes for acceptable political pundit speak.
“It would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn’t in any way resemble how we actually talk to each other on TV. Let’s at least make troubled individuals easier to spot.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on January 11, 2011