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Bang, You’re Dead

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Published : October 12th, 2015
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Category : Editorials

A propos of the recent Roseburg, Oregon, school massacre that left nine dead, President Obama said, “we’re going to have to come together and stop these things from happening.” That’s an understandable sentiment, and the president has to say something, after all. But within the context of how life is lived in this country these days, we’re not going to stop these things from happening.

And what is that context? A nation physically arranged on-the-ground to produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety, and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation. Really, everything in the once vaunted American way of life slouches in the direction of depression, rage, violence, and death.

This begs the question about guns. I believe it should be harder to buy guns. I believe certain weapons-of-war, such as assault rifles, should not be sold in the civilian market. But I also believe that the evolution of our Deep State — the collusion of a corrupt corporate oligarchy with an overbearing police and surveillance apparatus — is such a threat to liberty and decency that the public needs to be armed in defense of it. The Deep State needs to worry about the citizens it is fucking with.

The laws on gun sales range from ridiculously lax in many states to onerous in a few. Yet the most stringent, Connecticut, (rated “A” by the Brady Campaign org), was the site of the most horrific massacre of recent times so far, the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting. The handgun law in New York City is the most extreme in the nation — limiting possession only to police and a few other very special categories of citizens. But it took the “stop-and-frisk” policy to really shake the weapons out of the gang-banging demographic. And now that Mayor Bill deBlasio has deemed that “racist,” gang-banging murders are going up again.

Which leads to a consideration that there is already such a fantastic arsenal of weapons loose in this country that attempts to regulate them would be an exercise in futility — it would only stimulate brisker underground trafficking in the existing supply.

What concerns me more than the gun issue per se is the extraordinary violence-saturated, pornified culture of young men driven crazy by failure, loneliness, grievance, and anger. More and more, there are no parameters for the normal expression of masculine behavior in America — for instance, taking pride in doing something well, or becoming a good candidate for marriage. The lower classes have almost no vocational domain for the normal enactments of manhood, and one of the few left is the army, where they are overtly trained to be killers.

Much of what used to be the working class is now an idle class that can only dream of what it means to be a man and they are bombarded with the most sordid pre-packaged media dreams in the form of video games based on homicide, the narcissistic power fantasies of movies, TV, and professional sports, and the frustrating tauntings of free porn. The last thing they’re able to do is form families. All of this operates in conditions where there are no normal models of male authority, especially fathers and bosses, to regulate the impulse control of young men — and teach them to regulate it themselves.

The physical setting of American life composed of a failing suburban sprawl pattern for daily life — the perfect set-up for making community impossible — obliterates the secondary layer of socialization beyond the family. This is life in the strip-mall wilderness of our country, which has gotten to be most of where people live. Imagine a society without families and real communities and wave your flag over that.

President Obama and whatever else passes for authority in America these days won’t even talk about that. They don’t have a vocabulary for it. They don’t understand how it works and what it’s doing to the nation. Many of the parts and modules of it make up what’s left of our foundering economy: junk food, pointless and endless motoring, television. We’re not going to do anything about it. The killing and the mayhem will continue through the process of economic collapse that we have entered. And when we reach the destination of all that, probably something medieval or feudal in make-up, it will be possible once again for boys to develop into men instead of monsters.

 

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James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
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Your article has hit the nail on the head and that is the outcome of the 1% taking 90% of the nation's wealth. Turning the other end of society into a welfare dependent cohort with no hope in life can only breed resentment, and whilst some of committing massacres are not the bottom of the heap there are many who live a violent unlawful life. When Wall Street turns you into a desperado how can any of us blame them?
It is unlikely that anything is going to change. The rich are not going to give up their opulent lifestyle so that Americans can all prosper in the wealth of the nation. God knows that taxes for the rich are never on! The gun manufacturers are not going to give up their lucrative business interests. And finally no president is going to be able enforce genuine gun control as too many vested interests are at work.
What is truly saddening is that no amount of domestic massacres will change anything and the only way out is for voters to vote out the bastards who are owned by the NRA and manufacturers. Then things will change. Perhaps then there will also be meaningful controls on who can buy what gun, if any at all.
As I have been saying for a lifetime: follow the money trail and you'll find the culprits.
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Perhaps the enamor of guns in our society is yet another symptom of a cultural paranoia. In the US we spend trillions to bolster our military, accept the Patriot Act without a whimper, vociferously defend our borders against any aliens, futilely check Halloween candy for pins, and endorse laws to kill others when "feeling threatened". The more afraid gun owners feel, the more ammo and guns they purchase as though confrontations enable one to grow more hands to hold those weapons. We now have enough armament in the US for every man, woman, and baby to brandish their AKs and Glocks. It frightens me so, I'm on my way to a gun show today!
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And there lies a part of the problem! If your family is massacred you may actually think twice about your acceptance of this gun nonsense.
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ranbotrader: My trip to the gun show was sarcasm. I hope to never own a gun. I had my fill of them in the military.
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Latest comment posted for this article
ranbotrader: My trip to the gun show was sarcasm. I hope to never own a gun. I had my fill of them in the military. Read more
The Recusant - 10/14/2015 at 4:06 PM GMT
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