 Jim C:
I'm going to have to disagree with you again, I'm afraid. Although I agree that Boehner's crying, as it relates to the shooting rampage, is a bit irrelevant, the article on the whole is pretty spot on.
Culture matters, and ours is collapsing. I think that it is not outrageous to postulate that the symptoms of that collapse would first make themselves felt in males.
Kunstler certainly is a bit left of center for my taste, but he is right when he points out that materialism, or at least our particular brand of it, is destroying the soul of the country.
I think the subtext of his article points to the possibility that Loughner's reaction, schizophrenic though it may have been, was in some ways a coherent response to the vacuousness of modern global culture. (If anyone thinks that the rest of the world is more mature or spiritually satisfied than Americans, I would hold that they are extremely naive, but it is a point that I cannot prove). As is al-Qaeda's, as backwards and sick as that is.
The problem is not the Right or the Left. It is not even mental illness in the clinical sense. The problem is a civilization and an age careening out of control. One that can no longer offer definitions for the most basic terms of life, like "human", "man", "woman", "child", "freedom", "law", "God", "money", "truth", "good", "evil", "beauty", "art", etc. It is impossible for any individual or civilization to conclusively define these things, but we have either given up the attempt to come to some consensus about what they mean, or we have expanded them so much as to become void of meaning. Violence and sex fill that void, since society actively corrodes all other constructive endeavors. A civilization that expects no more of its population, especially its males, than to get a job and pay taxes is barbaric. Scratch that, barbarism at least has a naive charm and simplicity. A barbaric civilization is simply insane.
Perhaps I am over-excited, but Loughner may prove to be a John the Baptist of the coming age, one that will baptize all in blood. For me, at least, the assassination attempt had initially been a random act of insanity, but the reaction it seems to be provoking among the nation as a whole points to a deeper significance. Commented 4864 days ago |
