Letting freedom -- and hate -- ring
It’s shoot first and ask questions later for some big-name right-wingers
By Ellen Snortland 08/07/2008
Hatred is spewed every day and night in this country on radio and TV. Vicious, violent verbal vomit from right-wing radical gasbags is so ubiquitous that we have become inured to its impact until something more dramatic happens. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is an old newsroom adage, and blood flowed two weeks ago. When white, right-wing nut-job Jim David Adkisson opened fire at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, it was merely shocking, not really surprising.
Maybe Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and their ilk are not literally saying, “OK, wackos, go down to your local hardware store and buy a 12-gauge shotgun and then find a group of lefties and wing ’em,” but they do actively create a climate of intolerance and yes, hatred.
The environment they create through their words is one of scapegoating, the deliberate demonization of other people and their points of view and “thingifying.” It is absolutely no accident that some of the reading matter found in the shooter’s home was “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Just as pre-World War II German and Austrian home libraries had Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to spur on their contempt of Jews, gays, Catholics, “uppity” women, and other “defectives,” our little ditto-heads whip up their hatred with similar bile in our own culture 24/7. Hatred is commercial in the US and is easy to focus on the “other.”
A bit more about “thingifying.” I’m constantly interacting with people because of my ardent feminist views, some of whom say “Aren’t you people satisfied yet? You live in a country where you don’t have to walk eight miles for kindling or water. What are you bellyaching about?”
Violence, and specifically male violence, is what I’m bellyaching about. While it’s absolutely true that women in developed countries have made many strides in quality of life, there is still a very real “thing” factor in play. When you make a person into a thing — objectify them, expect them to live by very rigid gender behavior rules, or else — it becomes a lot easier to brutalize them. When you regard someone as a full human being with all the subtle and various nuances that being human entails, it’s harder to treat them like a “thing.” Adkisson regarded liberals as things to be exterminated.
My “thing-o-meter” happens to be the rate of violence against women and girls. My feminism is rooted in a commitment to end violence against all people, with my jumping-off point and focus being on how we treat females. We’re still treating females like objects and, as a society, treating so-called “feminine” qualities as inferior.
In the radical conservative (isn’t that an oxymoron?) culture of our radio “boys,” calling someone a liberal — male or female — is another way of saying that they are “wimpy,” or a “sissy,” aka feminine. The predominant undercurrent of conservatism is the maintenance of rigid gender roles regarding white, straight male supremacy. And while there are many liberal men who are clueless about their own homophobia and misogyny, at least they aren’t actively fanning the flames of hatred toward “uppity” women and gays. Adkisson was on a rampage against liberals, or the “feminization” of his country. The church was his ex-wife’s former congregation and indeed, she had gotten a restraining order against him.
Many of our liberal male allies are not aware of the subtle terror that many women live with on a daily basis. Whether it’s the woman next door in our nice Pasadena neighborhood who gets the back of her husband’s hand when he has too much to drink, the unwanted attention of a threatening larger male, or the chill that runs up our spine when we have to walk to our car in a parking structure at night, many females have an awareness of the potential of male-on-female violence that just doesn’t exist for most men.
While Adkisson didn’t specifically target women or “feminists” per se, as Montreal Massacre shooter Marc Lepine did in 1989, he was out to kill the people he blamed for ruining his country. The victims — two dead, eight wounded — were the people targeted verbally by O’Reilly, Savage and Hannity as well as the other right-wing pundits in their rants and books. Hey, if I were a right-wing nut with an itchy trigger finger, I’d head over to a UU church myself. Heck, those UU churches are full of femi-nazis, liberals (gasp!), queers, even (drum roll …) Democrats! It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
I am not calling for censorship. What I am calling for is balance. There is no such thing in the mainstream media, and now with the newspaper crisis we’ll have even fewer points of view available … a dangerous prospect indeed. Liberals, left-wing activists and feminists have been stereotyped and ridiculed to the point where shooting them seems for some of the minions of hate to be the logical next step.
Contact Ellen at www.snortland.com.
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Comments
Oh Dear,
Poor Ms Snortland.
She destroys her own argument with her own ignorance of history.
She accuses Conservatives of being responsible for Addkisson's violent behaviour, then compares it to pre-World War II indoctrination of Germans and Austrians by the NAZI ideology from "Mein Kampf".
Ms Snortland may well be correct in her comparison but it doesn't advance her argument, in fact it destroys it.
Hitler, the author of "Mein Kampf" and leader of the NAZI Party was a socialist.
The NAZI Party was in fact the NSDAP or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which translates to National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Yes - A SOCIALIST WORKERS Party.
So Ms Snortland is in fact inadvertently making the case that the ideology used by a violent radical can just as easily be Left Wing as it is Right Wing.
Which kind of destroys the whole purpose of her rant.
Ellen,
Forgive me for saying, but your points seem very self-serving.
It's easier to lay blame on an entire group when one person does something horrible, particularly when you have an agenda.
It seems so much more feasible to you, doesn't it, to put the blame of one, mentally unstable, horrible person on the whole of the right-wing media outlet when your agenda is one that conflicts with it.
The fact is, these recent shootings are the work of ONE MAN, not an entire sect of the American community at large.
If I have literature about dessert preparation littering my home and I decide to go out and shoot a sous chef citing my hatred for anything non-dessert does that open the door to lay blame on the entire dessert preparation industry for my actions, or does it just make me another garden-variety nut job with a shotgun and too much time on my hands? Would you suddenly start preaching about the damage that dessert makers are doing to the country and how their freedom of speech should be limited?
No, you wouldn't. You wouldn't because it would be ridiculous to do so. The same applies in this case. However, because you carry the self-applied moniker of "feminist", and that agenda conflicts with that of the person in question, you use it as a vehicle to shout your rhetoric from the rooftops screaming "look at me, I'm right!"
You are, in essence, guilty of spewing the same degree of propaganda as Hannity, O'Reilly, and others, and in the same fashion as them, you mask your intent with a ruse. "It's the right-winger's fault that this moron did what he did, so let me use that as a tool to promote my own, conflicting agenda", is what you're saying, and it's painfully obvious.
My advice to you is to take your own advice and take a standpoint of balance. You have your views. I don't agree with them. However, I am compassionate to the fact that you have every right to your opinion and I won't cite examples of the wrongdoings of a few radicals within your culture to contradict the whole of your movement. You should have enough respect, or at worst, common sense, to do the same.