Shootings in Arizona

It's been a weird weekend. I took the train upstate through beautiful snowscapes on Friday night. On Saturday, my partner Jerry and I attended the HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West with Deborah Voigt. We attended a different production a few summers ago at Glimmerglass which I found more intimate and moving. (Sidenote: did you know Andrew Lloyd Webber lifted one of his main themes of Phantom of the Opera from Puccini's score.) We saw the opera at Time and Space Limited, a neat small theatre in Hudson that shows really offbeat films in addition to HD broadcasts from the Met and the National Theatre of Great Britain.

After the opera, we heard on the radio about the shootings in Tuscon, Arizona where congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was wounded and six people were killed including a judge and a 9 year old little girl. It reminded of the late 1960s when I was about 10 and it seemed assassinations and violence were erupting every week. I remember I was watching Bewitched and they interupted it to announce that Martin Luther King had been killed.

It's only a day after the shootings and the political debate has already been launched. Did the violent rhetoric of the right--and yes, it's mostly--not ALL but mostly---coming from the right, I'm sorry but it is--create an atmosphere of rage to influence unbalanced individuals like the 22 year old nutjob who did the shooting? It's way too early to tell anything and I don't believe people like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, and Sharron Angle are purposely inciting violence. Well, I take that back about Sharron Angle. She did say discontented Tea Partiers should invoke "Second Amendment remedies" if things didn't turn out the way they wanted in the last midterm elections. But, I don't believe the rest really meant to incite violence. But when you use targets and crosshairs on images of people you disagree with, as Sarah Palin did on Giffords' congressional district in Arizona, you have to take responsibility for creating a dangerous climate.

Palin could have used less violent imagery to get across her point in the last election. We don't know if this crazy kid saw Palin's website and was inspired by it. We do know his ravings on the internet are incoherent and he may be just plain crazy and this would have happened with or without the media madness stirred up by Palin and her ilk. But people like Beck are invoking, even jokingly, violence and death against people like Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi. I remember driving through Missouri a few years ago and listening to a local talk station. The host joked that he wanted to be fair, but then said "Michael Moore must hate this country." I just don't get that. Yes, you can disagree with Moore all you want, but must he hate this country just because he doesn't share your opinion on health care and gun control?

The sherriff of Tuscon said in a news conference yesterday that Arizona is becoming the capital of bigotry and inflamed rhetoric and that it's time for American media to tone it down. I believe all but a few fringe-lunatic Americans abhor violence, but too many in power both in the media and in politics have no problem using it to grab bigger ratings or more votes. And they have no conscience and sleep perfectly well when something like this happens because they don't make the connection. Sarah Palin and hubby Todd are getting a good night's sleep on their mattress stuffed with all their millions, and she is not responsible for yesterday's shootings. But she is responsible with her crosshairs imagery and scary talk of death panels in creating a climate of division and rancor.