Casualty of the Culture War?
Blog — By John Pattison on September 23, 2009 at 3:26 pmThe AP is reporting that a census worker was found hanged in rural Kentucky with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest.
The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation.
I’ve said this before on this blog: at some point the violent rhetoric of the so-called culture war has to turn into actual violence. In the last year there have been shootings at “liberal” churches, and guns, angry signs, and near riots at town hall meetings about health care reform. I am reminded of something I read in an article in this week’s Time magazine about Glenn Beck and the politics of paranoia:
[Glenn Beck] is afraid of one-world government, which will turn once proud America into another France. He is afraid that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people” — which doesn’t mean, he hastens to add, that he actually thinks “Obama doesn’t like white people.” … On a slow news day, Beck fears that the Rockefeller family installed communist and fascist symbols in the public artwork of Rockefeller Center. One of his Fox News Channel colleagues, Shepard Smith, has jokingly called Beck’s studio the “fear chamber.” Beck countered that he preferred “doom room.”
Glenn Beck is just one purveyor of the violent and fear-based rhetoric that is poisoning the public conversation. Is the death of that census worker in Kentucky another inevitable result?
13 Comments
Yep… Yep. It’s bound to happen. People think the media doesn’t play a huge role in people’s lives, but man oh man… it sure does.
If I take your question at face value, the answer is no. There is an extremely wide psychological gap between spouting ideological venom and murder. Ironically, the same gap doesn’t exist for war, but a face-to-face killing outside of a culturally sanctioned conflict is different. It takes a deep level of pathology or psychological fragmentation to kill somebody, even if you hate them. Subverting basic empathy and fear of consequences alone is impossible for most people. Though I agree that Beck’s approach is unhealthy (not to mention stoopid), it doesn’t motivate a killing. Columbine wasn’t caused by violent video games. Helter Skelter didn’t cause the Manson killings. Judas Priest didn’t make that kid kill himself. A sociopath just uses media content as window dressing.
Just because Beck is a tool doesn’t mean we should hold him responsible for something like this.
Steve,
I’d like to challenge you on one point. As a teen, I had to sit through two evangelists with a turntable playing Led Zeppelin albums backwards, looking for Satanic messages. Are you absolutely positive about the Helter Skelter thing? Those two were fairly confident in their presentation.
Was the census worker black? Because that would change everything.
Steve,
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I defer to your expertise in this field. One question though: you said that face to face killing “outside of a culturally sanctioned conflict” is different than war. But is there an extent to which this type of violence – the census worker, the shootings at the liberal churches, the town hall protesters holding signs saying that it is time to water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots – is part of a conflict sanctioned by a powerful SUBculture?
John
I actually meant that war IS a culturally sanctioned conflict. Not the best sentence construction, I guess.
But you’re raising an interesting and important question. There is a fine line between individual sociopathy and group hysteria. When a group of people starts to escalate, a sense of individual responsibility becomes more diffuse. When we see other people are doing (or not doing) something, our individual sense of right and wrong can get subverted pretty quickly. This can also be the case when an authority figure tells us to do something, like in the Milgram experiments. So it’s complicated. My point was that, in general, it takes a lot more than Glenn Beck, a video game, Led Zepplin, or Larry Shallenberger to get someone to commit murder. The vast majority of people exposed to this kind of stuff never do anything violent.
All actions begin as thought and are motivated by emotion. The thought forms first in the mind of the thinker, it condenses into emotion, and ultimately moves into the outer manifestation as an action. The media is enormaously powerful because most people are completely unaware of this process. They receive the thoughts that are presented to them and thus own them without the will power to critically decide if the thought is worth having. Then they blindly follow their emotions without the self-reflection necessary to understand and appropriately respond to those emotions. This is why Jesus told us that it is not merely enough to refrain from sinful acts, but we must also refrain from sinful thoughts if we are to be truly free. Glenn Beck is a glaring example of the media vying for attention without any regard to what thoughts are being put out in order to do so and what the resulting emotional catalyst will produce. It is an immorality similar in form to the shady business dealings that led to the currrent financial crisis. Those of us with sufficient awareness should use events such as these to become more awake regarding the current state of our collective consciousness and become very mindful of the thoughts we choose to add to it. In our society it is unreasonable to punish anyone for what they say, only what they do. What a person says provides evidence of what is in their minds as it moves through their emotions. The best way to hold Glenn Beck responsible for his thoughts is to simply give him no more attention. The only way to discipline the media is self-discipline.
Wow, you actually condemned Glenn Beck based on a quote ABOUT him. That’s ballsy.
There have been shootings at all kinds of churches.
In my neck of the woods, people have been called nazis for daring to have an opinion about healthcare reform.
This article is so skewed it’s hard to interact with it in any rational way.
Don’t one-sided charicatures like this contribute to the “culture war”?
Annie,
Condemned? No. Concerned? Yes.
Your point being?
The rhetoric of the culture war goes both ways.
It’s not an article, it’s a blog post.
Perhaps. It wasn’t written to caricature. I’m genuinely concerned and sad. Sorry if it did. I’d value your input on the substance of my post – the question at the end of whether the language of culture “war” can be expected to lead to acts of actual violence?
John
My point being that you were doing the exact thing you were decrying- half a sentence, requoted, out of context, and then linking it to increased violence at healthcare town halls and the slaying of a census worker. Yet, at no time was there any interaction with what he was actually saying.
I don’t think that the language of the culture war brings about violence. I think that the language of the culture war keeps us from being able to take each other seriously enough to prevent violence. The violence itself, where preventable, seems to come more from peoples’ perceptions that they either aren’t being heard (because they are simply being caricaturized) or have run out of options.
Mostly, I see fear. I think there is extreme fear on both sides, some of it justified. But, as long as we refuse to hear each other, it remains a shouting match.
It is very difficult to interact with what Glenn Beck and others like him are “actually saying” because their rhetoric is so full of logical fallacy at best and often outright cognitive dissonance. He is a hugely famous figure at this point, most who read this blog post are already aware of his rhetoric. I agree that mocking people tends to produce frustration and that we need to listen better to each other. Also, watch just about any episode of the Glenn Beck show if you ever want to see disrespectful and mean caricatures of “leftist leadership”.
Powerful stuff I enjoyed it. Someone else once said: I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.