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More gruesome details about the death of Census worker, Bill Sparkman, have emerged that make it obvious that - regardless of motive for the killing - Sparkman's killer was, by stripping Sparkman, binding his hands and feet with duct tape, scrawling "fed" on his chest, and attaching his Census ID card to his head, was participating in an exceptionally violent and lunatic way with the anti-government rhetoric promulgated on cable television and talk radio.
As Faiz Shakir writes, "Regardless of what the motive for the killing may have been, why would a murder(s) take such pains to so blatantly convey anger, fear, and vitriol towards a Census employee?" It's either passion stirred by the talk show propagandists, or a conscious draw away from the real reasons for the murder. Either way, anti-government ideas were never far from mind while Bill Sparkman was bound and hung.
Read Richard Benjamin's post on HuffPo. In it, he spins Sparkman's murder as the narrative of a crumbling infrastructure, a dynamic American electorate, and the lingering death of America's middle- and working-classes. In short, the pressures caused by growing minority populations coupled with the decline of American manufacturing, the decline of real wages, and the rising instability associated with foreclosures and rising medical and insurance costs, puts the 2010 Census into a highly volatile context - which is being whipped up into a froth by the Glenn Becks and Michelle Bachmans. Sadly, it's the Bill Sparkmans - the "perma-lancers," as Benjamin calls them, the ordinary Americans taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet - who are on the front lines here.
This is a good time to excerpt from Adam Gopnik's reaction to the Oklahama City bombing, "Violence as Style":
Timothy McVeigh may be a nut, but nuts don't fall far from the tree. Fifty years from now, historians are unlikely to wrote, "In the mid-nineties, politicians and talk-show radio created an atmosphere of poisonous hatred against the national government. Also in a completely unrelated development, somebody blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City"....The problem is not that the militias have been mysteriously infiltrated by extremists but that the federal government has, especially in the past two years, been inflated into an imaginary hate-object big enough for a nut. That's happened with the enthusiastic help of "mainstream" right-wing paranoia: Bill Clinton is an illegitimate President; liberals are the enemies of normal Americans; gun control is a conspiracy to tyrannize the populace; a New World Order is being put in place by foreign bankers. These are the ideas of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan and the N.R.A. - ideas, in other words, that a section of the "responsible" right in this country has spent the last few years legitimizing and circulating. It is no great exaggeration to say that The American Survival Guide is just The American Spectator with bazooka ads.
Of course, the difference is that the militia right comes armed with ideas and guns, whereas the mainstream far right comes armed only with ideas. Not a meaningless difference but not a decisive one, either, as we discover when the ideas being promoted are the kind whose logical consequence is to make somebody else want to go pick up a gun. It turns out that there isn't one world of cultural theater and another world of real acts. The terrorists, though, had come to believe they weren't bombing a building full of people but obliterating an abstract object of hate. The "grievances" that are said to have moved them seem, on examination, curiously bloodless - things seen on television and in "instructional" videos rather than actually experienced. The people who had helped teach them to view the world as a set of easy abstractions, rather than as intricate arrangements made by human beings and inhabited by them, are under no obligation to take the blame for what happened. But it would be nice to see a little more remorse.
The left learned long ago to shut out its potentially violent fringe rhetoric from mainstream discourse, thanks to the hard lessons it learned about political violence in the sixties. Despite Timothey McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, the right refuses to acknowledge the dangers in abetting racist, nativist, homophobic, and virulently anti-government rhetoric. But blood has already been spilled in Pittsburgh. And Kansas. And, now, in Kentucky. Where next?
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