Sparkman's death a suicide

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Nov 25, 2009 at 10:54:26 AM MST

State police, working with the FBI, said at a press conference moments ago that Sparkman had recently taken out two life insurance policies that would not pay out for suicide. It appears Sparkman hoped that the scheme would benefit his son, Josh Sparkman.

Sparkman, of course, was the Census worker who was found hung, bound with duct tape, and with the word, "fed," scrawled on his chest. At the time, I wrote:

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.

Obviously I was wrong about Sparkman having killers. It seemed fantastic at the time that anyone would kill themselves they way Sparkman did - it still does, frankly - and that a murder with such blatant anti-government details was, in fact, a reaction in some way to recent anti-government rhetoric. Instead, it turned out that Sparkman was spoofing Beck and Bachman, and a lot of us were wrong about his death, and obviously rushed to implicate high-profile, cable television righty extremists in it. In this particular case, we were wrong.

But beyond the senseless death and Sparkman's convoluted acts and the effect it will have on his family, the worst thing that will probably come out of this isn't that leftys suddenly look like jerks, but that the Glenn Becks and Michelle Bachmans of the world will somehow feel "exonerated" or cleared. But their vile rhetoric has already led to recent killings. The story here shouldn't be that leftys jumped to conclusions, but that extremist rhetoric has already created dangerous tensions. Frankly, the only difference between the extremist rhetoric that touched off Nidal Hasan, and that which touched off Poplawski is that the Pittsburgh shooter's fare is widely promulgated on cable television and underwritten by mainstream businesses. Politicized right-wing misinformation and paranoia has been legitimized, and the revelation that Sparkman's death was a suicide means warnings about rightwing extremism will be viewed as unfounded or exaggerated.

"...an act of terrorism..."

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Sep 28, 2009 at 05:27:11 AM MST

Now, these details still do not tell us whether Starkman was killed because he was a Census worker, or whether he was killed because, in the course of doing his Census work, he happened to come upon an illegal activity. But they do make it crystal clear that Starkman's killers wanted him to be found like that. Which means - obviously - that this was a message killing. It was a political statement - an act of terrorism....

It's irrelevant whether Sparkman's murderer(s) were meth dealers or government-haters. Either way, Bill Sparkman was killed because he was, as the message on his body crudely proclaimed, a "fed." And whether his killers were fans of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, or not; whether they knew that a member of Congress had declared her proud intention to violate federal law and encouraged others to do so, or not; whether they had picked up on the Republican Party's many, many anti-government "hate minutes," or not, does not mitigate the dangerous and irresponsible game that conservative public figures, lawmakers, and prominent bloggers/pundits are playing when they go beyond criticizing specific political figures or particular political viewpoints, and start to attack government itself, along with the very notion of public service. Public discourse is increasingly shaped by the voices of those we elected to make government work for us - all of us - refusing to support the public process they swore to uphold, and actually making it their task to destroy government from within, to tear it down and put it down and have us believe that good government is a joke and government institutions a source of evil and danger, such that violating the law is an act of patriotism. And when they do this, they are responsible - for implicitly condoning and encouraging hatred, for stirring the embers and for fanning the flames and for the "unintended" and "unfortunate" consequences when, as flames do, they burn out of control - for being, in Natalie Cole's exquisite words, "silver tongues bearing fruit from poison lies."

In short, those that spent their rainy-day savings to send Robert Stacy McCain to Kentucky to prove - what, exactly? Sparkman's killers love their government? don't watch Glenn Beck? - have wasted their money.

Update: Unbelievable. From the same folks who froth at the mouth about jumping to conclusions, etc & co. Completely classless and disrespectful.

Sparkman's death and extremist rhetoric

by: Jay Stevens

Sat Sep 26, 2009 at 08:24:47 AM MST

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?