Discurso civil and the End Times
When I landed at Luis Muñoz Marín Airport at around 9 PM on Nochebuena I got an email from a friend in New York that read: “The earth shook from Rincón to Fajardo on Crhrismas Eve in Puerto Rico. No casualties reported thus far. Happy Holiday.” It seemed like no one waiting at the baggage carousel even had an idea. Later that evening, when my mother described being so afraid she scooted under the dinner table, it didn’t seem real.
An earthquake in the middle of las navidades in Puerto Rico is bound to cause some serious speculation about What Is to Become of Us. The dawn of the new millennium came and went over 10 years ago, but it still has people un poco nerviosa. Maybe you remember La Comay’s infantile tittering about the terremoto in May, where she flipped over a piece of paper that gave the time, 1:16, so that it read 91:1. Even my mother’s cousin, a born-again zealot, who came to the hospital with me to visit my father, who was in intensive care, was warning everyone (the nurse in the ICU, the parking lot attendant, anyone I introduced him to),
“¡Acuérdate que El Señor viene pronto!”
I think I first became aware of this millennial fever when a Manhattan cab driver who dodged the Vietnam War draft waxed poetic about how Zbignew Bresinski started the muhajadeen during the Jimmy Carter administration to get the godless Russians out of Afghanistan. It always goes back to the Middle East, doesn’t it? I used to think that El Señor would probably show up there first, giving me a few hours to confess my sins before he got to this side of the Atlantic.
Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “When I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
–Barack Obama, speaking in Arizona at a ceremony honoring those wounded in Tucson, Arizona on January 8.
But how inexplicable was this event? Haven’t we just lived through a series of mass shootings on college campuses and workplaces carried out by young people with pathological disorders and disgruntled workers at the end of their rope? Didn’t Congress let the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expire during the Bush administration in 2004? Wasn’t “Call of Duty: Black Ops” the top-selling video game in the US last year, selling over 12 million copies in two months?
Once again, Obama calls for “civil discourse”:
…What we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other…Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.
But besides perhaps alluding to Sarah Palin’s grotesque “blood libel” video, the President’s comments seem more directed toward legitimate criticism of the incendiary rhetoric used by the right wing of the Republican Party, and not as much the “conservative” interpretation of the Second Amendment that allows someones like the Tucson shooter to buy a semi-automatic weapon almost as easily as a cell phone.
The use of violence and intimidation by the hard right wing of the Republican Party, at least in its current manifestation goes back to a “riot” in Miami over a ballot recount in the election dispute that got Bush wrongly installed in the White House as the millennium turned. Sharon Angle, Tea Party candidate for governor of Nevada in 2010, suggested that the American people bring down “an out of control Congress” with “Second Amendment remedies.” It is the only form of “negotiation” currently being used by the government of Luis Fortuño.
The Tucson shooter is probably best described as someone with very deep psychological problems, and his political logic is twisted and in many ways irrelevant to the crime he committed. But he is a product of a time where real physical violence and a more subtle form of psychological violence takes a daily toll on our lives. Despite his short-lived passion for the music of Charlie Parker, he became, as this New York Times profile theorizes, “an echo chamber for stray ideas, amplifying, for example, certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system and the government’s mind-manipulation of the masses through language.”
The idea that language is being re-shaped by some hegemonic force or that the supremacy of the U.S. dollar is in doubt is occasionally used by the left as a critique of tangible crises, not as a call to violence. These crises reveal that problems of inequality in “American” democracy are becoming so glaring as to provoke a deterioration in society in general and “civil” discourse in particular. The result is increasing authoritarianism, and more talk about coincidence (one of the victims of the shooting, a 9-year-old girl, was born on September 11, 2001) and El Señor.
In the hallway outside of intensivo a woman holding a stuffed doll was waiting for her grandmother to be moved out to a regular room in the hospital, like my father would a few days later. She had that look on her face, and it wasn’t just about her mother. “Con todo lo que está pasando, sabe, y el terremoto…” “Estamos en tiempos difíciles,” I said.
“Eso es así,” she said.