Arizona's Smoking Gun Is Not a Civil One

So if we are being asked to choose between two alternative explanations of the vast public slaughter in Tucson and neither of them make much sense, which one should we pick?

And if we can't accept either of them — if we can't accept that an attempted political assassination was carried out without a political component, or that a mass murder was carried out because Sarah Palin put crosshairs on a map — is there any explanation that counts for anything at all? We have been told by no less an authority than the president of the United States that the very need to seek explanations is something of a human failing, and that "none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack." We have also been told, by no less an authority than the president of the United States, that we ought to be nicer to one another, because the victims of the attack would have wanted it that way, and because "only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation."

I applaud and agree with him, and his point — that our political polarization prevents us from addressing, or even talking about, the issues that really came to the fore Saturday morning in Tucson: gun control and mental illness — is the point I was trying to make in this space on Wednesday. Still, his speech, graceful and moving as it was, raises a question with an unfortunately binary answer: Did political polarization and excessive partisanship contribute to the Arizona massacre or not? And if it did not, why does the massacre serve as an occasion for undoing it? If, as the president acknowledged, the "simple lack of civility" did not cause the murders, then why did the president call for more civility in our public discourse? Why has no less a partisan provocateur than Roger Ailes supposedly told his anchors to "tone it down," and no less a bomb-thrower than Matt Taibi pledged to stop calling everyone he writes about a complete asshole?

Why should Jared Loughner change the discourse, when there's no evidence as yet that he was affected by the discourse?

The answer, of course, is that there's murder in the discourse, and everyone knows it....

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-speech-tucson-4859658?src=rss

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