FRIENDS: We live in two nations composed of best friends!

MONDAY, JULY 15, 2024

Friends don't let friends hear from Others:  As it turned out, the assailant—the gunman, now deceased—was only twenty years old.

As it turned out, he was a registered Republican. That said, it still isn't clear what his political views may have been, or whether he really had any.

As has often been the case with these gunmen, someone who knew the gunman in high school has said he was endlessly bullied. Full disclosure:

At this time, we ourselves don't know if that's true.

Quite a few of our nation's recent mass shootings have been committed by young men—young men of roughly this same age—who were apparently lost in clinical depression, severe mental illness, disordered thinking, despair. 

Meanwhile, here's something else that's true. Frequently, the most obvious possible motive for our nation's political shootings hasn't turned out to be the actual motive. 

Sometimes, the motives for political shootings haven't been political! In a superb "News Analysis" overview for the New York Times, Peter Baker recalls the motives behind a few such "political" shootings:

BAKER (7/15/24): When President Ronald Reagan was shot by an attention-seeking drifter in 1981, the country united behind its injured leader. The teary-eyed Democratic speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., went to the hospital room of the Republican president, held his hands, kissed his head and got on his knees to pray for him.

[...]

Gov. George C. Wallace, Democrat of Alabama, was shot at a campaign event during his 1972 presidential run by a man who wanted to be famous...John Hinckley attacked Mr. Reagan out of an obsession to impress the movie star Jodie Foster. 

John Hinckley, who had just turned 26, tried to kill President Reagan. As it turned out, he wasn't driven by a political motive. Insanely, he decided to shoot President Reagan in the hope that such an act would impress the very young Jodie Foster. 

In the grip of a mental illness, he apparently came to believe that shooting and killing President Reagan would be the way to do that! So it has often turned out in the case of attempts on the lives of political figures.

Hinckley tried to kill a sitting president. When George Wallace was shot, he was a presidential candidate.

More recently, Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot and severely wounded by Jared Lee Loughner, who was 22 years old at the time. Six other people were killed in this crazy attack on a political figure.

What exactly was this young man's "motive?" Wikipedia's thumbnail says this:

Jared Lee Loughner is an American mass murderer who pled guilty to 19 charges of murder and attempted murder in connection with the January 8, 2011, Tucson shooting, in which he shot and severely injured U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, and killed six people, including Chief U.S. District Court Judge John Roll, Gabe Zimmerman, a member of Giffords's staff, and a 9-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green. Loughner shot and injured a total of 13 people, including one man who was injured while subduing him.

Acquaintances say that Loughner's personality had changed markedly in the years prior to the shooting, a period during which he was also abusing alcohol and drugs. He had been suspended from Pima Community College in September 2010 because of his bizarre behavior and disruptions in classes and the library. After his arrest, two medical evaluations diagnosed Loughner with paranoid schizophrenia and ruled him incompetent to stand trial...

In any normal sense of the term, did this young man have a "motive" at all? You can teach it flat or teach it round—but it seems quite clear that he was in the grip of a severe mental illness.

Let's move farther afield. Why did Mark David Chapman, age 25, end up killing John Lennon? What was Chapman's "motive?"

Below, you see an early summary of Wikipedia's much longer account:

Raised in Decatur, Georgia, Chapman used to be a fan of the Beatles, but was infuriated by Lennon's lavish lifestyle and public statements, such as his remark about the band being "more popular than Jesus" and the lyrics of two of his later songs "God" and "Imagine". In the years leading up to the murder, the J. D. Salinger novel The Catcher in the Rye took on great personal significance for Chapman, to the extent that he wished to model his life after the novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Chapman also contemplated killing other public figures, including David Bowie, Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul McCartney, and Ronald Reagan...

Following the murder, Chapman's legal team intended to mount an insanity defense based on the testimony of mental health experts who said that he was in a delusional psychotic state at the time of the shooting.

Among other complaints, he'd been infuriated by Lennon's lavish lifestyle! This young man's earlier episodes of clinical depression are described in Wikipedia's detailed account. 

Clinical depression seems to be an obvious part of this tragic story. For the record, here's a bit more detail about the short-term "motive" behind his crazy, murderous attack:

Chapman had also been influenced by Anthony Fawcett's John Lennon: One Day at a Time, which detailed Lennon's lavish lifestyle in New York City. According to [a personal friend], "He was angry that Lennon would preach love and peace but yet have millions." Chapman later said: "He told us to imagine no possessions and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music." He also recalled having listened to Lennon's solo albums in the weeks before the murder:

I would listen to this music and I would get angry at him, for saying [in the song "God"] that he didn't believe in God, that he just believed in him and Yoko, and that he didn't believe in the Beatles. This was another thing that angered me, even though this record had been done at least ten years previously. I just wanted to scream out loud, "Who does he think he is, saying these things about God and heaven and the Beatles?" Saying that he doesn't believe in Jesus and things like that. At that point, my mind was going through a total blackness of anger and rage.

According to Chapman, his mind "was going through a total blackness of anger and rage." So it frequently goes with the "motives" of these badly disturbed young men.

In the current case, why did the latest assailant—a 20-year-old registered Republican—attempt to kill Donald Trump? 

At this point, no answer to that question has emerged. It may turn out that he left writings which will explain his state of mind. It's also possible that no clear picture will ever emerge. 

Even today, no one knows why this very young man did what he did last Saturday—why he went to a rally and apparently tried to shoot and kill a presidential candidate. (Presumably, he knew this act would likely end in "suicide by cop.")

At this point, no one knows why he did what he did—but so what? On the Fox News Channel, and elsewhere in Red America, thought leaders rushed forward that very day to announce why he did what he did. They said he did it because of what Joe Biden had said, or because of things that had been said on Blue America's "cable news" channels.

In our view, there's plenty to criticize in what has been said on Blue America's "cable news" programs. (In our view, the behavior on the Fox News Channel tends to be even worse.)

In our view, there has been plenty to criticize! That said, what was the "motive" for Saturday's attack? What explains this latest assailant's behavior?

Even today, no one can say—but so what? Here's the start of Baker's analysis piece, which appears in today's print editions:

BAKER (7/15/24): When President Ronald Reagan was shot by an attention-seeking drifter in 1981, the country united behind its injured leader. The teary-eyed Democratic speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., went to the hospital room of the Republican president, held his hands, kissed his head and got on his knees to pray for him.

But the assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump seems more likely to tear America further apart than to bring it together. Within minutes of the shooting, the air was filled with anger, bitterness, suspicion and recrimination. Fingers were pointed, conspiracy theories advanced and a country already bristling with animosity fractured even more.

The fact that the shooting in Butler, Pa., on Saturday night was two days before Republicans were set to gather in Milwaukee for their nominating convention invariably put the event in a partisan context. While Democrats bemoaned political violence, which they have long faulted Mr. Trump for encouraging, Republicans instantly blamed President Biden and his allies for the attack, which they argued stemmed from incendiary language labeling the former president a proto-fascist who would destroy democracy.

Mr. Trump’s eldest son, his campaign strategist and a running mate finalist all attacked the political left within hours of the shooting even before the gunman was identified or his motive determined. “Well of course they tried to keep him off the ballot, they tried to put him in jail and now you see this,” wrote Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the former president.

So said the senior adviser—and from others, the accusations were more specific and dumber and worse. That's what was instantly being said, at a time when no one had any way of knowing what may or may not have lay behind this latest violent attack. 

That very Saturday, major political figures "attacked the political left." The next morning, on Fox & Friends Weekend, a quintet of the Fox News Channel's official "friends" staged a gruesome, hours-long clinic in the ways of pre-human pseudo-journalistic behavior.

We briefly described this gruesome gong-show in yesterday's report. As they staged their tribal war, no manner of dimwitted tribal propaganda was left behind. 

But so it goes—so it has always gone—when members of our limited species split themselves into warring tribes.

Yesterday morning, the inanity on Fox & Friends Weekend was endless. It went on and on and on, and then it went on a bit more. It started with the unblinking assertion of divine providence the previous day, not excluding the intervention of "our lord and savior, Jesus Christ." 

So ruled weekday friend Lawrence Jones, speaking at precisely 6:12 a.m. Already, the weekend friends had agreed on the role of divine providence. On this "cable news" show, Jones then took the next step.

(Jones didn't explain why the divine intervention had allowed other people to be critically wounded or killed during the violent assault. Nor did the other friends ask him to do so. On this imitation of a news channel, friends don't let friends kill a buzz!)

Stating the obvious, Jones and the other friends are fully entitled to their religious beliefs. That said, no point of dumbness was left behind yesterday morning in the two hours we watched.

No unfounded assertion was left behind—no preapproved element of tribal agitprop. That said, this is the regular order of business on the increasingly gruesome Fox News Channel. In fairness, behavior which isn't altogether different is common on MSNBC, Blue America's "cable news" channel.

The Fox News Channel starts each weekday morning with four (4!) hours of Fox & Friends. The friends talk down to their millions of viewers. No possible sifting of information will ever be left behind.

Over on the rival channel, a conventionally attractive woman with perfect teeth and excellent hair has been pleasuring Blue America for two hours per day over the past five or six years.

Her very heavily watched TV show has been devoted to LOCKING HIM UP. This program has been a repository of bad political judgement—a type of judgment which now may be blowing up in Blue America's face. 

That said, her program has been built around friendship cadres too. Every single freaking day, this former advocate of war in Iraq and antigay referendums tells her trusting viewers that they are watching conversations involving "some of our favorite reporters and friends."

(Sometimes, these friends are elevated to "dear, dear friends." Sometimes, viewers even hear themselves described as "beloved viewers.") 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But this is no way to assemble friends, and this is no way for friends to be treating friends. But this is the way we now organize vast amounts of our nation's journalism, along with our national politics.

Under current corporate arrangements, these "cable news" channels are almost wholly "segregated bv viewpoint." It's been this way for years.  On these ersatz cable "news" channels, one key rule obtains: 

Friends don't let friends consider the viewpoints or insights of Others. 

Friends don't let friends speak to Others. Friends don't make friends listen to Others. All in all, friends don't ask friends to encounter the world like functioning human beings.

This is the way our world has been organized for a rather long time. For Blue America, it's beginning to look like this may have been a disaster.

Yesterday morning, the friends behaved like trained seals. They're cast in that role every day.

Our nation has been organized this way by profit-seeking corporate interests. Very large modern nations simply can't function this way.

We'll explore the behaviors of these dueling groups of friends as the week proceeds. But why did Crooks, just 20 years old, do what he did last Saturday?

Even today, nobody knows—but who what? On Fox & Friends Weekend, a quintet of well-paid corporate tools rushed forward to bulldoze their friends.

Tomorrow: Fox & Friends never quits