Since the awful events in Arizona, writers in the liberal press have made a welcome discovery. In the Guardian Jessica Valenti pinpoints the site of this discovery by talking of ‘the culture of increasing vitriol in US politics’. Michael Tomasky refers, similarly, to ‘the violent rhetoric that emanates from the rightwing of American society’ and suggests there’s ‘some kind of connection’ between it and the Arizona shootings. A Guardian leader is on the same wavelength. ‘What is clear’, it says, ‘is that every Republican and media loudmouth who has flirted with insurrectionary rhetoric… should examine their consciences.’ The same thing on Comment is Free from Gary Younge: the rampage, he writes, though the product of an unstable mind, ‘was also the byproduct of a polarised political culture underpinned by increasingly vitriolic, violent and vituperative rhetoric and symbolism’. And you’ll find similar from the Independent: ‘if politicians routinely use the language of violence, actual violence is more likely to break out’. Again (from Jonathan Raban): ‘extravagant figures of speech can all too easily become literal, and rhetorical guns turn into real ones’. There’s much more of this about, but I’ll leave it at that.
When I say that the discovery lying behind the above quotations is a welcome one I do not mean to imply that the point they all express was previously unknown to me. It wasn’t. I’d say I’ve been aware of it since forever. This point being? That words count. That ideology, political rhetoric, the language of violence, threats and so forth can be free-standing causes, and have real effects in their own right. But the insistence on this truth this last couple of days I call a welcome one because in another context, that of Islamist terrorism, we are regularly, and lavishly, treated in the same liberal press to efforts to displace this truth by way of literary meanderings about festering grievance, reactive rage, mistaken foreign policy, Tony Blair, and what not. For my own part I do not pretend to offer any would-be comprehensive account of the causes of Jared Loughner’s actions. However, it’s good to see that the relatively autonomous power of belief and its propagation can be more easily admitted in some contexts than in others to the journalistic sociology of political violence, without always being reduced to an epiphenomenon of something else. Only connect.