Is anyone surprised that someone called in a bomb threat to Grover Norquist’s office? The amount of stress the anti-tax Republicans are putting on people, globally, is immense. People are looking at financial ruin because of their antics, and it’s inevitable that some people are going to crack. Destroying people’s life’s savings, jacking up their adjustable rate loans, causing a new wave of lay-offs…do the Republicans really expect that no one will decide that they won’t wait passively for these things to be done to them?
It’s inexcusable to issue bomb threats, or to carry out any violence. But it’s also irresponsible to threaten people in this way. When you threaten to shoot the American economy in the head on purpose and for no good reason, some people are going to start thinking in terms of self-defense.
Is the stress beginning to give you some irrational thoughts?
Is “He could have just faked the Bomb threat to get the ‘Liberals are all violent’ thugs all riled up so they ignore republicans acting like idiots” an irrational thought?
No, it makes some sense.
But, given the risks, I very much doubt it would be worth it.
Plus, ironically, Norquist has already decided a deal is better than whatever it is that Boehner is pursuing. The bomb threat was aimed at a target who is already trying to get the Tea Partiers to see reason.
Hmmmm…….work of a Tea Partier, maybe???
Could be a tea partier. We’re dealing with a complex hostage situation. going to ponder a way to model it.
Possible, but, again, unlikely. I think Norquist is just an iconic figure on the left. He’s blamed for creating this political climate. And, rightly so. But he is actually more of Dr. Frankenstein than his monster at this point.
We must both be suffering from the same irrationality. This is what popped into my mind:
Young Republican who claimed Obama supporter carved letter ‘B’ on her face during robbery made the story up, police say
The Norwegian tragedy is bigger for Norway in proportion to their population, than the 9/11 attacks were for the USA. And yet the response of their Prime Minister and the political establishment is to call for more openness and democracy.
This is in stark rebuttal to Anders Behring Breivik’s attempt to provoke a racist and fascist backlash against immigration and “political correctness” through his atrocity.
It is also in contrast to GW Bush’s crackdown on civil liberties in the USA, his “War on Terror” and the invasion of Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11 in the first place
Serious as the US debt crisis is, no one has yet died. Why is it that, within US political culture, the answer to every problem seems to be violence or the threat of violence and why is this tolerated as an understandable response by commentators?
The mature response to stress is calm reflection on the causes of the stress and and a considered strategy to reduce the causes of that stress. How does violence and the threat or toleration of it contribute to the resolution of the issue in dispute?
What is it about the USA and its fetish about guns and violence? Or are we supposed to regard the Norwegians as cheese eating surrender monkeys unworthy of the macho war making of their Viking antecedents?
Why is it that Christian fundamentalism is becoming synonymous with violence, and it is deemed wimpish to want to live and let live – i.e. to love thy neighbour as thyself…?
You know, you seem to be saying that because something is understandable that it is tolerable.
If I slap somebody in the face and they respond by shooting and killing me, I deserve some of the blame for what happened to me. That’s doesn’t mean killing me was okay.
Of course the context may be relevant, but I can think of few contexts where you giving someone a simple slap on the face means that you deserve some of the blame for getting yourself killed. Maybe you deserved a slap back, but it’s this lack of proportionality that I am trying to highlight in my comment. If every response is a couple of orders magnitude greater than the original provocation, its not long before we are in Armageddon territory.
Somehow I don’t find this helpful. Everyone knows the USA is a gun-oriented culture; some of us are trying to change that, to foreground other, more constructive aspects of our culture which is complex and has many strengths. As far as Christianity goes, didn’t Scandinavia participate in the crusades? I recall reading sermons by Bernard of Clairvaux about militarism for the Church written centuries before protestant fundamentalism was even a glimmer in the FSM’s eye.
I was obviously not trying to do justice to the richness and complexity of US culture in my short comment and my main critique was directed at Bush, although he did have a lot of popular support at the time. I had already noted that the Norwegians had violent antecedents in the Vikings. How does adding in the Crusades add to that? My point is that modern largely secular Norwegian society has responded entirely differently – to both their (pagan and Christian) antecedents and to the US under Bush, and yet Europeans are often criticised in the US as wimps.
My question is “why is the US so different?”, and I’m not sure how your comment is helpful in proving an answer to that question.
well, these are very complex issues and that’s what I was trying to respond to, impatiently and opaquely I guess. The issue of guns in the USA and the issue of violence within a culture are two different issues – as Don Durito’s comment looks at how to understand violence. Cultures differ very very much in that regard.
My comment on the crusades was re: fundamentalism. Religiously sanctioned violence takes many forms. It looked very different in the era of crusades through conquest/ colonial period. Religiously sanctioned destruction of entire cultures in the conquest. The role of religion in the USA is a complicated one – different from Europe, where there are official churches but a largely secular populace. We have the opposite – separation of church and state and a largely religious populace. (There are entire libraries written on this and I can write more if it seems useful.) Bushco had nothing to do with religion – completely in line with what the Koch bros are doing, the politics of hate is pretty much as an engine for that corporate appropriation of other ppl’s resources – that’s my reading. a complex issue and I have no patience with the “Europe is more civilized” pov. Tell that to all the countries whose ecosystems were permanently devastated during colonial rule of Africa and Asia and still are under the sway of Europe-based multinationals.
Although Norway was never a colonial power and doesn’t have much in the way of global corporates.
I agree that corporates can use hate as an engine for appropriation, but don’t get the sense that corporates dominate European polities to the extend they do in the USA – despite the fact that European polities tend to be much smaller and less powerful relative to the global corporates. The closest we had to a Koch Brothers is perhaps Rupert Murdoch in the UK but he is getting his comeuppance there if not in the US.
not dominating European politics per se, but are global actors – Dutch Shell, Unilever, BP,
The Crusades, and specifically the Knights Templar, were apparently one of the primary inspirations for Breivik. Not sure what your point is.
I know, I wasn’t at all clear. just that this sort of thing on the part of Christians isn’t confined to the USA
I think that at the root of much of this is fear. We have, for the most part, been a largely self-sustaining nation for our entire lives. The majority of our demographic variations have been based on small regional and cultural differences. We are now in a position where things are changing at a rapid pace. The country is looking vastly different than what we are accustomed to. Our standard of living has been in steady decline for three or four generations and we are now to the point of really noticing it in middle, mostly-white, America. And we are looking to place blame. Christian fundamentalism is a perfect complement to the fear of “the other”. Fascism has no closer friend than fundamentalism.
We are now reaping the whirlwind of our arrogance that “might makes right” and that we are somehow the chosen people of a god whose preferred political system happens to be exactly like our own.
I agree with you, somewhat. I disagree that our standard of living has been in decline for 3 or 4 generations. Three generations ago was the Baby boomers! You going to say that the pre-WW2 generation had a better standard of living?
I’ve always said the big difference between us and Europe is that the Europeans really HAVE faced existential crises in the past. I’m not talking about the WWs, it’s just that in the early years it was entirely possible for another people to just come in and your armies couldn’t stop them. Then they’d either rule your country as king or annex it to their country and that was that.
That kind of memory is baked into the foundations of the modern nation states that were born in the Renaissance. The US has NEVER had that kind of threat, even in WW2 there was no realistic way for the Nazis to threaten the US. Even the cold war we were never under real threat of Communist conquest, just mutual annihilation.
The oceans protected us by they also created a bubble.
What I meant, but did a poor job of stating, was that real wages have been in decline. I do think, though, that the fact my minimally educated grandfathers could work and successfully raise families firmly in the middle class without my grandmothers ever having to lift a finger at a job outside the home is certainly a reflection that something was different (better???) for much of the WW2 generation.
I agree with your other observations. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but we are, in many ways, a spoiled and often arrogant people who have no appreciation for the severe adversity and threats that other countries around the world have faced for centuries.
The key word their is much. Being Latino, my grandfathers were in a much MUCH worse place after WW2.
Point well taken. My family was the stereotypical WASP, for whom the deck was favorably stacked in those times.
What’s needed I think is a more multi-faceted analysis of violence. Although this post is a bit old now, it does offer up a couple terms that I usually associate with sociology – namely organizational and structural violence (sometimes I see systemic violence used to describe both of these). In essence, we have a violent economic and political system – one that with out firing a shot can destroy lives and livelihoods without a second thought. Although I have no way of knowing what was behind the alleged bomb threat to Norquist’s office, I suspect it stands to reason that those who feel victimized by a system and its players will feel increasingly tempted to fight back using whatever means they have at their disposal. All we need do is to look at recent events in Greece and Spain (where there are uprisings against austerity) and the “Arab Spring” as largely collective responses to rather severe organizational and structural violence (in the case of the latter) or the threat thereof (in the case of the former). Food for thought.
Thanks for giving the wider perspective with this post.
As a sociology major I am very familiar with the concepts of systemic violence and wasn’t seeking to exclude them from any analysis. (The US, has for instance, the largest prison population in the world, and one of the harshest prison regimes in the developed world). The Greek and Spanish “uprisings” did rise to the height of extensive rioting in Syntagma Square (though not much elsewhere) and I am not aware of any resulting in a single live round being fired. It is this lack of respect for opponents resulting in rapid demonisation, depersonalisation and then violence which seems to be more characteristic of US (and underdeveloped) societies which I find strange and fascinating.
I say this because my only personal experience of the US (many years ago!) was of a country where people couldn’t be nicer, friendlier, or more helpful on a personal basis – and yet seemed horrendously quick to demonise anyone “other” who opposed them – if they didn’t have personal knowledge or interaction with them. It is this failure to respect difference, of empathy at a macro level by otherwise compassionate and intelligent people that I find difficult to understand.
Nor would I accuse you of leaving them out. 🙂 Certainly on that front, our nation is in appalling shape. Your point is well taken.
It seems like a whole lifetime ago to me now, but back in the 1980s while I was an undergrad, I had to read this book called “Violence in America” (edited by Graham and Gurr). Basically, one of the things that I took away from the book and the course was that there is a tremendous amount of paranoia in the US that goes back to the days when its northeastern and mid-Atlantic areas were colonized by the English. Within the US we have among our cultures a Southern Culture of Honor that is especially violence prone. Whether we talk about the baggage left from the Puritan era onward, it seems that the default position is to view our in-groups and out-groups in very Manichean terms. If the Other is perceived of as a “threat” then we tend to deal in terms of loading the shotgun (or finding whatever weapon is available) or resorting to various forms of state-sponsored violence.
Anyhoo, a relatively brief reply to a brief comment cannot begin to do this complex topic justice.
Trust me, I’ve had irrational thoughts about a number of these turds for years. My fantasies about Clarence Thomas, Scalia, Norquist, Coburn, Cantor, Noem, and so forth will not be detailed, but are lurid. However, I merely consider this a little recreation. No interest in actual PERFORMANCE of fantasies.
Which is partly what defines you as a sane mature adult…
the fact that something like this hasn’t occurred already is what surprises me. It shows that, among the non-right wing population, there is an incredible tolerance for right wing bullshit. It also shows that people, even the most easy-going, eventually snap.
I weep no tears for Norquist. And if it had been a REAL bomb, I wouldn’t have cared either.
It also shows that the right-wing is moving out of the realm of just bullshit to stuff that affects people enough to want to act out.
And there are likely to be a number of copycat acting out events. A suspicious package was reported in a shopping and office area of Chapel Hill (or as the right-wing calls it, the North Carolina Zoo) today.
Events like the terrorist attack in Norway just bring out lesser loonies. Mostly apolitical. And I’m not sure the phrase “attention seeking” that is bandied about actually fits their state of mind. There seems to be a strong obsessive-compulsive disorder strain to their behavior.
frankly, I’m GLAD that Norquist et al were the victims of a terrorist scare. if there is one thing a bully cannot abide it’s when someone hits back.
Great…now Grover can claim his is a victim.
He’s made a career out of claiming he’s a victim. Taxes are violence, you know. The forcible expropriation of hard-won blah blah blah.
Exactly.
First thing I thought of after reading your comment was the quote “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” Very applicable in Grover’s case.
I am a US citizen who lives in Canada (healthcare – yay), but who works in the US. I am on the verge of finalizing a divorce with the husband for whom I moved. As a teacher in the inner city, I live with the constant threat of an emergency financial manager take-over, took a pay cut, now will pay more for benefits. Now today, I deposited US money into my Canadian account at the rate of .93. The tellers said that there’s no way the rate will stay in the 90s if the US defaults.
Irrational thoughts? Live with my ex-forever, get a second job (on top of grading endless piles of paper), live in a cabin like Thoreau.