“Kill the bastard!” one woman shouts (dream scene from 9 to 5)
“Hello Hart” Jane Fonda in cowboy outfit, with powerful rifle and clip of many bullets (dream scene from 9 to 5)
Dear friends and readers,
I have not said much about the Sandy Hook mass killing on Sylvia I, partly because I become wordless in the face of the continued intransigence of the US gun culture (in the US gun-owners, gun-sellers, gun-lovers are heard demanding that teachers be armed, there be no “gun free zones” and suggesting in effect all-out gun battles in schools with teachers heading a pack will stop mass killing), and I know huge amounts of money are made on selling massive assault weapons and 100s of types of guns and bullets.
A simple pragmatic solution is available. Yes there are millions of guns out there in individual private homes, offices, institutions (guards wield them), to say nothing of the ubiquitous military institutions everywhere. But bullets go out of date. Everyone knows this. What was done to remove sudafed and deconamine so effectively from millions of individuals can be repeated here. Control the sale of bullets, make it hard to get a set of bullets unless you go through a thorough background check to make sure you are a stable person, have some purpose non-lethal to humans (like hunting non-human animals, a paid job as a guard or active military person), and then control the numbers of bullets anyone can have. That would do it. It has done it for deconamine. I defy anyone, including most physicians to buy any deconamine type tablets.
Such legislation has been introduced in congress. It has gone nowhere. Senator Feingold’s proposal does not attempt to limit the sale of bullets and only goes after a few types of assault weapons. The controls are so porous they are a joke.
But at this moment were one or two congressmen to be courageous enough and introduce legislation which is like that of the control deconamine, the routine outbreaks would stop. It would take a couple of years perhaps but the crazed gun scenes would cease.
That’s the starter. First do what needs to be and can be done.
Since no one is proposing this publicly, the second thing we need to do is as important. We need to think about how these situations come about, talk about the full context.
Why do we not yet have a well-funded organization with determined people who will stay on task year-after-year sufficiently to put such legislation in place and then try to keep the congress to the mark not to undo it. We have some feeble underfunded ones. Why don’t they catch on? Most Americans are not murderers, not even of their families individually or themselves. But they have been gotten to condone a culture which enacts killing as a courageous acceptable solution to many problems.
Michael Moore gave an unfortunately hysterical speech the day after Sandy Hook which was as to content and topic spot on. He went on from the US mass killings, to the macho-culture which encourages killing as a brave solution (in boys’ & adventure books is one place), to skewed values which de-funds mental and physical health care for all; to refusals to offer 1) social programs and gov’t agencies to rebuild the US and provide good jobs, 2) affordable housing. Then he went onto the US govt’s criminal behavior using drones, the senseless killing in Afghanistan, our condoning and financially supporting Israel’s murdering and destruction of Palestinians (in the latest round children were openly targeted), doing nothing to counter the various ferocious dictatorships around the world (some of which we put in place).
The list is long and has been gone over many times. And the speeches given routine. Moore did provide a useful collage of them:
This video brings home to us that after all the pious talk of shock and horror, nothing will be done to rein in even the sale of these easy-killing machines and accompanying hundreds of rounds of bullets (by Internet sales, from such places as Wal-Mart for startlingly cheap prices like $30). Obama’s spokesperson has refused to offer any details of bills that Obama might urge the congress to pass with a public speech (using his pulpit). There is perhaps not as much money in the hands of those who want to put a stop to these mass killings (61 since Columbine in 2002), not as many across-the-US well-placed, well-connected organizations (including ALEC, a reactionary think-tank.
It’s important to note at the same time much of this money and these gun organizations operate steathily. In the last weekend, not one NRA person came on TV. One gun-selling man (a head of a lobby) came onto DemocracyNow.org because his organziations make money selling the mass weapons and he wanted to use this moment to argue against having gun-free zones. He’s for Stand Your Ground laws too.
There is a “give” somewhere. The point is to get ourselves to where the gap between what’s publicly professed and what is actually thought and felt do not meet.
Let’s look at who generally does the killing. Not only are the overwhelming majority of the killers, white young men, often lower middle class and often in school settings (one movie). As presently discussed talking about mental illness can also be a distraction since it is impossible to cure or help mentally disturbed people without first looking to their economic and social circumstances which are partly responsible for their illness. Today psychiatry has become an sub-commercialized business where the “doctor” (often a less-well educated psychologist) dispenses drugs and in the few sessions offered works to coerce and/or shame the person into conformity, with no attempt (except for those with a great deal of money and access to the few psychiatrists) to try to delve the past history of the child, home, local environment, economic and social circumstances of the family.
So a blame game seeking out an individual ensues. The killer has this or that stigmatizing mental illness, or maybe his mother was the problem?
This morning a moronic — yes moronic — news story in womens’ enews arrived in my email box. This is not the first time this publicatoin has been counterproductive: in this case it was an article where a writer asks as if this is a serious question, if we should blame Lanza’s mother for what happened in these terms; Is she as evil as he was? a monster? Of course they say no, but they then do not go on to discuss the culture she was part of and expose and indite that.
This article is fodder for those who would react to it to blame women, hate mothers (another whole topic), a set of feelings encouraged by US culture, which were aroused by a poignant letter to the press published by Huffington Post: the mother of an intensely hostile mentally ill boy lives in fear of him. He has learned to hate her as she has had to seek help from others since all the organizations she has taken him to (schools) treat him as a disruptive freak. She gets no real help for him whatsoever, just drugs to put him in calming stupors or people who restrain him, if necessary brutally.
The letter was first published in Blue Review and quickly circulated around the Net. Ms Long does not (as Ms Lanza does) compound her problem by buying huge numbers of guns and ammunition, and by training her son to use them., but she was laughed at, dismissed.
These are both US mothers in typical US situations. One place to begin to acknowledge this is to pay attention to popular books and movies, the kind that become sociological events, and then the culture that is pictured by such movies.
The boss chained and hoisted (Dabney Coleman played the role)
So today I will review an old “feminist” classic film I watched last night: Nine to Five, featuring the then box office female stars, Lily Tomlin (TV comedienne), Jane Fonda (its producer) and Dolly Parton (big-breasted country western sexy singer). I often watch movies which became sociological events at the time of their release as much as 20 years later. This time I was 30 years late. I watched it because it prompted a debate which turned slightly acrimonious before it was (I thanked her) brought to a halt by Joan Korenan the list-owner of WMST-l (Women’s studies). It seems that numbers of women teachers screen this film as a popular feminist protest story against egregiously dominating exploitative males. They say their students enjoy it. Others protested the film had something problematic and was worrying, or that their students didn’t like it as unfair to men, and embarrassing to watch.
What I saw was a film that in an unexamined way showed Americans coping with oppression and injustice through violence. Dolly carries a gun and offers its use as a central tool to controlling the mean sexist boss.
Dolly tells the boss if he makes one more indecent proposal or thread, “I’m gona get that gun of mine and change you from a rooster to a hen in one shot!” (this last shot again one I culled)
We are asked to believe that the women easily cow him with but one small hand-gun. Dream sequences include Jane Fonda toting a long-shooting repeating rifle in a cowboy outfit and chasing him down shooting at him. In one sequence he is in a bathroom, quivering with fear and she shoots him frontally. It’s a reverse of films which show this kind of violence at women, but is it really ultimately useful simply to reverse this sequence? The film mocks hunting as the result of this shot we do not see a destroyed brain case but his head mounted on the ceiling where he had had a deer head killed and stuffed. In another sequence the people in the office chase him down, some with bats, some with fire, others with whips and prods, and some with guns. One woman shouts “Kill the bastard!”
Now it is telling to me that not one still from these sequences is to be found on the Net. The two snaps at the head of this blog I got by using a vlc video player.
You can find sequences where the boss is chained thoroughly and attached to a pulley which can be pulled at so we see him dangling from the ceiling. Utterly humiliated, but further emasculated. Emasculation is women taking over the cruel roles. Again no shots of this on the Net; mine gotten with the vlc video player.
We should also note that today a nine-to-five job, implicitly excoriated as inhuman is something many people in the US today might give an eye-tooth for. At the close of the film the boss is made to set up child-care programs, flexible hours, a more humane environment. A fine target for 1980. Now the true figure for unemployment is 17%, underemployment underpaid is pervasive, so what could be laughed at then is not a subject for laughter now.
On the various programs I’ve seen on the Net and articles I’ve read a figure of 30,000 individual deaths from guns is cited, most of these said to be suicide. I have known two young men and have a friend who had a close male relative who took guns and shot themselves through the head. When the police arrived in all three cases, they treated the incident as routine. Lost thrown-away people, they don’t need mass assault weapons, nor will a hand-gun carried by us all (as Dolly does in the film) be effective. More will die. I’ve read of families destroying themselves through killing one another, friends. Robberies are committed with guns and end in murders.
I write for all the thrown-away people in our world, the ones who resort to hysterical self-, and social-killing, those who get caught in the cross-fire and those who just huddle alone or with others somewhere watching a TV or Internet video.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Michael Kimmel, also on WMS-l from CNN: Masculinity, mental illness and guns: A lethal equation?
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/19/living/men-guns-violence/index.html?iref=allsearch
In the blog I wrote I remarked that as far as I could tell most of the men doing the mass killing had been white (I did not remember the one Asian man), were lower middle class, few or none were women. And also that I had not seen anywhere anyone talk about this racial fault-line. My guess from experience is had any of these men been black, the racist excoriation would have gone through the skies; so perhaps the obverse is true, because they have been mostly white, no one has spoken of it.
It’s obviously significant. I don’t have data. I would like to know how many of these white young men were employed, how many had some mental illness diagnosis (of whatever sort, whatever the label), from what socio-economic class they were (tied to real data on family or their income).
Could it be people are afraid to mention it lest this start a really ugly conversation about crimes with race fault-lines.
In discussing masculinity and violence in the US in classrooms, how many people discuss racial differences?
Men do kill themselves violently (shoot themselves to death) in far greater numbers than women. Women are less aggressively violent in their suicides and may be saved more often therefore.
E.M.
Ruellia:
I thought this was a fascinating article by a woman who became obsesses with guns:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/12/why_did_nancy_lanza_love_guns_i_bet_i_know.html?wpisrc=newsletter_tis
These other pieces have gone out in many other places, but for folks
keeping track here are some other thoughtful and critically engaged pieces
on the Sandy Hook shooting, violence, and masculinity:
Jackson Katz: Memo to
Media
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-katz/men-gender-gun-violence_b_2308522.html
Meghan Murhphy: But What About the Men? On Masculinity and Mass
Shootings
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/feminist-current/2012/12/what-about-men-masculinity-and-mass-shootings
Michael Schwalbe: Denormalizing the Signs of Impending
Disaster
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/18-8
In solidarity,
Matt Ezzell
It was a tragedy. I do agree, people are entitled to have handguns for self protection. But I do believe in gun control. I certainly don’t understand what a civilian was doing with a military weapon. The mother owned an assault rifle. It was used. It can be fitted with a grenade launcher. yesterday’s Times had quite an article about it with full description. They were banned for awhile but the NRA and their private equity partners saw to that law ending …
—
Penny
A view of the massacre that had never occurred to me: “Don’t buy the manipulative argument that it’s somehow “anti-male” to focus on questions about manhood in the wake of these ongoing tragedies. Men commit the vast majority of violence and almost all rampage killings. It’s long past time that we summoned the courage as a society to look this fact squarely in the eye and then do something about it. Women in media can initiate this discussion, but men bear the ultimate responsibility for addressing the masculinity crisis at the heart of these tragedies. With little children being murdered en masse at school, for God’s sake, it’s time for more of them to step up, even in the face of inevitable push back from the defenders of a sick and dysfunctional status quo.” Jill
I’ll go even farther: I can’t remember one gay man who was the perpetrator of one of these rampages.
I reply:
In his essay on the life of Roger Casement, Colm Toibin suggests gay men often empathize sensitively with others because of their experience of marginalization and erasure.
How do we construct masculinity in this society? Various of the mass slaughters had had their “masculinity” affronted:
http://www.alternet.org/gender/what-it-about-men-theyre-committing-these-horrible-massacres?paging=off
E.M.
Dear Ellen, I absolutely agree with you about gun control. This is a time where Obama, senators, and congress could make a difference, “armed” with statistics, and change the laws..
I heard an excellent piece on NPR by a high-school student in Oakland. She pointed out that it was a tragedy at Sandy Hook, but shootings happen every day in her neighborhood where everyone has a gun. Many get killed.
And I had not thought along those lines. We get focused on the school shootings, and then forget about these shooting deaths in poor and other neighborhood.
Yes, these guys are mentally ill, but I want to point out that very few mentally ill people are violent. There have been studies on this.
Today I passed a store called The Gun Shoppe in a suburb. I could not believe it.