To Win On Guns We Have To Fight

People who want gun proliferation and want to stop gun control are a formidable force not only due to the NRA lobby. They care a lot about the issue, a helluva lot more than the average proponent of gun control. Progressives who want gun control get incensed after the latest shooting, then forget about it next week. Sometimes they even refer to the cycle of "thoughts and prayers" leading to nothing in an entirely self-defeating way. "Nothing can be done' they.

Well, I for one am sick of the excuses. I am furious, not only at the politicians bought by the gun lobby and the gun humpers who support it, but also by liberals and progressives who do all of their political fighting on social media and never turn out to do something more meaningful. And you know what? I am also sick of the hand-wringing folks on the left who greet every gun control proposal with a "well actually this is all caused by xyz structural issue in the American polity." OK Mr. Smarty Pants that's nice, but how in the hell do we stop the bloodshed?

You know why I am sick of it? Because people keep dying. Because two weeks ago I had to spend four hours after school getting drilled on what to do if a shooter came into my school. Because my five year olds are doing exercises already. Because we as a nation have essentially agreed that we expect students and teachers to be slaughtered like hogs in their schools from time to time as if it is a natural and unavoidable fact of life.

Stop whining about the NRA and put your shoulders to the goddamned wheel. There are a lot more of us on this issue than there are of them. Organize! Mobilize! Make it so that Republicans crossing us more than they fear crossing the NRA. Until that happens, nothing changes. Instead of seeing this as too daunting, take up the challenge!  We simply cannot keep living like this, and the only way forward is clear as day.

After Las Vegas, We STILL Need To Talk About The Dysfunctions Of White Masculinity

The movie Targets from 1968 may be the most prophetic in history

Sunday night I was thinking to myself about mass shootings, and about how we live in a society whose cruelty, lack of community, and worship of empty consumerism make it fertile ground for such things once easy access to firearms is put in place. I was thinking about this specifically in terms of white men. I know so many fellow white men who are middle class and seemingly doing okay for themselves who have his inexplicable nihilism. They seem obsessed with tearing a system down that benefits them, driven by intense resentments that they can't articulate. I sensed this nihilism in some of the folks I know who voted for Trump. "At least he will shake things up!" is easy to say when you're not the one being put in front of the firing squad. 

Sunday night I was also thinking about Puerto Rico, and the cruelty of a president and a nation so indifferent to the suffering of fellow Americans. I was remembering my time in Germany, and that as many things I did not like about German society, at least there was a sense of common good. Trump is the avatar of the worst of this country, its crass materialism and solipsistic selfishness. Those values are very powerful, and it is worth noting that they resonate especially with white men.

In any case, I went to bed Sunday night, exhausted but ready to face the week. I woke up Monday and immediately saw a news alert about Las Vegas. It freaked me out a little that I seemed to have had a premonition the night before. This shooting is, of course, the result of America failing to face many of its problems. One of the biggest is the dysfunction of white masculinity. I wrote the following essay in 2012 after Newtown. I am posting it again because every single word is just as relevant now as it was then.

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Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework.  Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools.  We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things.  There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.  However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.

Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student.  That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men.  I hardly think the connection is coincidental.  Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings.  I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.

Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control.  I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal.  That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America.  Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.

Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are.  When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront,  they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide.  Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did. 

The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well.  Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill.  We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill.  They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in.  Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home.  While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.

We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives.  These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed.  When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst.  We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions.  We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks.  Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.

The Other Gun Violence

If I were to say "America has a gun violence problem" you might instinctively think of mass shootings like the tragedy in Orlando. That frame is what drove the sit-in of House Democrats to force a vote on gun control legislation aimed at increasing background checks and barring those on the terror watch list from getting guns. That frame has issues, since mass shootings account for a small number of the tens of thousands of Americans killed by guns every year. 

The murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge at the hands of the police should also be prompting a different conversation about gun violence, one that will not be solved with gun control measures. This is the gun violence perpetrated at the hands of the police. There have been too many prominent instances to count, and they have been outnumbered by the victims whose names did not become hashtags or who did not have cameras present at the scenes of their deaths.

As awful as mass shootings are, we cannot forget that police shot and killed almost a thousand people last year. There's a big difference in how the two are received, however. Nobody defends mass shooters, but huge amounts of political capital are expended to defend killer cops. Prominent publications even write sympathetic articles about them. The blood is barely dry on the ground before stupid memes like "BlueLivesMatter" are all over the place. In Louisiana, the state where Alton Sterling was murdered by the police, the legislature just passed a law covering police as a category of victim in hate crimes. When police are faced with protests over their violence, they blame any street crime on protests, as if the blood on their hands can be transferred onto the hands of others. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, consistently defends the police after they kill, and has proposed a mandatory death penalty for those who kill police officers.

And here's the deal: a very substantial portion of the white American population cares more about assuaging their own fears of supposed black criminality than they do about the lives of black people. In their minds the police are holding the line against what Victorians called "a criminal class," and will support any level of force used against them. If the police are criticized they go nuts because they think the whole dam is about to break. It's in moments like this that I feel absolutely sick, and not just because of the horror and injustice of the killings. I get ill thinking about how this mentality is so common among the people who raised me and surround me. The police are allowed to kill not just because of a political system or legal system, but because of the everyday fear, hate, and contempt nestled deep in the soul of white America. As long as that remains, I fear that the other gun violence will never end.

America 2015 (A Year On The Brink)

"So It Goes" by Nick Lowe seems to be an appropriate song for this year

Every year about this time I take stock of what's happened, both in my personal life and in the larger world.  This year, 2015, will either be seen in the future as an important turning point (a la 1968), or a momentary outbreak of change that quickly subsided (like 2011, the year of Occupy.)

The thing that dominated the political scene in America this past year was the color line.  In regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests related to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 did not quickly become a thing of the past, as unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray showed. In that case the attorney general actually secured indictments, but the trial process has been difficult.  Movements against racism went well beyond the police.  In Chicago the mayor himself was implicated in covering up a cop's murder.  At the University of Missouri students actually managed to get their president to resign for not doing enough to address racism on campus.  Pressure was put on Democratic candidates for president, and now Bernie Sanders is explicitly endorsing the movement's goals. The Democrats rely on black votes to win elections, and the BLM movement might thus finally break the two-party consensus of "tough on crime" dating back to Clinton.  Despite the setbacks recently in Baltimore and the continuing headlines of police shooting unarmed African Americans, the new anti-racist movements could be poised to bring about some major changes.

Of course, whenever the color line gets challenged, white people spring forth to its defense, and fight that defense more fervently the more that line gets challenged.  The Republican Party has been using racial resentment against president Obama for years, but in 2015 that coded resentment was out and proud, thanks to Donald Trump.  His campaign initially benefited from him being perceived as a straight-talked who would upend traditional politics.  He achieved staying power, however, by going after Mexican immigrants in openly bigoted terms.  The success that this has brought him has forced many other Republicans to follow suit, leading to the opening of an Overton Window.  Trump has advocated mass deportations of millions, the kind of thing carried out in only the most repressive states, and yet his popularity keeps rising.  Fear and resentment of Muslims has grown in staggering fashion, so much so that Republican officials fell over themselves to be the first to castigate Syrian refugees and proclaim that they weren't welcome.

In a sign of the times, the violent white supremacists are coming out of the sewers and out into the open in ways I've never seen in my lifetime.  Some of them shot four black protesters in Minnesota, and the protests at the University of Missouri were partially spurred by white supremacist graffiti. Anti-Muslim hooligans have been defacing mosques and Muslim centers all around the country.  Trump is speaking to these and their grievances, and white power groups and figures have now endorsed him.  Trump may very well go down as a historical oddity, like Boulanger in France in the late 1800s.  But like Boulanger, Trump represents deeper forces at play.  Just as France in the fin-de-siecle was a place of extreme political and cultural divisions, so is America.  In both cases reactionary elements have a romance with authoritarianism and removing "internal enemies."  The anti-Semitism of the late 1800s has been replaced with Islamophobia and racial resentment, but both rooted in the desire by a particular group to "take our country back."  If 2014 finally ended the fatuous talk in the media of a "post-racial America," 2015 was the year that openly expressed white supremacy came back into the national discourse.

In the midst of all of this, guns played a big role in 2015, from San Bernardino to Umpqua. This past year confirmed something we already knew after the Newtown massacre: gun control is just not going to happen.  If a room full of dead children wasn't going to move the issue, nothing else ever would.  Something most progressives don't seem to understand is that for a large group of people, guns are a crucial element to their very identity, and many of those people think gun ownership is a bulwark against government tyranny.  Beyond the headline-grabbing massacres, the open carrying of guns at protests has gone from something that once caused great alarm a few years ago to a commonplace occurrence.  America was always a heavily armed society, but it is now one where guns are allowed almost everywhere, and where they are being used in protests to intimidate and imply the threat of violence.  Americans now think that in response to the threat of terror that we need MORE guns, not fewer.  Banning assault weapons used to have huge amount of support, now only a minority would back it.  2015 may very well go down as the year that the NRA's interpretation of the role of guns in society actually became conventional wisdom.

Looking forward I try not to let my usual pessimistic tendencies predominate.  There are levels of political action and activism by young people that I have not seen in my lifetime; it's the kind of thing I so sorely wanted to be a part of in college where I formed a club with a handful of friends to that end because there were no organizations on campus for social activism.  While Bernie Sanders will likely not get the nomination, the fact that he draws the level of support that he does is heartening.  Anti-racists are making the likes of Rahm Emmanuel run for cover and are forcing many institutions to confront structural racism.  Years of activism by the gay rights movement paid off this year with the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.  Transgender people are getting rights and recognition when they used to only get scorn and mockery.

At the same time, I can't escape the thought that these green shoots of progress will only prompt a much stronger reaction, uprooting them violently.  Trump is leading the Republican race as a quasi-fascist, and even if he doesn't win, his army of supporters is still out there, ready to act and ready to listen to another demagogue.  There is still no justice for Sandra Bland and countless others.  The most fearful among resentful white people are literally sticking to their guns.  2015 was a year on the brink in America, 2016 will likely decide whether that brink will be breached or not.

Has The GOP's Deal With The Devil Come Due?

Back when the Tea Party winds stared blowing back in the early parts of this decade, I wondered whether the Republican Party had signed a devil's bargain.  It was encouraging the support of fringe elements that had long been outside of the mainstream of American politics, all in order to benefit politically from the rising feelings of resentment among white people.

One such example is the Republican eagerness to put the grievances of the "open carry" movement into law, as just recently happened in Texas.  This is a movement that worships guns and views the Second Amendment as a protection against tyranny, as if the only thing standing between the status quo and a dictatorship is a bunch of dudes carrying AR-15's into the local Chipotle.  Voters who vote on gun issues tend to be highly motivated, so the Republicans are willing to break bread with armed vigilantes if it means electoral success.

The same goes for white nationalism, although the connections have been blurred more.  The continued Republican support for the official use of the Confederate flag (which was only shaken after the terror attack in Charleston), is a case in point.  The same goes for the lip service paid by Rick Perry and others to Texas nationalism, which in my experience is an idea limited almost completely to white Texans.  The anti-immigrant rhetoric and "show me your papers" laws in states like Arizona are based in a conception of the United States as a white man's country.  Sometimes the links between the "secure our borders" rhetoric and the ugly truth beneath those words gets exposed.  For example, it came out today that that Earl Holt III, the leader of Council of Conservative Citizens, has given campaign donations to multiple Republican presidential candidates.  In case you don't know, this organization was cited directly by terrorist Dylann Roof in his manifesto as instrumental in affecting his worldview.

Now this is not necessarily a case of Republicans actively seeking out the support of extremists.  Rather, they have been more subtle, in that they will take their money and promote policy positions that make those extremists happy.  Anti-immigrant legislation, voter suppression of people of color, and slashing programs that help Latinos and African Americans in poverty might be called "securing our borders, combating voter fraud, and welfare reform" officially, but everyone with eyes who can see understands that they are all policies that further white supremacy.  (Hence their popularity in large sectors of white America.)  The horrors of the Charleston killing, as well as the almost comical responses by many conservatives that downplayed any discussion of race, have highlighted just how beholden the Republican Party is to extremist elements.  In the wake of a racist terror shooting it must figure out how to spin its long-standing policies of no gun control and defending the flying of the Confederate flag.  It was easy to court extremist elements when no one was watching, now it will be much harder to hide.  Time will tell if this will actually result in any electoral change.

America's Gun Problem Hits (My) Home

The story faded after a day, but on Friday we narrowly avoided yet another mass shooting tragedy in Colorado.  A student at Arapahoe High School in Centennial came to school armed and ready to kill, but only ended up killing himself after wounding a couple of students with random fire.  Sadly, one of the wounded students is severely hurt and in a coma.  It was fortunate, nonetheless, that he had a shotgun rather than an assault weapon.  Had that been the case, the carnage would certainly have been worse.  That might very well be due to new laws limiting gun sales in Colorado, since the gunman could not get ahold of the deadliest weapons.

This incident, which like so many others has quickly been forgotten, hit home hard for me.  One of cousins is a teacher at Arapahoe, and when I heard the news about an active shooter in the school, I feared the absolute worst.  I spent my commute home from work just trying to keep it together and felt incredible waves of relief released when I finally learned from my cousin that she was alive doing okay.

This potential slaughter came one day before the anniversary of Newtown, a truly horrifying event, and one that has exposed the complete moral bankruptcy of our society.  If a pile of dead first graders is not sufficient to change our gun laws and our sick national addiction to firearms, then nothing ever will be.  We have become so inured to school shootings that unless there is one with a high body count, we really don't even bother to pay attention.  The incident at Arapahoe is one of many of these horrible events that easily fade into the background.  Because it could have claimed the life of a loved one, I simply can't let it go.

Gun control is hardly a panacea, of course, but some sensible laws are in order, and this is hardly a matter of much dispute.  Americans overwhelmingly support universal background checks to eliminate obvious loopholes in the system, but the NRA and others have successfully fought them tooth and nail. There is no real reason for allowing high capacity magazines, either, but the 2nd Amendment crowd defends even these deadly devices.

Even where new laws exist, roadblocks remain.  In states like New York and Colorado, which have passed gun control measures, county sheriffs are now refusing to enforce the law.  Reading the comments section on this Times article on the phenomenon is a quick primer in just how active and committed gun rights advocate are.  To them, limiting 30 round clips of ammo is tantamount to tyranny.  I can only hope that in the horrible event that another shooting would happen in the Denver area, that if the shooter got his gear illegally in rural Colorado, the local sheriff would be proseccuted as an accessory to murder.

I somehow don't believe that will ever happen, though.  It all seems to boil down to an underlying cultural-political chasm that is growing ever wider in this country.  Every time I go home to my rural Nebraska hometown, the vehemence about guns and other culturally-grounded political issues seems that much more extreme.  People in these places think they are the "real America" and as such have a right to veto or not follow restrictions on guns that originate in other places, even if, in today's world, it is urban America that is more "real," since it represents a much larger number of people.

 There are only two options: that rural America is allowed to be a country in a country, withering further into irrelevance yet still having its way on gun control, or that the issue is forced and majority rule is actually allowed to hold sway.  The latter course of action is the only way our gun problem will be resolved, but it seems to be so fractious and fraught with conflict that we have decided not to bother, even when a tragedy like Sandy Hook occurs.  The dead children appear to be an acceptable price for political peace for most in this country, and I don't know if anything can change that.  

Last Week Taught Us That Some Americans' Lives Are Cheap

Remember last week?  In our 24-hour news cycle world events of great import are quickly forgotten.  Our nation keeps lurching forward, like a stumbling amnesiac easily distracted by bright, shiny baubles and incapable of recalling the recent past.  Horrors and tragedies occur, but are quickly assigned to oblivion with all deliberate speed.

In our quest to forget we enable the same horrific crimes to be repeated.  Last week brought three truly awful examples of how certain people's lives are cheap: the Navy Yard shooting, the police shooting of Jonathan Ferrell for the crime of being black, and the lonesome death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, adjunct professor.

In the aftermath of the Navy Yard shooting, where a mentally deranged man with an inexplicable access to firearms and security clearance killed twelve people, we did not even bother having a real conversation about gun control.  A pile of dead first graders in Newtown didn't do the trick, so nothing will.  We will continue stumbling along until the next mass killing, and afterwards the same usual suspects will spout their same usual platitudes, and nothing will get changed and more slaughters will follow.

In the case of Jonathan Ferrell, he was unarmed, yet shot dead by the police for the crime of seeking help after an accident while black.  Evidently running to get assistance was some kind of threat to the officer who pulled the trigger.  Funny, I don't seem to recall this ever happening to white people.

Last but not least, the plight of adjuncts briefly entered the national conversation after the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a longtime Duquesne University adjunct who died penniless, buried in a cardboard box.  Heaven knows how many other people like her have or will soon suffer similar fates.  While plenty of people in the academic world have been using her case to argue against the current adjunct system, I fear that the wider world has already stopped caring.

All of these stories affected me, not least because I know in my heart that more adjuncts will die penniless, more unarmed black men will be killed by the police, and more mass shootings will happen.  What kind of society do we live in that human lives are so cheap, and that their loss barely even registers?

Cranky Bear Holds Congress in Contempt

Note: My friend and associate Cranky Bear has been sending me plenty of missives by carrier pigeon over the last few months, but I have been trying to make this site less profane, and more professional.  However, in the aftermath of Congress' vote yesterday, his is the abrasive voice that needs to be heard.

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Cranky Bear here, sipping bourbon and about ready to blow my stack.  Good old Cranky has been pretty desensitized to the braying idiocy of humanity and its tendency to be its own worst enemy.  However, there are times when even I am surprised at the base stupidity of our elected dipshits.

In case you didn't know, ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks for the purchase of guns.  They find keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of psychopaths, domestic abusers, and convicted felons to be such a common sense proposition that most people think we already have such safeguards in place.  Only if that were so.

I honestly can't think of any issue where 90% of the country agrees.  Hell, there are probably 15% who are so irascible that they don't think baby kittens are cute, or hold that the Star Wars prequels were superior to the originals.  Normally when the public lines up so definitively behind an issue our Congresscritters get so overanxious to please their constituents that the queue to the grandstand goes around the block.  For instance, just witness how public hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11 led to the horrifyingly sweeping PATRIOT Act.

Congress hasn't been too slow to act when it wants to, despite our assumption that it's incapable of action.  For instance, Congress managed to pass a massive giveaway to the evil motherfuckers at the Monsanto corporation in the dead of night as if by magic.  Corporations are people, after all, and furthermore, to quote Orwell's Animal Farm, "some animals are more equal than others."

If Monsanto needs legal protection for its nefarious deeds, fine, but if twenty innocent first-graders are torn to shreds by bullets fired from a weapon meant for the battlefield by a psychopath so loopy that his actions came as little surprise to those who knew him, that's just their tough fucking luck.  Next time pack some heat, assholes.

Those who voted against background checks might object to that characterization of their stand, but as far as I can tell, they are motivated by one of three factors: 1. Licking the ass of the gun lobby in return for blood money 2. An insane interpretation of the second amendment that makes it easier to buy an assault weapon than to register to vote 3. Absolutely craven fucking cowardice when it comes to standing up to the rabid gun nuts.  Their votes are based on either corruption, stupidity, or fear, which are never good reasons to do anything.

I am not so naive to think that our country is really a democracy, but I think that yesterday's events ought to have finally torn the mask off for anyone who had any doubts.  The overwhelming will of the people for a common sense reform of a system that leaves tens of thousands a year dead from gun violence was no match for a powerful demagogic lobby representing a small faction of shit fer brains whack jobs that's got wads of dollars bills it can peel off.  At least we won'y have to argue anymore whether our system is a catastrophe or not, just on whether it is merely fucked up, or Lindsey Lohan fucked up.

Well Congress, I do have to give you some credit.  Your approval ratings are just south of those for root canals and urinary tract infections.  It seemed it would take a miracle to get them to go any lower, but you actually figured out a way to do it, namely to ignore the vast majority of the people you supposedly represent, so you could prevent any solution to the bloody violence that claims new lives everyday.  Congratulation-fucking-relations assholes, I thought it couldn't be done.    

Post-Newtown, We Still Need to Have That Conversation About White Masculinity

After the horrors of Newtown, I hoped that it would not become yet another blip in our national consciousness and get sucked down the memory hole.  Sadly, what's happened has actually been worse.  Responding to the public outcry and the revival of the gun control movement, the NRA and gun proliferators have hit back so hard that the new gun legislation actually makes it EASIER to get them.  This week I was glad to see the president and brave loved ones of the victims of our gun violence epidemic call on the nation to do something, and that Michael Bloomberg has been using his money to push the issue in campaigns across the country.  Maybe we can actually get something done.

That said, there are issues even deeper than gun control which desperately need attention, but are pretty much being ignored.  I was reminded of this today through a chilling and thoughtful article in the New York Times Magazine by Jay Caspian Kang.  He discusses one of the many forgotten massacres in this country, the one that took place last April in Oakland at a nursing school.  Instead of being the usual post mortem, however, Kang discusses the feelings in the Korean-American community about the fact that the shooter in Oakland One. L Goh, and the murderer at Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho, were both Korean immigrants.  Kang wonders whether the tendency to repress emotions and feel intense, barely-suppressed rage in Korean culture might have played a part.

Reading this piece, I was struck at how little white people in this country have done to ask themselves why it is white men who are overwhelmingly and vastly disproportionately the ones to massacre large numbers of people with firearms.  One of the great powers of whiteness is that it bequeaths individuality to its holders.  If you are white, you are an individual person, judged only on your own standards.  Your actions do not reflect on other white people, or are interpreted as part of a larger pattern of white behavior.  Korean-Americans, on the other hand, do not have this status, and hence are more capable of asking difficult and soul-searching questions in the aftermath of shooting tragedies.

After Sandy Hook, I wrote about the dysfunctions of white American masculinity, and how they contribute to violent shootings.  A few other folks -namely David Sirota and Chauncey DeVega- did too, but that conversation quickly petered out, or was treated with outright hostility.  It is good that gun control is back in the public eye, but if we really want to prevent future Newtowns, we need to have a serious and meaningful conversation about the problems of white masculinity in this country.

Is a Second Term Slump Avoidable for President Obama?

The inauguration is coming tomorrow, after perhaps the most eventful and contentious lame-duck session of Congress in our time.  We seem to have collectively erased our memories of the 2012 election, despite the fact that it dominated public discourse for well over a year.  Perhaps the double-whammy of Sandy and Sandy Hook are to blame for the amnesia, but I think the Right has done a pretty successful job of so thoroughly ignoring the results that their defeat is no longer discussed.

Well, whether they like it or not, Barack Obama is starting four more years in the White House tomorrow.  Back in 2009 I would have been ecstatic by this prospect, but now I'm pretty much just exhausted, as happy as I am.  The intransigence and extremism of the opposition party doesn't really give one much hope over the president's prospects for bringing new initiatives forth and getting them turned into law.  I also have the sinking feeling that he will experience the second-term slump that even his most illustrious predecessors suffered from.

After winning a landslide in 1936, FDR went on to get involved in the aborted court-packing scheme and made cuts to his New Deal programs that brought on a recession.  When his second term ended, his political standing was much weakened.  Nixon didn't make it through his second term due to Watergate, and Reagan's second was also bedeviled by scandal, along with his increasing senility.  The economy boomed in Clinton's second term, but he was impeached and almost didn't make it out intact.  Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, crashed and burned with the deterioration of Iraq, Katrina, and judicial scandals.  Sometimes I feel that the pressures of the American presidency are such that it's impossible to sustain a high standard of performance for more than four years.

One reason Obama might be different is that unlike other presidents, he did not have a honeymoon period in his first term.  From the beginning, his political opponents have obstructed and blockaded him at every turn.  This experience has hopefully kept him sharp and his team from getting complacent.  Obama also does not suffer from the deficiencies of other past presidents.  He is younger than Eisenhower and Reagan, and not scandal-prone like Nixon and Clinton.  He is not a cowboy buffoon like W, whose idiocy was not fully exposed to the American public until it was too late.  My main fear is that his intellectual detachment will be more manifest once his fatigue with the job sets in.  It just might get too tiring to force himself to do the work of retail politics that he today seems to approach with disdain.

I think the gun control issue will very quickly define the nature of his second term.  For the first time since the early 1990s, there appears to be a groundswell of support for gun control, an issue Obama seemed happy to completely avoid to this point.  That of course never stopped the gun nuts from spinning paranoid fantasies about Obama's true intentions.  They went out and bought guns and ammo by the barrel-full when he was elected in anticipation of new gun control laws that never came.  For his first four years, Obama seemed to think that even raising the gun issue was out of the question.

Current events certainly now make the gun nuts feel as if their fever dreams were right all along.  By taking on the NRA and the hordes of wingnut "patriots," Obama is doing political combat with the faction of the Right that seems to hate and fear him the most.  If he can get his legislation passed, this would be a political de-pantsing of epic proportions, and would clearly send a signal that the president will be in the driver's seat for his second term.  Defeating one of Washington's most powerful and fearsome special interests, a lobby that has scared Democrats from even talking about guns, would give Obama the kind of political mojo he needs to get through his term without a slump.  I could even see the Republicans giving way on the debt ceiling issue in this case, since they would finally have to acknowledge his position of power.

If the president is unable to get much done on gun control, it will greatly embolden those who despise him the most.  He will have spent much political capital on a losing issue, and will most likely spend the rest of his term playing defense.  A similar thing happened to W, who floated the idea of Social Security privatization at the start of his second term, only to have it smacked down faster than my 18-year old self was when trying to talk to members of the opposite sex.  By tackling a brand new issue and a powerful lobby in the bargain, Obama is taking a huge risk, even despite the public's horrified reaction to Sandy Hook.

Mark my words, as goes the gun issue, so goes Obama's second term.

Gun Control Is Only Partly About Guns, And Mostly About Challenging a Dangerous Political Tendency

Anybody actually remember the 90s?  Sure, you might say,  I've still got my Super Nintendo and Lilith Fair t-shirts.  When trying to recall politics you might scratch your head, and think about Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Janet Reno.  You might even have a chuckle or two about Linda Tripp and Ross Perot.

You, like most folks these days, might have totally forgotten about what the radical and armed Right was up to back then.  Since 9/11 we have tended to associate terrorism with radical Islamism in this country, but the horrific Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was the bloodiest terror bombing in the nation's history up to that point.  Separatist militia types were known to get into fracases with federal agents and spread paranoid fears about the "New World Order" and commando raids aided by black UN helicopters.

After 9/11, the face of terror changed, and with the new Islamist bogeyman haunting the nation's dreams, most everyone seems to have forgotten about the paranoid Right fringe.  Guess what folks, this fringe done got respectable, and instead of being consigned to the margins, it has wormed its way into the center of American life while the rest of us were asleep at the wheel.

At the same time that fear of terror bombings on airplanes led to an ever-growing list of seemingly ridiculous TSA restrictions and the government claimed powers to wiretap without warrants and to torture, gun restrictions melted away.  The assault weapons ban expired, and the NRA had a field day successfully pushing for guns to be allowed in just about every corner of American public life, from taverns to universities.  Second Amendent absolutism has gone from being a ridiculous theory peddled by a fringe movement to the law of the land.

States like Florida forced welfare recipients to undergo humiliating and wasteful drug testing, but have been handing out conceal and carry permits like Crackerjack prizes.  This same state has the infamous, NRA-backed "stand your ground" law, which makes armed citizens into their own judge, jury, and executioner.  The Sunshine State now touts itself as "One Million Strong," apparently so angry old white men can settle parking lot disagreements with hot lead.

The paranoid fringe now has a bevy of political figures at its beck and call, and plenty of voices in the media spewing its talking points.  Texas just overwhelmingly elected Ted Cruz to be its Senator, a man who has actually asserted that there is a UN plot to take away our golf courses.  Fellow Texas politician Louie Gohmert responded to the Newtown massacre by lamenting that teachers in the school didn't have assault rifles of their own.  These are the type of opinions that in a healthy society would be confined to ranters on street corners and senile drunks on barstools.  Fox News made one of these ranters, Glenn Beck, its de facto leader in the aftermath of Obama's election.  Beck regularly invited militia types on his show, and spun paranoid conspiracy theories and dire predictions of political apocalypse.

The old militia movement has morphed into something I call "God, gold, and guns conservatism."  It's not just for the armed militiaman reading The Turner Diaries by the fire in his compound, but the aging suburbanite who went out and bought a gun after Obama's election, and who has spent a large chunk of his savings on gold bars peddled during the commercial breaks on Fox News.

For gun control advocacy to be effective, it will mean confronting this very powerful and volatile tendency in American political life.  I get nervous thinking about how the God, gold, and guns crowd will react if new gun restrictions come down after years of progressive cowardice and indifference on the issue.  (Remember, even president Obama was willing to approve concealed weapons in our national parks.)  I fear a repeat of the political violence of the 1990s might be in the offing.  I can only hope that my fears are misplaced, and that the recent advocates for sane gun legislation stick in their fight with a powerful nemesis.

The Important Thing We Learned From the Debate That No One Will Talk About

Predictably, discussion of Tuesday's presidential debate has hinged around the boxing scorecard (Obama by TKO, in my opinion) and the usual array of sound-bite spin wars.  Many on my side of things are rightfully making hay with Romney's "binders full of women" remarks and the utter cluelessness that they revealed, and the Teabagger crowd is still trying to say that the president did not immediately call the attack on the Benghazi consulate an "act of terror."

These are significant issues, but I am amazed at how little people are discussing the concrete policy ideas of the two candidates, and the degree to which they represented them faithfully.  For instance, Mitt Romney, who supports the Pell Grant-slashing budget of his dead-eyed granny killer running mate, said he supported Pell Grants just as soon as the debate began.

While that kind of lying and getting away with it disturbs me plenty, I'd like to take things from an angle that is sorely lacking in the mainstream media and the blogosphere.  On a couple of very important issues for this country, both candidates appeared to support policies that are extremely destructive, and cowardly in their deference to special interests.  I am referring to gun control and energy.

On the latter issue, Romney bizarrely tried to force Obama into a "yes or no" question on whether his administration has reduced the number of oil leases on federal lands.  While the president did a good job of defending himself, he did not once mention the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or the need to protect our nation's common land from environmental devastation.  On the subject of coal, Romney proclaimed his love of that Dickensian throwback.  Obama's did not dare discuss the negative environmental effects of coal, instead he just pointed out that Romney had flip-flopped from his position when he ran for governor of Massachusetts.  We have now apparently reached a point in our national politics where supporting environmental protection is a non-starter for presidential candidates.  This at a time when global climate change threatens the well-being of billions of people around the world.  I think it's clear we can never expect any real action on that coming catastrophe from our political class.

The same goes for gun control.  After a summer of several harrowing mass shootings at the hands of psychopaths and white supremacist terrorists, the president still would not advocate for additional gun control laws.  He turned the question into a discussion of education, while Romney did him one better and spoke about the need for two-parent households.  Thousands of people die needlessly in this country every year because of our gun laws, but no one who wishes to occupy the top office in the land can even acknowledge that fact.

So yes, we did learn that the president has his fight back, and we saw him defeat Romney in an impressive fashion.  (My wife and I jumped up and hugged each other with joy when it was over.)  We saw yet more evidence of Romney's arrogant douchebaggery and lack of empathy with people who aren't wealthy white men.  However, we also witnessed how our current political system, governed by money and special interests, is completely paralyzed when it comes to dealing with crucial life or death issues.  Perhaps we as a nation ought to talk about that for once.