A Tragedy in Two Acts
Attacking our political enemies ignores the real problem.
ACT I
Within minutes of an 18-year-old man opening fire on black shoppers with a semi-automatic rifle in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the headlines congealed: white supremacy, great replacement theory, Tucker Carlson. Before the bodies were cold, the hot takes flowed in, quickly hardening into truths and easy story arcs.
One early article put forth that the shooter, a self-described “eco-fascist” whose manifesto apparently spent a considerable amount of real estate on anti-Semitism, was nothing more than a mainstream Republican, linking a fanatical murderer to regular Americans through poorly understood, disparate ideas. This narrative took root quickly.
In a New Yorker interview, scholar of extremism Dr. Kathleen Belew explains the ideology behind the Buffalo shooter’s motivation:
The “great replacement” comes about relatively recently from “The Camp of the Saints,” a novel that depicts a surge of migrants that usurps European culture. But it’s really the same ideology as the New World Order conspiracy, the idea of the Zionist occupational government—which is how people talked about this in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. We see versions of this going all the way back to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, the writings of Madison Grant, and things such as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” All of these are the same set of beliefs packaged with the cultural context at the time.
There are, of course, conservatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have parroted this awful theory, Jewish elites and all. Trump’s shrugging off of the Charlottesville tiki torchbearers was not comforting. But Belew shies away from connecting this theory in any definitive way to the current conservative political mainstream.
While it may be possible to hear an echo, it’s hard to tell which direction it’s coming from. For all the anxiety over immigration from the right, a comparable amount of celebration over immigration has come from the left. With a demographic shift that will ostensibly favor liberal policies, some lines of thinking go, we only have to wait for the old white Christian voters to die off to finally get the country on the right track.
This anxiety indeed manifests as support for candidates like Trump. But it’s not born from racist memes on 4chan or because people are stupid or because they’re all one bag of fertilizer away from becoming a Unibomber. It’s a product of the cultural conversation in a time of seismic rumblings on the meaning of America. It’s just right there for all to see.
ACT II
Within minutes of an 18-year-old man opening fire on a room full of fourth graders with a semi-automatic rifle in Uvalde, Texas, the headlines congealed: gun control, gun control, Republicans.
Twitter flooded with messages of outrage. How could we still have laws on the books that allow for this carnage to happen? Sen. Chris Murphy implored Congress to act. Beto O’Rourke disrupted a press conference with Gov. Greg Abbott. On social media, performative grief around the rate of gun violence in America melded into a convulsing doomscroll.
Sadly, as many have noted—including Parkland survivor and gun reform advocate David Hogg speaking on NPR—even if all the desired reforms were in place, this young man would have still been able to obtain a gun. The episode, from the moment the shooter told a friend he was about to kill children, to the interminable 40 minutes he was barricaded inside, was pocked with failures to stop him.
Like the Buffalo shooter, the Uvalde killer had raised suspicion before the rampage. Buffalo had contemplated shooting up a school, or a church, or a synagogue, before settling on the grocery store. Both went for maximum carnage. Both told others of their plans. Both were male. Both were 18. Both spent significant time online. And while we don’t know anything yet about Uvalde’s motive, and we may never know, we can safely assume he was very alone.
So why were their stories framed so differently? Why was the response so different? These crimes touched our national psyche in different ways, yes. But I think there is something else.
Humans are religious. We naturally and subconsciously seek narratives that affirm our views and, like paperclips to a magnet, unwillingly fling ourselves at the group of people echoing our beliefs. And as religious beings, we always need someone to play the role of the enemy. The closest, easiest enemies are our political opponents. We need to burn them at the stake.
What’s harder to do, as every monk surely knows, is to look inward. What caused these young men to commit such atrocities? What have we, as a society, done to allow these people to go off the rails? It can’t just be blamed on mental illness, which according to at least one study is not a factor in most mass shootings. Let’s blame the gun lobby. The gun lobby has spent $190 million since 1998, according to Fortune, with 60 percent of that spending in the last nine years. But for comparison’s sake, consider the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has spent $4.7 billion on lobbying efforts since 1999, or about $233 million per year.
What if we tried to think about this problem differently?
Jon Allsop, writing for Columbia Journalism Review, reflects on the media response too by focusing on some widely shared interviews, press conferences, and an editorial. They all follow a script we have come to know well: “the factual struggle to piece together what happened, efforts to learn about the victims and center their grieving relatives, and the impulse to slot all the horror into a framework of national political debate and electoral contestation.”
These stories illustrate something more, too. The official obfuscation and heavy-handed policing of traumatized parents, in particular, fit a script that is not limited to mass shootings; similarly, the rush of coverage that follows such events, while repetitive and distinctive in its rhythms, cannot be divorced from the way we approach other big stories across the sweep of society. In all such cases, the need to probe and scrutinize the official line, rather than just regurgitate it, is paramount.…All of us should assess how America is exceptional—and how it’s not—with the clearest of eyes.
I’d like to offer a new way to scrutinize the official line coming from the media. It involves looking not at our political gridlock, but rather in the mirror.
Our sense of family and community has collapsed. Loneliness is an epidemic. A pandemic locked us inside our homes and experts told everyone that the kids would be fine. Social media drags people into a dank wasteland, and regular media normalizes violence and graphic sex, yet their creators are rewarded for eyeballs and clicks, and their companies are incentivized to grow. Video games have become real (the Buffalo shooter livestreamed his rampage on Twitch, starring in his own virtual reality). Boys have few role models, and girls are outpacing them in education and at work. We don’t let our kids, especially boys, take natural, healthy risks for the sake of safety, and in doing so we enable them to harm themselves and others. And when things get tough, we medicate. The patriarchy doesn’t need to be smashed. It already rotted. And what’s left, especially for many young men, is a vacuum.
Racism is a cancer that will never be fully in remission. Guns will never be off our streets in either legal or illegal capacity. What’s a gun, anyway? It’s power. Limit their availability, sure, maybe that will make a dent. But the more important question is, who is behind the trigger? How did he get there? And are we complicit?
Or we could just tell the same story and blame the same actors. It’s easier, and we’re tired.
This Week Last Year
Community Announcements
Check out my latest episode of While You Were Sleeping in Hebrew School on the history of the Jews of Jamaica with Tyler Samuels!
Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar and the virtual calendar.
This week’s parasha is Behukotai.
Candlelighting in Seattle is at 8:35 p.m.
Last call! In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, the WSJHS invites you to join our 2022 Gala on June 1st at 6:30 pm for the release of the 2nd edition of the Family of Strangers, the “bible” of Jewish history in our state. wsjhs.org/gala
Shoutouts
Shout out to Justine Sabban on becoming a Bat Mitzvah this coming Shabbat. Mazel tovs all around! —Joel Magalnick
Mazel Tov to our grandson, Dovy Adinoff, of Jerusalem, on his Bar Mitzvah. —Stuart Kaufman and Hanna Esther Begoun
The Mercaz Seattle Board of Directors is proud to congratulate Rachel Rosenfeld, who as of May 1, 2022, has been brought on as the part-time Executive Director. The community is so grateful to be able to leverage her skills and energy! —Dina Levitan
Paid monthly/annual subscribers can submit unlimited shoutouts, memorials, and announcements. The editrix has the right to moderate all content. Send them to thecholentseattle@gmail.com.
