Apropos of the recent Roseburg, Oregon, school massacre that left nine dead, President Obama said, “We’re going to have to come together and stop these things from happening.” That’s an understandable sentiment, and the president has to say something, after all. But within the context of how life is lived in this country these days, we’re not going to stop these things from happening.
And what is that context? A nation physically arranged on-the-ground to produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety, and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation. Really, everything in the once vaunted American Way Of Life slouches in the direction of depression, rage, violence, and death.
This begs the question about guns. I believe it should be harder to buy guns. I believe certain weapons-of-war, such as assault rifles, should not be sold in the civilian market. But I also believe that the evolution of our Deep State — the collusion of a corrupt corporate oligarchy with an overbearing police and surveillance apparatus — is such a threat to liberty and decency that the public needs to be armed in defense of it. The Deep State needs to worry about the citizens it is fucking with.
The laws on gun sales range from ridiculously lax in many states to onerous in a few. Yet the most stringent, Connecticut (rated “A” by the Brady Campaign org), was the site of the most horrific massacre of recent times so far, the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting. The handgun law in New York City is the most extreme in the nation — limiting possession only to police and a few other very special categories of citizens. But it took the “stop-and-frisk” policy to really shake the weapons out of the gang-banging demographic. And now that Mayor Bill deBlasio has deemed that “racist,” gang-banging murders are going up again.
Which leads to a consideration that there is already such a fantastic arsenal of weapons loose in this country that attempts to regulate them would be an exercise in futility — it would only stimulate brisker underground trafficking in the existing supply.
What concerns me more than the gun issue per se is the extraordinary violence-saturated, pornified culture of young men driven crazy by failure, loneliness, grievance, and anger. More and more, there are no parameters for the normal expression of masculine behavior in America — for instance, taking pride in doing something well, or becoming a good candidate for marriage. The lower classes have almost no vocational domain for the normal enactments of manhood, and one of the few left is the army, where they are overtly trained to be killers.
Much of what used to be the working class is now an idle class that can only dream of what it means to be a man and they are bombarded with the most sordid pre-packaged media dreams in the form of video games based on homicide, the narcissistic power fantasies of movies, TV, and professional sports, and the frustrating tauntings of free porn. The last thing they’re able to do is form families. All of this operates in conditions where there are no normal models of male authority, especially fathers and bosses, to regulate the impulse control of young men — and teach them to regulate it themselves.
The physical setting of American life composed of a failing suburban sprawl pattern for daily life — the perfect set-up for making community impossible — obliterates the secondary layer of socialization beyond the family. This is life in the strip-mall wilderness of our country, which has gotten to be most of where people live. Imagine a society without families and real communities and wave your flag over that.
President Obama and whatever else passes for authority in America these days won’t even talk about that. They don’t have a vocabulary for it. They don’t understand how it works and what it’s doing to the nation. Many of the parts and modules of it make up what’s left of our foundering economy: junk food, pointless and endless motoring, television. We’re not going to do anything about it. The killing and the mayhem will continue through the process of economic collapse that we have entered. And when we reach the destination of all that, probably something medieval or feudal in make-up, it will be possible once again for boys to develop into men instead of monsters.
Kunstler’s third World Made By Hand novel is available! The Fourth and final is finished and on the way — June 2016. “Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist
I would guess that the girls mugging for the camera in front of the assault rifles are not mothers.
Re: “American life composed of a failing suburban sprawl…” Suburbs, maybe especially affluent suburbs, set up isolation. Everybody’s in their single family detached house, sequestered from one another. Community is likely to happen outside the neighborhood at work, schools, parks, bars, church, etc. And it’s all built around the automobile. Try having an engaged life in the suburbs without a car. Without one it’s hard enough to get to a job, much less any kind of social activities. Ever try to get to church by bus on a Sunday?
In the affluent suburb in the Bay Area I grew up in our house was located on the top of a steep hill. So bicycling out of the neighborhood was not an option, the ride downhill was too dangerous and the ride back uphill was too strenuous. Once I was a teen getting a ride from Mom out of the neighborhood was “‘uncool”. As for other kids in my neighborhood, I didn’t like most of them, so I was left to my own devices to entertain myself, resorting to lonely, unfulfilling pasttimes like playing frisbee golf by myself.