[Jim Moonan]

Allen: Something has to happen

Yup. And something will. And it scares me. It scares me to think things are so far gone it is a joke. Who's laughing? Has American culture jumped the shark? Is American culture a shark? Is a deadly form of dysfunction endemic to our society? Surely it's systemic... It's no joke. (Though to call it that helps to cope.)

My hope? That the horror of this long acceleration of unconscionable slaughters will reach/has reached a tipping point; that it has been so indelibly imprinted in the minds of our future leaders (today's children) that the pendulum swings. Yup, I'm hoping for a pendulum.
To paraphrase the words of a famous American children's lyric: Education -- That's what it's all about. It will take a massive infusion of civics into our education curricula and waves of publicity campaigns put together by the best communications/marketing minds we can find. And make it profitable somehow. Americans love that.
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[Andrew Szilvasy]

Walter's 100% right. This country's a joke, and will still be that in 2021 if we have a new president. We're pretty much as backward as we can be socially and our decisions have long-term negative consequences that we consistently let other countries pick up the tabs for.

[John Isbell]

I don't disagree with Walter markedly. But more narrowly, any country with a mass shooting every month or so for the last several years lacks the fundamental requirements of a civilized state. It is, precisely, a joke.
I will just add, thank you, GOP politicians and the NRA you bow to.

Cheers,
John

[Jim Moonan]

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Yes it (USA) is (a joke). (Though it perverts the meaning of the word "joke".) But was it always? (I don't know.) Will it always be?(I don't know. I hope not.) Or could it be that we are disoriented by the crush of (brutal) minutia that pushes epochal change? Is what we are calling a joke really a small part of that epochal change? What is it that's coming to a head? Are we evolving? Or is it that we are dissolving as the world is evolving? Or what? Is the the "Me Too" moment for gun ownership reform? Don't answer. I don't know. Nothing.

I've been following the conversation on GT about the Bob Hicok essay. Andrew, you said, "it's pitched as a lament for his falling sales paired alongside praise for the diversifying poetry scene paired with open envy of that diversifying scene." Somehow, someway, I see a connection -- albeit in a microscopic way -- between the outrageous proliferation of gun violence and the realization by priveleged white males that the world is a diverse place. --And with that realization comes the general dissolution of world order making way for a new world order. I don't really know what I'm talking about.

The strange (and good) thing is that I feel like I am amongst good people here. Smart people. Thinkers. It is a strange haven to have in a world that feels more like a hellish storm at sea than the safe harbor that this place (Sphere) is.
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[Andrew Szilvasy]

Originally Posted by Jim Moonan

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Somehow, someway, I see a connection -- albeit in a microscopic way -- between the outrageous proliferation of gun violence and the realization by priveleged white males that the world is a diverse place.

You don't have to read very far into it, Jim. The killer manifesto references this exactly--and, unfortunately, the "Great Replacement" ideas I mentioned to Mark.

Bob Hicok's sads are related to this, perhaps in a microscopic way (in that I found the essay problematic but don't in any way see him as suffering from the same disease), but white people, specifically white men, coming to terms with a changing world that no longer caters to them (i.e. white supremacy) is absolutely a part of this. The shooting is a symptom of multiple diseases, white supremacy being a major one.

As to the US: it has always been a glorious idea, but it has never been anything other than a pale imitation of the beautiful words that supposedly underscore it. The ideas this country says it was founded on are the most important in the world; what they actually were founded on--slavery and exploitation--run fundamentally anathema to them. And we've never reconciled them.

[Allen Tice]

I return to my earlier remarks. Then I intend to be silent. The majority of the mass shootings are committed by young males who haven’t discovered the conceptual resources to constructively channel their confusion about the conflicting inputs they see (and feel) around them on all sides. The technical term for this is “decompensation”. Because others who don’t have an individual’s best interests anywhere near their own agendas continue to erode virtually all standards of profitable activity, the inevitable anger and frustration experienced especially by under-thirty males explodes. When life becomes pointless in a cultural madhouse, their patience vanishes.

[John Isbell]

Hi Allen,

I'd add the word white to your diagnosis. Them's your mass shooters (except for the DC sniper, pretty much).

Cheers,
John

[Erik Olson]

Originally Posted by Orwn Acra

The United States is a joke.

Touche to this laconic sally! As it happens, it put me in mind of Voltaire, the most popular thing he never said: God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh*.

*
‘This quote is very widely attributed to Voltaire and is certainly in his style, but in fact, it is from H.L. Mencken, who has a certain similarity to Voltaire in his expression,’ says Marvin Carlson—City University of New York theatre historian and expert on Voltaire’s theatrical works.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Having grown up in a family that never even thought about having a gun in the house, it's pretty hard for me to comprehend why Americans are so obsessed with guns. Any ideas on this, folks? New Zealand changed its gun laws overnight after Christchurch. Italians aren't especially into guns and mass shootings here hardly ever happen. I know the NRA has a lot to do with it, but so many Americans seem positively fixated on guns. It's weird. People in the U.S. always say they need them to defend themselves if there's a shooter, but tell me no one in a Walmart in Texas was carrying a pistol. Yet it didn't stop the maniac with the semiautomatic.

[John Isbell]

My basic starting point is that a gun is a penis. But I can't fathom why so many Americans feel the need for a metal penis.

Cheers,
John