God bless Wayne LaPierre -- no one has worked as tirelessly to underscore the utter absurdity and paranoid delusions of the NRA's assault on all rational efforts to regulate guns better than Wacko Wayno. I mean, you really have to hand it to a guy who can make someone at Fox News step back and say "Whoah, this dude's seriously nuts...." Yeah: Think about it -- when has anyone at Fox News ever been able to recognize bat-shit crazy? But wait: What's the deeper message here? Are the cultural fault lines shifting? Could there be better proof of that possibility than the appearance of small cracks in the foundation at Fox News?
God bless Wayne LaPierre -- no one has worked as tirelessly to underscore the utter absurdity and paranoid delusions of the NRA's assault on all rational efforts to regulate guns better than Wacko Wayno. I mean, you really have to hand it to a guy who can make someone at Fox News step back and say "Whoah, this dude's seriously nuts...." Yeah: Think about it -- when has anyone at Fox News ever been able to recognize bat-shit crazy? But wait: What's the deeper message here? Are the cultural fault lines shifting? Could there be better proof of that possibility than the appearance of small cracks in the foundation at Fox News?
In a commentary published in the January/February 2013 issue of OutServe Magazine (http://outservemag.com/...) I wrote an analysis about how the LGBT community proved itself to be a significant power broker in the November 2012 election, suggesting also that the LGBT community will in a very positive sense influence the future, not only for themselves but also for the benefit of many millions of other Americans.
In that piece I wrote, “Election results suggest America is experiencing a profound cultural and political resurgence of more tolerant public speech, policies, practices and legislation toward gays, women, racial minorities, and the economically and educationally disadvantaged after a four-decade long freefall to the contrary. Put another way, the election results are a win for cultural and political liberalism, as well as justice and common sense.”
What I didn’t include in that article because it wasn’t pertinent to the discussion about the past and future of gender equality per se was that it’s quite feasible that the most profound cultural and political battle looming in the United States right now is actually about gun control. The very fact that the battle is being so fiercely fought is due to America’s shift to the left and it is because of this shift that I’m fairly certain sanity will win out. In my article about gay rights, I also used Winston Churchill’s famous line that “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” If Churchill’s quip made sense in a review of the 2012 election, then it makes even more sense in light of America’s battle to regulate guns and gun owners.
Major historical events never arise de novo out of the mists of time. They all have both remote and proximate causes that give them breath and then muscle. In America, we can almost measure the success of our efforts to go in one direction over another by the virulence of opposition to such movement. Let’s just say that the Devil always knows when he’s losing and he doesn’t like it.
The NRA has grown more extremist over time. There was a day when it largely concerned itself with public education about gun safety and responsible usage. No more. Over the last thirty years it has devolved into a dysfunctional organization driven by dystopian fantasies. What is interesting, and could serve as a great research subject for social scientists, is how the arc of the NRA’s increase in extremism and descent into madness so totally parallels what has happened to the Republican Party.
We can locate the remote causes of both the rise and fall (yes, we are seeing the fall) of the NRA in the warp and woof of American culture and such things incubate over time. However, what always ignites any great issue in historical time is a sudden spark, a proximate action, that creates a conflagration. For us, at this time, relative to gun control, we have Sandy Hook.
If location is everything in real estate, timing is everything in history. The tragedy of Sandy Hook came shortly after moderate forces of political reason re-elected Barack Obama. This time around he wasn’t elected in a joyous almost childish belief in Hope and Dreams, but by a more sober evaluation of reality. I would posit a guess that few Americans voted for Obama because they continued to believe he was the man they thought he was in 2008. Rather, I would suggest Obama was elected because when measured against the alternative, voters understood he was most certainly the only rational choice. Frankly, I call this political wisdom borne of maturity.
The point is that this same electorate is clearly in the ascendancy and times they are a changin'...
When I analyze cultural shifts I study many things and this past election has been an incredible study in America’s shift toward moderation, if not full tilt left. Whether Fox News is waking up to the fact that a cultural tsunami is just over the horizon and it doesn’t want to be unanchored, adrift, and lost at sea – or whether such a change is less corporate and more a representation that there is a genuine sea change in the belief systems of some of its people is yet to be seen. I tend to suspect, however, it’s the latter and not the former.
On Sunday, February 3rd, Chris Wallace of Fox News interviewed the NRA’s LaPierre. In the face of LaPierre’s absurd position that all American school children share an equivalent need, and have the same right, as the Obama girls’ have for Secret Service protection, Wallace allowed his own good sense to emerge and bluntly told LaPierre he was being “ridiculous.”
At first blush, “ridiculous” seems benign (I would prefer some other terminology) when listening to the mad rants of Wacko Wayno, but we must remember that Wallace works for Fox News – an organization that not only stomachs a lot of bullshit but also knows exactly how to produce it. No nonsense has ever been too absurd for Fox to shill.
Until now.
If a far-right propaganda machine like Fox News begins to back pedal away from the lunatic fringe – and Wayne LaPierre is certainly the poster child for the lunatic fringe – then I think this time around the gun nuts are the ones who are going to learn what it means when someone else is holding all the heavy ammo.
This time around I think it’s the NRA’s bullshit that’s clearly in the cross hairs -- or so one hopes.