DOES "THANK YOU" MEAN "APPRECIATION" OR DEPARTURE FROM AN ACTION OR EVENT?

[Harry Riley]

World Net Daily 

Thursday, January 13, 2011

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RETURN TO REASON
Loughner, language and the Big Lie
Exclusive: Ilana Mercer figures shooter went 'mad' due to 'the perversion of speech'

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Posted: January 14, 2011
1:00 am Eastern

 

By Ilana Mercer

 

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"What is government if words have no meaning?" Jared Lee Loughner asked Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in 2007.

Loughner was attending a Giffords "Congress in Your Corner" get-together. The gracious congresswoman attempted to answer the youth's riddle. As we now know, no reply would have satisfied or stilled the mind of this obsessive individual.

Four years later, on Jan. 8, 2011, Loughner went on a rampage outside a Tucson grocery store, where the representative held a similar event. He killed six people and wounded 14, among whom was Gabrielle Giffords.

Loughner was both fixated on his representative's imagined failings, and preoccupied with language and its misuse. These elements combined and then combusted in his head.

As a writer who really loves the English language, I am intrigued by the intrusive, persistent thoughts about grammar and illiteracy to have plagued Loughner.

You see, as I mourn the senseless slaughter of my countrymen, I also grieve – with almost every book I pick up or Internet tract I read – the bastardization of the language.

Given time, the nation's mental-health mavens will confuse matters. They will likely assert, without any science, that misfiring neurotransmitters in the man's brain brought us to this point. It would appear, however, that what pushed Loughner into an abyss was the inability to "read" the world around him.

Words are symbols. They are used as agreed-upon conventions to make sense of the world. For Loughner, these constructs no longer corresponded to the things they are supposed to describe.

The magazine Mother Jones interviewed Bryce Tierney, a close friend of Loughner. Tierney confirmed "the fascination Loughner had with semantics and how the world is really nothing – [an] illusion." In addition, Loughner, said his pal, liked to insist (credibly) that government was "f---ing us over."

Perhaps, then, it was not speech per se that inflamed Loughner's febrile passions, but, rather, Orwellian speech; lies that belie reality.

The Big Lies.

Take, for example, the words of the by-now notorious and odious Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. The Democrat made his début on the national stage by calling Arizona a "Mecca for prejudice and bigotry" – the right-wing kind, naturally. Shortly after, Dupnik fleshed out his perspective: "We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country."

Forget for a moment that both parties have made the country inestimably worse.

How many generations of young people can you raise on these sorts of Big Lies – the kind that teach that taking from Peter to lavish on Paul at the point of a gun creates a "better country"? That central planning, the sort that crippled the USSR, will make for a "better" USA? That bankruptcy is bad if you are a private citizen, but fine for the State? That borrowing money you don't ever intend to repay, so as to finance welfare and warfare forever-after, is for the "better"? That there is nothing wrong with an OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) that equals GDP (Gross Domestic Product)? That it is not a mathematical improbability to claim that an enormous new entitlement program (health care) will drastically reduce the deficit and debt?

Those in authority promise youngsters that the larger the parasite (government) the healthier the host (the private economy) will be. This, as their communities continue to wither.

The country's public schools raise bumper crops of rudderless dullards. Many simply do not have the wherewithal to deal with these Big Lies.

Having robbed "our kids" of their intellectual and spiritual heritage, they no longer have the resources to cope. A few will come to view words as detached from the things they are supposed to denote. Still fewer – the more vulnerable among these kids – will likely become dazed and confused, and even go "crazy," so to speak.

Language became a metaphor for Loughner's meandering mind. He grew angrier and angrier as the symbols his society deploys clashed with the reality these symbols were supposed to represent. You could say that Loughner was particularly susceptible to the schizophrenogenic communications transmitted, on an ongoing basis, by the many Ministries of Truth.

Liberals contend that free, right-wing speech drove Loughner over the edge. I would counter thus: The perversion of speech – and the manifest discrepancy between words and what they stand for – is what encourages "madness" and mayhem in individuals like Loughner.

An inability to deal with incongruity does not imply an absence of mens rea (criminal intent). "Crazies" know right from wrong.

We are all equally exposed to the Big Lies pushed by the country's so-called cognoscenti. The political class has manufactured a parallel universe for us to inhabit. We are, however, all free to refuse to occupy it.

[Sandra Lee Smith]

THANKFULLY, yes, we are free to choose to NOT inhabit that insanity, and insane world our "leasers" and others in positions of power of some sort would have us buy into.  Bad enough, some days I wake up and wonder if it's really worth trying to keep fighting this madness, but then I've been prone to depressions all my life, and so such feelings of being overwhelmed are, for me, on the "normal" side; and I've kept finding reasons, so far.   But for someone grappling with the onset of schizophrenia, as it APPEARS Loughner might be, based on reported behaviors and some of the things he's reportedly been writing/saying in recent years, I can well see where he or others like him would be too overwhelmed and ill-equipped to sort it out, much less cope with it in any rational way.  Further, by some reports, he was estranged from his parents, at least emotionally, so fairly isolated, and likely felt he had nowhere to turn.  That doesn't EXCUSE, only explains what he DID, which was wrong.  What's most disheartening is that the very people who are actually responsible for the situation that produced such conflict in this kid WON'T see their own complicity in the problem at all!

[Harry Riley]

Sandra........I think your last sentence pretty well sums up what Mercer is saying.........it's difficult to determine anymore exactly what the gibberish we read and hear means.......my opinion...   Government, our education system.....on and on....is truth today what it was as recent as 50 years ago??

I think Mercer nails a gut-wrenching issue...........

[Sandra Lee Smith]

She does; and  I believe the business of PC and "situational ethics", along with the "living" Constitution are at least 3 of the pillars at the root of it.  All 3 have to do with a loss of clear truth and "right-or-wrong" morality;without which NO human can safely navigate the problems of life.  Think a ship without a rudder or compass in the middle of a severe hurricane or typhoon.  That's what's happening to so many of the people who were children from, at the very latest, 1960 on, the ones who didn't get solid values taught them in their homes.  They can try to throw out an anchor but to what?  There's nothing for it to catch onto.  Even mature and sensible adults need some sort of framework to guide their thinking and decisions, and that just isn't being provided in far too many cases any longer.  So we get a sick kid like Loughner going completely off the deep end.  I'm frankly just amazed there haven't been MORE such incidents, not that I'm wishing for them, mind you.  Just surprised.

[Samita Sigala]

  Relative or positive truth has a lot to do with language. I am in my garage but that does not make me a car. A relativist would say i am a car if i think i am a car. Political speech is often vague. But the worst speech of all ,imo, is the denial of a moral law upon which our Republic was formed. Our laws as John Jay defined them is what is lacking and never taught in schools. Unfortunately many, not all, parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach those laws at home. I'm rambling here. God help us to know truth for ,"Thy Word O God Is Truth"

[Marianne Hart]

Wow, what a great article! Thank you Harry for posting.

[Sandra Lee Smith]

Ethics, the real sort, without so many shades of grey in them, and morals are but 2 pillars of a healthy social structure; when those are removed, well, look around you to see the results.  PC is one of the ways of removing them; as is allowing the acceptance of that which is immoral and unethical to be practiced openly, and called "normal" and "healthy" when in fact they are not.  The US is not now and never has been perfect, but it was a lot closer at one time than any other nation or governmental structure has ever been in all human history.  Our Constitution allowed for humans to be their best and to grow and flourish, as NO other form of government has ever done.  But it requires of each of us that we develop a thing called character, which is based on SOUND morals and ethics, and far too many don't want to do that.