Katherine Hill
  • Books
  • Selected Writing
  • Bio
  • Events
  • Contact

Gabby

1/14/2011

0 Comments

 
I admit I've fallen for Gabby. I had never heard of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords before the attempt on her life last Saturday morning in Tucson, but now I am, like so many Americans, pulling for her desperately. She rides motorcycles. She married an astronaut. She's only 40 years old, for Christ's sake. I cling to news of her recovery (she opened her eyes! she dangled her legs over the side of her hospital bed!) as though willing her to get well so that she can -- what? Return to Congress with renewed passion and go on to become the first female President...?
Picture
Gabby was shot in the head at close range. Even if she recovers as miraculously as everyone hopes, she’s unlikely to return to her old life in politics. And yet I can’t help wanting it for her. In a very short amount of time, I’ve come to identify with her deeply and to see in her all sorts of significance and possibility. Possibility that a seemingly deranged gunman may well have taken away.

So it’s somewhat startling that Greg Downs, a fiction writer and history professor at City College in New York, thinks I have something in common with Jared Loughner, her alleged shooter. Startling, but spot-on:
The way Loughner approached politics was actually not as idiosyncratic as we would like to think, even if it was much more extreme.  Loughner’s attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seems likely to have been spurred not by her ideological commitments nor by her cultural values nor by her actions in regard to any project in Loughner’s backyard, but instead to a fleeting moment of personal interaction in which, in Loughner’s skewed view, Giffords failed to engage with him.

Although most people do not erupt into murderous rages, many Americans do think about politics in these very intimate ways, as exchanges between individuals, and those exchanges are often imaginative, even fantastic, among people who otherwise seem rational and sane.
What Downs says makes even more sense in the context of a story heard on NPR this morning, about a 1999 Secret Service study of assassins and would-be assassins. Yet another reminder of the ever-personal nature of  politics.

Yes, Loughner was likely mentally ill. All the more reason we should strive to understand his behavior on all fronts – clinical, cultural, et cetera – rather than dismissing his rampage as the inexplicable action of a lunatic. Maybe this is what people really meant when they blamed our "toxic" political climate: that Jared Loughner is more like us than we'd otherwise like to admit.  

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    About

    author of The Violet Hour, reader, prodigious eater of ice cream

    Archives

    June 2014
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    July 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010

    Categories

    All
    #amour
    #beastsofthesouthernwild
    #coloradoreview
    #oscars
    #osloaugust31
    #philadelphiainquirer
    #rustandbone
    #thekidwithabike
    #theviolethour

    RSS Feed

    Friends
    The Glance Reveals
    The Iron List
    The White Tank Top
    Apathetically Decomposing
    Noise Narcs
Designed by Jessie Junak
  • Books
  • Selected Writing
  • Bio
  • Events
  • Contact