It's two days after the Tucson massacre and the internet is filled with rhetorical battles between the right and left.
Maybe the right has no memory but having lived through the sixties it is simple common sense that public figures don't make jokes about shooting politicians. People with lesser intelligence and the mentally ill have trouble understanding the difference between a metaphor and reality.
That is why when McCain, Kelly, Palin, Angle et al used metaphorical phrases involving the shooting and/or murder of Democrats to remove them from office there was widespread concern. This event was utterly predictable. In fact, it was predicted although the conservatives didn't see it coming and pooh-poohed the idea as an impingement on their right to free speech. Now that what was predicted has come true the comments section is filled with apologists for those who used the language of hate and eliminationism.
Using metaphors for eliminating perceived problems is rhetorical shorthand. It plays well in the hinterlands. To say, "Let's deport all illegals!" is a lot easier than deporting twenty million illegals. Deporting that many people requires identifying them, having law enforcement arrest twenty million people, having twenty million deportation hearings in courtrooms, having places to hold twenty million people before deportation, having a means of sending twenty million people to countries that are willing to accept them without consequences, and ensuring that those twenty million people don't return to the U.S. Metaphors don't explain what you do with the children of illegals who were born here. Do you deport them? Under what law? Do change the Constitution to eliminate the citizenship of people who are already citizens? Do you support the wives, husbands and children of spouses who had been supporting their families before they were deported or let them starve? Do you treat them differently than hungry people who weren't married to illegals? Ah, but with a metaphor you can solve problems simply, although you don't actually solve anything. But it's easy.
There is a poem by W.H. Auden about Hitler, "Epitaph on a Tyrant", which he wrote in January 1939, long before the Nazis had done most of their dirty work:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Utterly predictable. A poet predicted it.
So various Republicans over the last few years used the rhetoric of elimination to attack Democrats and commentators warned what would happen. And it happened.
Sorry, I'll accept an apology from a Kelly, a Palin, an Angle, that they are truly sorry that they used that dangerous rhetoric if that apology comes with an understanding of the consequences of their misbehavior.
But pathetic mouthbreathers who say, "He was just a nut" still don't get it. Nuts listen to Sarah Palin too. And little children died in the streets.
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