A terrible tragedy today. Rep. Giffords of Arizona was gunned down and, though early reports were that she is dead, the hospital is confirming, as of this writing, that she is alive and in surgery. 11 others were apparently shot and six others are dead. I spent an hour with Rep. Giffords a few months ago. She and I were sitting in Jim Bohannon’s studio with Robert Reich was on the air. She’d driven him over to the studio. We chatted for an hour. We disagreed on much. She was extremely, exceedingly nice. My prayers are for her and her family.
Unfortunately, the left is using this tragedy to score political points. Rep. Giffords was on Gov. Palin’s target list for defeat this past November. The left claims Gov. Palin has blood on her hands. So does the tea party movement. Less than a year ago a gunman stormed into the Discovery Channel’s headquarters, taking hostages and threatening to kill them all. The left immediately accused the man of being a tea party activist. Unfortunately for the left, the man turned out to be an envirowacko leftist raised on Algore’s global warming garbage.
Immediately, the left changed their tune and proclaimed that no longer could we as partisans accuse each other of causing things like this. There are just crazy people in the world and tragedies happen. My, my how quickly they forget. The truth is there is evil in this world. Evil exists where God does not and as we drive God further and further away, evil creeps in more and more. Today was not a random act of violence. It was a profound evil. Let’s not pretend it wasn’t. Let’s not pretend evil does not exist.
But let’s not let the left, yet again, spin this against the tea party movement, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or Sarah Palin inciting violence. That’s both a profound lie and just another, though lesser, bit of evil.
As more details are revealed about the background of purported 22-year-old shooter Jared Loughner, who is in custody currently for the shooting in Tucson today of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Federal Judge John Rell and a number of others, at least five of whom have died, a number of people are speculating about his possible mental illness. One diagnosis that keeps arising is schizophrenia. It’s worth looking into what that might mean…
I am a licensed psychologist and from afar, and am not in the position to diagnose Mr. Loughner. However, one can make some initial impressionistic comments based upon the video content he posted on YouTube. The autistic, in the sense of highly encapsulated and personal, nature of his thought processes, his emphasis on coercion from without [see his discussion about being taught letters of the alphabet], the strange nature of his logic and language, the paranoid attitude toward the world in general, are consistent with known cases of schizophrenia, paranoid type…
This is not the rambling of a right-wing crackpot, which some have claimed Loughner to be, but gibberish. This doesn’t take away from the possibility Loughner reacted to right-wing propaganda, but quite likely out of madness, not political motivation, such as we understand such motivation.
Schizophrenia doesn’t often lead to such violence, but when it does, the cases are bizarre and usually make the news, then show up on what I call "bad person television" along with serial killers and sociopaths – Dateline, 48 Hours, 20/20 – those shows that document the stories of the macabre around us. The motivation in such Schizophrenic cases is rarely directly political, but more idiosyncratic – either a response to direct command auditory hallucinations or as an attempt to destroy and silence the imagined tormentors. That would be more likely in this case than any consistent ipolitical deology. That said, 90 years ago, when Victor Tausk wrote about the Influence Machine, he noted that the Schizophrenics’ ideas about what was causing their internal turmoil came from the times they lived in. In ancient times it was witches or sorcerers, God or Satan, later it was electrical current, then radio waves, now electronic devices. Political or spiritual sources are commonly fingered as the culprit.
As to Erickson’s formulation about Evil and Godlessness. Plenty of Schizophrenic people have been sacrificed in response to such theories – burned as witches being the foremost example. Erickson actually has it backwards. It is the psychotic Schizophrenic person who is obsessed with fighting against Evil [with a capital E], and that’s very apparent in Loughner’s postings. Erickson may be correct in cautioning the Left to refrain from blaming this on the right-wing pundits, but his own use of this tragedy to promote his religious right return-to-god agenda makes the exact same error in the other direction.
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