Over at Slate, Dave Weigel has some words of caution for anyone looking to make too strong a connection between yesterday’s Discovery Channel hostage-taker, James Lee, and any particular political movement. In a post titled “This Crazy Man With A Gun Proves That Political Point I Was Making!,” he notes that these types of stories inevitably go through three stages:
1) Investigation. Who is this guy? Right and left partisans immediately worry that it’s one of their team (defined loosely — a white liberal might worry that it’s a Muslim radical who’ll prove Frank Gaffney right).
2) Revelation. The identity of the perp is discovered — in this case, we find that it’s an anti-human population activist. Everyone pretends that their previous theories about what might be happening were never really serious.
3) Polarization. The people whose ideology most matches the perp cry loudly that he is crazy and has nothing to do with them. The people whose ideology is antithetical to the perp’s — in this case, conservative skeptics of environmentalism — subtly hint that the perp is too representative of the other team. Oh, sure, they’re not saying that. But every time someone goes crazy on the other side, they get blamed, so it’s only fair.
It’s funny because it’s true — every. single. time. Remember the backlash against the pro-life movement after the George Tiller murder? Anyone tempted to lump all environmentalists in with Lee might do well to consider that first.
Make no mistake: There is absolutely a movement in some environmentalist groups that supports contraception, sterilization, and abortion as effective “population control” measures. The position is almost the more insidious for being held by otherwise rational people who don’t consider the human race “parasites” or follow the teachings of a telepathic gorilla. Let’s engage that debate, and leave the crazy people of the world out of it.
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Perhaps the lesson is that you’d have to be crazy to take An Inconvenient Truth seriously.
It is surely true that no generalized connection can be made between James Lee and environmentalists or even between Lee and that nutset of environmentalists who see humanity as pests and a blight upon the Earth. While it cannot be used on offense, however, it rather clearly makes the point that what isn’t sauce for the goose isn’t sauce for the gander either. Something to remember the next time someone tries to link George Tiller and the pro-life movement.
*snerk* Ahem. No comment.
Ender, in hindsight I realized I could have written this post the other way around and made the same point. I’m sure we’ll go through this cycle all over again when the next crazy makes headlines, so it’s a fair point to remember.
My husband works 3 blocks down the street from the Discovery building, and we lived 2 years ago in an apartment 4 blocks away. I walked past this guy, kids in tow, pretty regularly for a while to get to the grocery store. We, and most everyone else with ties to this area of Silver Spring, have NO problem disassociating Lee in our minds from any normal activists or causes. He’s not an environmentalist, he’s just mental.
This is the same guy who, in 2008, caused an unruly mob formation outside Discovery because he decided for some incomprehensible reason tied somehow to his perpetual solo protest to throw cash into the air out of a duffel bag.
Would have been nice if Slate had offered this conciliatory piece after one of our guys went nuts, rather than one of theirs.
If the Discovery Channel Gunman’s manifesto had been full of exaggerated anti-abortion tropes, or read like some Tea Party caricature, would Weigel still have written this?
Who knows? Either way, he wrote it, and it’ll be just as true next time someone else pops off. It makes a handy reference point regardless.
One side acknowledges a framework in which the immoral actions of its fanatics can be judged as gravely disordered acts of inhumanity, abominations toward God.
The other side acknowledges no such framework, it acknowledges criminal statutes might have been violated. Adding insult, this side sees the roots of the criminal act as ultimately traceable to sociobiological causes. The moral element is carefully expunged, leaving only an inconvenient public relations embarrassment behind.
To some this might be nit-picking, but to me it seems quite significant.
“Who knows? Either way, he wrote it, and it’ll be just as true next time someone else pops off. It makes a handy reference point regardless.”
You are correct except for one minor detail — the left places no value on truth. Modern Liberalism (including Environmentalism) has become a pseudo-religion. There is usually no room for reason. Their’s is a game of “heads I win, tails you lose” — remember, “Global Warming” no longer means “warming” but extreme weather of any type. Maybe we should start calling it The Whether Channel.
I’m having problems telling a madman from an ideologue. There’s no official diagnosis of mental illness in this man, is there? Why link his violence to mental illness?
Let’s rewrite the Communist Manifesto in the style of James Lee: poorer grammar, less flair, and a few shoutouts to the woodland creatures. Does that make Marx and Engels crazy?
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