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No, wait. Stop laughing.
Yes, I really did go to a gun show. No, I was not forced at gunpoint by someone else.
See, here’s the thing: I’ve been wanting to get some pictures of guns for a painting I’m thinking about. Sure, I could go to Google images for photos, but (a) that’s taking someone else’s work and (b) one can’t be assured of finding exactly what one wants that way.
Anyway, I was driving down one of the main streets in town here yesterday when I saw a sign for a gun show.
So I went in.
Well, no. That’s not exactly true. First I did a quick wardrobe check to make sure I wasn’t wearing anything that would get me shot in such a venue. I wear a lot of snarky t-shirts when I’m not trying to dress like a grown-up, and some of them are pretty political (I know, what are the odds?) and would not go over well with the gun show crowd. But as luck would have it, I was wearing an over-sized denim shirt, which I figured would be unobjectionable. If I were anywhere but Colorado, my Birkenstocks might have been a problem, but here, even some Republicans wear them – though most Republicans don’t, to my knowledge, wear blue toenail polish…
I decided that I was probably safe.
It was…how shall I say this…interesting. From, kind of, a sociological perspective, I guess.
You know that 28% that still apparently approves of George Bush, no matter what he does? Well, I found them. They’re all at gun shows, apparently. And they all loves them some John McCain, too:
No, this is not Photoshopped. This is the only covert picture I took at the gun show, because I couldn't stop myself.
I do not like guns. Guns were intended for one purpose: killing someone or something. This is something that makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.
I do not own a gun, though for several years I was in possession of one that was foisted on me by my father when my parents left Los Angeles to move to Colorado. They moved away about one year after the 1992 riots, and my dad didn’t like leaving his little girl unprotected in the big city. I accepted the gun from him because it increased his peace of mind, knowing that I had it. It stayed at the back of the top shelf of my closet, behind lots of other stuff, for the entire time I had it, so I wouldn’t have to look at it. When I left California, I gave the gun back to my dad, and I am happy to say that I have no idea what he did with it after that.
Guns creep me out.
So you can probably imagine how I felt as I wandered around the gun show, trying not to look like a liberal.
It was a little weird.
Of course, everyone wanted to sell me a gun. Or ammo. Or various army-surplus paraphenalia, like ammo cans and MREs. Or medals or ribbons or badges from some war or another. Some with Nazi insignia. Really.
Obviously, I couldn’t just wander around the place taking pictures, even though that was what I desperately wanted to do. I think the, um, merchants would have rustled me out the doors right quick if I had done so, and I doubt my camera would have survived the experience.
After wandering around the floor once, I decided to go with the honest approach.
“Um, hi, I’m an artist, and I’m trying to get some pictures of some guns for a painting I want to do. Do you mind if I take pictures of your display?”
This was met with one of three responses:
- “Yes, absolutely. Go right ahead.” Sometimes followed by, “Do you need to see different angles of the gun(s)?” or “Is there a particular type of gun you want a picture of?” These were the people who were gun enthusiasts. They were all about the second amendment, they were proud of their collections, and they were happy to have someone take an interest in the craftmanship of the different styles of guns.
- “Um, I guess that would be okay. Just of the guns? But, please not of the people looking at the displays or anything.” Okay, I could respect that – and did. They didn’t know who I was, or what sort of art I was talking about, after all, and certainly I could understand their concern that their customers might not be wild about being photographed looking at weapons. Plus, of course, someone taking pictures at a gun show looks out of place. This is not a place where cameras are much in evidence. So, I kept it low key.
- “No, I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to take pictures in here. I think that’s the rules of the convention place.” Really? I didn’t see any signs to that effect. And hey, why do all your guns have tags that say Not Legal in California, anyway?
Anyway, I took pictures where I could, and, as they say, got the hell out of Dodge.
But not before an earnest man in his mid-forties pressed an “Obama and the 2nd Amendment” flyer and a McCain/Palin sticker into my hands. “Really,” he said, “Make sure you read this. It’s important.”
I tossed the flyer. Second amendment concerns are WAY far down on my list of worries when it comes to presidential candidates, frankly.
But I’m still trying to come up with a good use for the McCain/Palin ’08 sticker….
–jane doe
Um, yikes! So the Dow apparently fell 777 points today, taking it lower than the first day of Bush’s presidency.
Seriously scared, now.
Can someone please just shut McCain up so the rest of Congress can work out a bailout package already? I don’t really like the idea of bailing out I-bankers at the taxpayers’ expense, but I like the idea of another Great Depression even less.
My mattress is looking safer and safer as a place to store what little money I have left…
–jd
P.S. Oh, and be sure to check out this article from the Guardian.
Women Against Sarah Palin is a new blog that hosts comments from literally thousands of women who are appalled by Sarah Palin’s views on many issues critical to women and to our country. They have my whole-hearted support.
That woman scares me.
I would be fine with her if she were just a small-town mayor, because I figure in small towns everyone knows everyone else, so if they elected her, they deserve her. But for someone who is that shallow, corrupt, and reactionary in her thinking to be one heartbeat away from the presidency of one of the most powerful nations on earth, is a terrifying notion.
Seriously, if you think George W. Bush is bad, he’s got nothing on this woman.
–jane doe
I’ve been working on a post about our potential next VP, but in the mean time, there’s this:
NB: I start this post off with a fairly long and rambling recollection of my memories of 9/11/2001. If you don’t want to read this (and I won’t fault you if you don’t), please consider scrolling down to the asterisks, where I actually start talking about political stuff that may interest my regular readers. -jd
It was an awful day, a day I and many – most – others wandered through in a sort of state of shock.
I was living in California at the time, still working as a lawyer. The first plane hit one of the towers just before my alarm clock went off that morning, The drive-time DJs chattered on as usual about nonsensical matters I can mercifully no longer remember, unaware of the unfolding tragedy until the woman who gave the traffic reports joined them on the air a few minutes later and told them to turn on a TV if they had one in the studio.
I turned my own TV on immediately, and thus had the dubious honor of watching the second plane hit the other tower as it was happening.
I stumbled around my apartment that morning, somehow getting ready for work, largely on autopilot, in shock. My brother called from Colorado. Was I planning on going to the office? Yes, I said. I had a meeting scheduled about a contract I was working on, I had to at least go in to see if it was still happening.
I was a lawyer, and lawyers aren’t supposed to react to emotional events the way other humans do, because lawyers aren’t supposed to be human, to suffer human weaknesses. I never got my emotional circuits disconnected (nor do most lawyers), but I often felt like I was obligated by my status to act as if I had – like many other lawyers did that day.
My brother was worried, because I worked in a tall building. Not the tallest in the city I was living in at the time, not by a long shot, but it was a crazy day, and no one was thinking logically. I certainly wasn’t. The biggest mass murder in our country’s history and I was putting on a suit and acting like I could ride out a day at the office.
It was a ridiculous notion, of course, but the truth is, I didn’t know what else to do. I lived alone, and had only recently moved to this city, so I didn’t have any close friends close by. My family was half a continent away. Practically the only people I knew locally were my co-workers. I think that’s the real reason why I went to work – I didn’t want to be alone on that horrible day, watching the news coverage by myself.
Probably only about a third of our staff showed up for work that day, mostly people with urgent meetings or people who like me didn’t think they were allowed (by whatever entity it is that allows these things) to take the day off. No work actually happened, at least as far as I saw. We congregated in a conference room where the head of our department had set up a television. Someone brought in a tray of bagels and a thermos full of coffee, which were largely ignored by everyone present. As if we could have eaten on that day.
We were all mentally or literally going through our rolodexes, trying to figure out if anyone we knew was likely to have been in one of the towers. I was one of the lucky ones – no one I knew, at least that I could think of at the moment, was likely to have been in either of the towers that day, though I did know several people who worked in one of the buildings across the street from the towers.
A co-worker – one of the ones who did not show up at the office that day – was not so lucky. Her mentor from a firm she had worked for earlier in her legal career was at a breakfast meeting in the restaurant that was on the top floor of one of the towers. He was among the missing.
We sat in the conference room, speaking in low voices, watching the scraps of news as they came in. Praying silently for the safety of people that we knew. Praying for all the people we didn’t know – the missing, and the people who would be missing them.
Every now and then, someone’s cell phone would ring, and the phone’s owner would walk quickly out into the hallway outside the conference room to take the call away from the rest of us. Sometimes, the news was good – someone they knew had received confirmation that someone else they knew was okay, was safe at home, was out of town, had taken a later flight, was not among the missing. Sometimes the news was less good – there were lots of reports of unanswered calls to mobile phones, or reaching answering machines at the homes of friends, or of not being able to get through to New York numbers at all.
By noon, I had had enough of pretending to work. I walked home from my office, got out of my lawyer costume and into comfy sweats, and started calling every single friend and family member I could, all over the country, trying to make sure that people were okay, trying to reassure myself that the world was not ending. And by and large, the news from my circle of friends and acquaintances was good.
There were some near-misses, though. A family friend who works in investment management and retirement planning was supposed to be flying from the west coast to New York to meet with some people from Cantor Fitzgerald that evening. His flight was canceled before it had a chance to board. The people he was scheduled to meet with were all among the missing. Another friend was a regular on one of the flights from Boston to LA that was hijacked. In other weeks he might have been on the plane, but something had caused his schedule to change that week.
The day passed slowly, with information trickling out in small bits between the endless replaying of the videos of the second crash and of each tower collapsing. Wild rumors circulated, and were duly reported by the media, albeit with strong caveats that they were unconfirmed rumors, because actual information was scarce.
It quickly became too painful to listen to the reporters, so I muted the television and started going through my CD collection, looking for music that might bring some comfort. John Lennon’s Imagine destroyed me – I listened to it twice, and cried for the lives lost. Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World was very cathartic, as well. I tried listening to Beethoven’s third symphony, Eroica – my favorite of the nine – but quickly abandoned it as inappropriate to the mood of the day. Ditto a Mozart concerto. I finally settled on the Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Sessions with the volume turned down low. The entire album has a very mournful sound to it, sad and soothing, something that could be listened to without fear of offending the souls of those who lost their lives that day.
As night fell, I lit candles in my apartment, in the spirit of hope that more who were currently listed as “missing” would turn up alive and well. I brewed chamomile tea, which I sweetened with too much honey and sat on my bed staring at the TV, half-listening to the Cowboy Junkies, and wondering vaguely what could possibly drive people to fly airplanes into buildings.
At some point, I fell asleep, lights still on, music still playing, TV still flashing endless loops of planes crashing and towers falling.
A new day dawned, and the entire world had changed.
* * *
You may wonder why I’m writing about all this. My story of that day seven years ago is not dramatic, and it’s not as if anyone who was alive and aware of the world around them at the time of the attacks couldn’t tell a similar tale.
In truth, it is not what I had intended to write about when I sat down at my computer. But these were the words that came out, and I let them, because I feel it is appropriate to honor the memory of that day, as horrible as it was, and to honor the lives lost there – particularly the sacrifice by those who were trying to rescue others caught in the inferno of the towers before they fell, and the lives of the people on flight 93, who, having heard what happened with the other hijacked planes, fought back against their hijackers and prevented their plane from being used as a fourth weapon of horror at the cost of their own lives. Likewise, it is appropriate to honor the suffering of all those who lost friends and loved ones on September 11th.
Moments of silence, flags flown at half mast, prayers and religious services are all appropriate tributes to the losses suffered on that horrible day. Likewise the haunting sounds of Amazing Grace played on the bagpipes or a stirring rendition of America the Beautiful.
These are the things that civilized people do when faced with such a tragedy.
What civilized people do not do, is to use the memory of that horrible day and the lives lost on it to score political points.
Yet today, we are seeing exactly that from the Republican party.
Last week, they showed that appalling 9/11 “tribute” video as part of the run-up to John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The video was apparently sprung on the cable news networks covering the convention without warning, and without the opportunity to screen it prior to its airing.
It was graphic and jingoistic, and it was clearly designed not to honor the memory of the lives lost or the heroic efforts of those who worked feverishly to rescue people from the rubble of the collapsed towers, but rather to inflame the worst aspects of the American public’s memory of that horrible day.
Worse still, it attempted to tie the attacks to Iran – a nation that had no part in planning the attacks – and to reinforce the idea that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were also somehow involved in their orchestration, despite no evidence to support this notion and massive evidence to the contrary. But tying Iran and Iraq to 9/11 serves the political agenda of certain people in the upper echelons of the Republican party (and, let us not forget, the agenda of the corporate interests and radical religious groups supporting certain GOP candidates).
Minutes after it aired, Keith Olbermann was apologizing to MSNBC viewers for the inappropriate nature of that video. And last night, he rightly castigated the Republican party leadership for the showing of the video in one of his excellent special comments.
Unfortunately, it seems we can expect many more actions of this nature from certain groups backing McCain and the Moose Killer over the next few months.
According to Denise Dennis, writing at the Huffington Post:
This past Sunday, in presidential-election swing states across the country, the New York Times came bundled with a dvd of the documentary “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” a controversial film on the threat Islamic terrorism. The documentary is set for release to retail outlets this week — the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — but has been shown at college campuses for nearly a year now, presented largely by Jewish student organizations and as part of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, the national “conservative campus protest” organized and sponsored last fall by conservative author David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.
As it happens, I find myself in possession of a copy of this DVD. I did not buy it, though it lists a manufacturer’s recommended price on the front cover. Apparently, someone thinks it is worth $19.95, though I would disagree with that appraisal.
The copy I have was pressed into my hands by an earnest-looking young woman on a Denver street corner two weeks ago during the Democratic convention. She said something about it being about the distinction between peace-seeking Muslims and terrorists. I thanked her for it and shoved it in my bookbag without much thought or attention at the time. It remained in a stack with all the other political literature and similar offerings that I picked up as I wandered around the convention venue until last night, when I saw Ms. Dennis’s story on Huffington Post and the movie’s title rang a bell in my memory.
I have now watched the first forty minutes of the one hour video. That was enough.
More than enough, actually.
It is a piece of propaganda, plain and simple. Like the 9/11 “tribute” video from the RNC, it is designed to reawaken the public’s fear off terrorism. It displays graphic images of people injured in terrorist attacks. It shows maps with ominous x’s at the locations of various events. And it shows clips of various men in Muslim attire, with subtitles full of scary threats against the west, and particularly against America.
The video purports to distinguish between most followers of Islam, who are as horrified by the terrorist tactics used by al-Qaeda as the rest of us, and the radical Islamists who actually support or engage in terrorist acts. In reality, what it does is paint the Muslim religion as a threatening “other”, both opposed and a threat to “our way of life.” It blatantly states that Muslim people will say one thing when non-Muslims are present, and another thing when only believers are present – thus, by implication, no Muslim person can be trusted, because you can’t tell the radicals from the non-violent majority.
Someone has obviously spent a lot of money to make sure this DVD is widely circulated in swing states. The copy I have was presented in the standard DVD case, with a cover that looks like it was designed professionally like any other commercial DVD. I would assume the same can be said of the copies that were sent to the New York Times subscribers. According to the above-cited Dennis piece, the DVD “was bundled into newspapers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia.” Make no mistake. The distribution of this piece of political propaganda cost a fair chunk of change.
Why would someone go to this incredible expense?
It all comes back to fear, and to terror management theory.
As I have noted previously in this space, reminders of 9/11 and the threat of terrorism have been shown to influence opinions expressed by voters on a variety of political issues, and on average to sway those opinions in the conservative direction.
The stronger the reminder about the threat, the greater the number of voters likely to be swayed by such tactics.
Certain Republicans want to set up Muslim citizens as the “other” in society, to be hated and feared, because it will give mainstream voters a visible threat to fear.
They are using graphic reminders of the attacks that occurred on this day seven years ago and the lives that were lost on that day as a means to accomplish this end.
They are doing it shamelessly and without apology.
There is a word for this sort of political tactic.
It is obscene.
According to Black’s Law Dictionary, obscene means “objectionable or offensive to accepted standards of decency.” It then goes on to further define the term in primarily sexual contexts, which is how that term is usually interpreted in the legal arena. But the first sentence of the definition certainly applies to this tactic, so I will use the term obscene to describe it.
The people who lost their lives seven years ago today deserve better treatment than to have their deaths turned into a political tool. The people who lost friends and loved ones seven years ago deserve better. The American public deserves better.
And yet, as appalling as it is, there are politicians, corporations, and religious groups who are foisting this obscenity onto the American public, and who will continue to do so between now and November, all for the sake of winning a presidential election – an election which they in no way deserve to win after the horrible catastrofuck resulting from the past eight years of Republican “leadership.”
I cannot begin to describe how angry this makes me.
Mere words cannot suffice. I could paint you a picture, but I don’t think I have enough cadmium red or alizarin crimson – indeed, there may not be enough of either pigment in the world to convey my anger about the cynical use of our memories of 9/11 as a means to a political end by people who want to see John McCain elected in November.
Instead, I will leave you with this. It’s another Roy Zimmerman song, about someone else who tried to use 9/11 in a semi-political, semi-religious context:
Peace.
–jane doe
I thought last night’s RNC speeches were bad, but apparently they were just softening us up for tonight’s performance.
I don’t even know what to say about Lindsay Graham’s speech, beyond asking, “Is he talking about the same war as the rest of us?”
The 9/11 video was beyond appalling.
And the raging insincerity and verbal gymnastics inherent in the various speakers’ attempts to distance themselves from the debacle of the last eight years under a Republican president while at the same time trying to generate enthusiasm for a candidate that promises four more years of the same policies are producing seizure-inducing levels of cognitive dissonance.
I just don’t know what to say.
–jane doe
…for calling the Republicans on the appalling use of that 9/11 “tribute” for political purposes. –jd
Zack de la Rocha and the rest of the boys from Rage Against the Machine give an impromptu, a cappella performance in St. Paul. There is something inspiring about getting a big crowd of people to chant in unison, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” (h/t to Crooks and Liars for the video clip)
–jane doe
Have I mentioned lately that I adore this man and all he does to call the mainstream media and political talking heads on their bullshit? Sure, he can be a little too nice sometimes when he’s got them face-to-face on his show, but then he does zingers like this, and all I can do is applaud.
–jane doe
P.S. Sorry, I tried to add the Comedy Central video here, but WordPress wasn’t cooperating.
…but it’s hard, because I have to keep hitting myself on the side of my head to get the bullshit out of my ears.
I don’t know. Maybe my insincerity and hypocrisy detectors are calibrated too sensitively.
Maybe the Republicans are only targeting voters incapable of critical thinking.
But can anyone be buying this shit?
–jane doe
