Sticks and stones

A day late and a dollar short, but this kind of only could be posted today. Bear with me:

-My first reaction to head-on-a-stick-gate: Yeah, count me in. Erik Loomis's violent rhetoric (macho posturing?) is not my style, but yes, I believe the N.R.A. is an evil organization, and only just recently compared the pro-gun side to those who supported slavery or Nazism when those were normal, an intentional (if hyperbolic, as they always are) Godwin with the point being that sometimes ordinary individuals believe what they've been taught to believe and don't know how wrong they are. The leadership in these cases is where the evil lies, and I should think the dude who's head of the N.R.A. should count. To reiterate: if you yourself happened to be raised in Gun Culture, I don't think this makes you somehow a worse person than people like me, who happened not to be born in that culture. But I'm not going to equivocate when it comes to declaring what you were taught to be wrong. I'm not going to act as though it's my duty as an American to on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand about this issue, to ever-so-sympathetically acknowledge the centrality of guns to American culture, just not the fake-American culture I grew up with.

-My second reaction when first seeing Loomis's tweets, including the ones above-and-beyond head-on-a-stick, with ample use of variants of "fuck," was that someone in an ordinary job would be in trouble, and that if we establish that tenured and tenure-track profs should not be, that's nice for them but useless for the rest of us. More specifically, I thought of that teacher (of regular kids, not college students) fired for appearing on Facebook drinking a glass of wine while on vacation in Europe. And of the many more college adjunct instructors, who quite simply don't have time to tweet about heads on sticks, what with teaching non-stop for not even a living wage and no benefits. Not, of course, that all of this need be zero-sum. But there's just so much cause for outrage in terms of how teachers are treated, which superhuman feats are expected of them, that the mistreatment of a swaggering blogger with the support of everyone who matters (what a list!) did not, immediately, strike me as a cause I needed to get involved in. I agree with the prestigious horde, but this seemed well-covered without me.

-First plus second reactions combined to my thinking that Loomis's job should absolutely be safe, but that as much as I want the anti-gun side to take a more radical (i.e. no private ownership of guns) position (either, a girl can dream, for that to happen, or at least to shift the center of the debate), I don't think this type of rhetoric is the way to do it. While they probably came from a place of sincerity and genuine outrage, they read as someone getting a real kick out of seeing how far he can go.

-Complicating all of this: The particular group one has beef with if one picks on the N.R.A. is a particularly shall we say armed segment of the population. Maybe the admins of the University of Rhode Island just don't want to be, like, shot?

-And then there was today's announcement from head-on-stick himself, Wayne LaPierre, calling for oh-so-effective armed guards at all schools. Still not convinced Loomis's rhetoric is the most effective (again, not because it's too radical, but because obscenities and threats of violence are just going to alienate potential allies), but it does feel a notch more justified.