Marty Kaplan

January 9, 2011

The vitriol vitriol

By Marty Kaplan

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“Clarabelle Dopenik.”  That’s what one wit on the popular conservative Web site freerepublic.com called Clarence Dupnik, the Pima County, Arizona sheriff who turns 75 this week.  Elected continuously since 1980, he is the public face of the investigation into the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 19 others. He is also, according to bloggers on that site, “an incompetent unhinged sonofabitch” and “a jerk” “using this tragedy for baseless, cheap political shots.”

Sheriff Dupnik’s crime was decrying

“the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business…. When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government—the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous, and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital…. People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”

The problem with Sheriff Dupnik’s calling out vitriol, blogged one conservative, was that it was actually “calling out Rush, Glen[n], Sean and Fox!!!!!”  Dupnik was, wrote another, “inciting violence accusing Rush, tea parties, Palin, and Republicans of bigotry and murder.”

What threatened the right the most was losing control of the national political narrative.  Until the slayings in the Safeway parking lot, the master story had been the triumphant G.O.P. sweeping into Congress to repeal “the job-killing health care bill.”  But as of Saturday, the new story connected the dots between the inflammatory rhetoric of McCain/Palin events in 2008, the ugly confrontations at congressional town halls in the summer of 2009, the “lock and load” cackling of the 2010 campaign – and the cultural climate of the Tucson murders.  Within the space of a few hours, the story had been transformed from a revenge narrative (Obama brought low) to a soul-searching meta-narrative: How has our society come to this season in hell, and what must be done to heal us?

The right’s panic about this shift was palpable.  Wrote one blogger on the day of the shooting, “Right now, I would be interested to see the smart response from Republicans.  If I was John Boehner, I would be in Arizona. As a speaker of the house, he needs to be there and meet the family before Obama goes to Arizona and gives a big speech to change the topic of the nations [sic]. Next 24 hrs is crucial till Glenn Beck and Rush come to air on Monday.”

But there was no need to wait for Glenn and Rush to come to their narrative’s rescue.  Politico.com, a site widely read by journalists and politicians, soon reported that Sheriff Dupnik had “established himself as one of the leading liberal voices in a state that boasts only a handful… Local conservatives are quickly spinning his comments as those of a partisan.”  The headline of the Politico piece—“Liberal Ariz. sheriff Clarence Dupnik sees cause of violence”—eliminated any daylight between those local Republican spinners and the Beltway media channeling them.  With Dupnik branded a liberal, the troubling thought that American public discourse had taken a wrong turn had been reduced to garden-variety lefty partisanship.

A New York Times columnist found another way to denature Sheriff Dupnik’s condemnation of vitriol.  He wrote that political leaders who cry “tyranny” and “socialism” aren’t trying to incite hysteria; rather, they’re “so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that – like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater – they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.”  Vitriol is theater, a reality show with a studio audience.  Rush is just an entertainer, Glenn is just a rodeo clown and the pols are just playing to the peanut gallery.  Cut these guys some slack.  Hyperbole’s great for everyone’s ratings.  Who can blame them for getting carried away?

If this tragedy is going to be a teachable moment, the lesson won’t be found by determining whose vitriol is warranted.  It will be found instead in what the vitriol is actually about.  And that, as Sheriff Dupnik nailed it, is “tearing down the government.”

In the 1970s, the “sovereign citizen movement” was still a paranoid fringe.  “Its adherents,” explains the Anti-Defamation League, believed that “virtually all existing government in the United States is illegitimate and they seek to ‘restore’ an idealized, minimalist government that never actually existed.”  In the decades since, this right-wing anarchism was domesticated and became mainstream.  Today it demonizes the federal government, federal programs, public employees, taxes and regulation.  It accords scriptural authority to the Constitution, but it is in denial about the powers that charter assigns to the central government.  It is blind to the “common welfare” that “we the people” task the government to promote, maintaining instead that the patriots who won our revolution wrote a document whose sole purpose was to protect freedom from the encroachments of the loathed central state.

In truth, American government is a miraculous equilibrium between individual freedom and mutual responsibility, the one and the many, the local and the national, the personal and the public.  The Constitution isn’t holy writ; it’s a living document whose text and meaning have evolved through the centuries.  “Government is the problem,” said Ronald Reagan.  He was wrong.  The problem is bad government, and the job of every generation is to make it work better, not to drive a stake through its heart. 

Killing government is the mission of an assassin.  The vitriol in our national bloodstream is the crackpot notion that killing government is the mission of the rest of us.

Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.  Reach him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

A version of this article appeared in print.

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An excellent response to the conservatives’ attempts to shift the focus off their near-anarchist and hate-mongering campaign. The tea parties, conservative media and the shooter all had this in common: they believe the democratically elected American government is illegitimate and support aggression as a means of installing their idea of a “democratically elected” pseudo-goverment. If only one, tiny, ray of goodness comes out of this horror, let it be that Americans become intolerant of the vitriol and aggression that the tea parties and conservative hate-mongerers like O’Reilly and Beck use to promote fear and gain power.

Sincerely,
a concered Aussie.

Comment by KatScorp on 1/09/11 at 7:11 pm

Thank you, Marty Kaplan, for a well-reasoned analysis of the current sorry, poisonous state of our political discourse.  You do an especially good service by pointing out how some of the unhinged paranoias of yesteryear have become the mainstream policy positions of the contemporary right-wing. There is simply no equivalent, systematic descent into madness and incivility on the part of the Left.

A few years ago, the Republican Party leadership tried to rebrand the GOP as the “Party of Personal Responsibility”.  Given its response to this tragedy, there is little evidence they would recognize “personal responsibility” if it walked up and bit them on the rump.

Comment by Doug on 1/09/11 at 8:10 pm

Marty, attempting to twist the evil actions of a crazed leftwing pothead (in the words of one of his classmates) into a political lesson benefiting your view of the world is evil: in the same fashion that fly larvae feast off dead bodies, you are feasting off of the murder of 6 innocent people.  Have you no shame?

Comment by paul almond on 1/10/11 at 8:40 am

Marty, don’t we all know that all the bad things in this country are the cause of the right wing conservatives? They are crazed, bigoted, gun totting, heartless, no-good SOBs.

So now explain to us how a self-proclaimed atheist, a lunatic who has listed the Communist Manifesto as one of his most favorite book is now a conservative?

Comment by Harvey on 1/10/11 at 12:21 pm

Phoenix New Times: “A classmate of the man accused of shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords this morning describes him as ‘left wing’ and a ‘pot head’ in a series of posts on Twitter this afternoon.”

Comment by Mini on 1/10/11 at 12:38 pm

One must consider a radical a radical when examining the bigger political picture.  The radical “Tearing down the government” attitude must be separated from the fact that there ARE parts of the big government that are not working for the good of the people, like politicians who “blame and accuse” instead of work to find common ground so solutions can happen. My wish would be that all hard line partisan politicians begin to see their own responsibility in this state of affairs.  Meanwhile, we can all take more responsibility to work at a local level, in our own communities, to rise above political rhetoric, identify problems and find common solutions.

Comment by DKMuir on 1/10/11 at 12:43 pm

Caitie Parker tweeted after hearing of the violent attack that targeted and hospitalized Arizona Democrat Giffords in critical condition with a severe head wound. “As I knew him, he was left wing. He was a pot head, quite liberal and oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.”

Comment by Harvey on 1/10/11 at 2:48 pm

“Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him [Republican Governor Rick Scott]and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he’s running for governor of Florida… He’s no hero. He’s a damn crook. It’s just we don’t prosecute big crooks.” (Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa, Oct 23 2010)

Comment by Mini on 1/11/11 at 1:41 pm

Crazed lunatic who has a copy of mein kamph,  guns down Jewish congresswoman. And somehow this is the fault of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh

Comment by Bill Pearlman on 1/13/11 at 3:51 am

Anther whacko jew (Jared Loughner) kills another US politician and somehow the problem is with white conservatives.

About half of the murdered politicians in the USA got that way by jews killing them.

When can we turn the conversation to this problem of jews solving their problems with murderous political violence?

Comment by Scott Mollett on 1/13/11 at 10:13 am

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