by pastordan
Mon Jul 28, 2008 at 07:18:23 PM PDT
As a pastor in the United Church of Christ - a sister denomination of the Unitarian Universalist Association - I know very well how vulnerable congregations are to those who mean to do them harm.
I also know very well the kind of selflessness practiced by salt of the earth members like Greg McKendry, who absorbed the full brunt of a shotgun blast to protect the other members of Tennessee Valley UUC. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends," Jesus tells us. There are millions of people across the nation who would be willing to take that saying seriously if called upon. In that they not heroic, but faithful.
Unfortunately, as a pastor and as someone who reads the news, I know as well the kind of hate that David Adkisson marinated in before the shootings.
Adkisson targeted the church,
Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."
Adkisson told Still that "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office."
Adkisson told officers he left the house unlocked for them because "he expected to be killed during the assault."
Inside the house, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.
It would be reductive to say the least to lay the blame for the Knoxville shootings solely at the feet of conservative shock jocks. Adkisson struggled with alcoholism, job loss and other demons yet to be disclosed. Too, there is a dimension of brokenness and evil in tragedies such as this that can never be satisfactorily explained. I urge you to pray for the dead and for the families of Tennessee Valley. Pray as well for David Adkisson, a soul in free fall.
But psychopaths do not choose their targets in a vacuum. As David Neiwert and Sara Robinson have documented at the Orcinus weblog, there has been a long history of "eliminationist" rhetoric in contemporary conservative circles:
What, really, is eliminationism?
It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.
... Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself -- unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary -- but not as nakedly eliminationist -- are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.
And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.
But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.
As Jeffrey Feldman documents in his new book Outright Barbarous, eliminationist rhetoric has long been married to a conservative language of violence that removes every veneer of surprise from what happened in Tennessee Valley. This was utterly predictable, if not at the hands of this madman, then by another's.
Continued>>>
http://www.streetprophets.com/storyonly/2008/7/28/221528/608
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