Close Readings: Beck on Palin on Loughner

The file cabinet interviews the cat.

Yesterday, on his radio show, Glenn BeckĀ announced that he had conducted an email exchange with Sarah Palin regarding the public response to Jared Lee Loughner. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. “Sarah, as you know, peace is always the answer,” Beck said he wrote. “I know you are feeling the same heat, if not much more on this. I want you to know you have my full support.” One hopes, for Palin’s sake, that he is already lying at this point, and that she does not have to field creepy emails from Glenn Beck every Monday morning. Regardless, Beck claims that two things happened next. First, he recommended that Palin hire some bodyguards or something, “because an attempt on you could bring the Republic down.”* As Emily Post reminds us, you should always conclude any letter of support by speculating on what would happen if the person you’re writing to were assassinated. Second, the response he claims to have gotten from Palin is so baffling, so obstinate in its thwarting of sense, that it is the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Trying to make sense out of Jared Lee Loughner

By now you may have heard about JaredĀ Lee Loughner, the Arizona man accused of shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people at a meet-your-congressperson even in Tuscon Saturday. Besides a slough of community college professors only too eager to talk about how weird he was in class, not much is known about Loughner. Or rather, a ton is known about Jared Lee Loughner, but it doesn’t really fit together. For example, he made this YouTube video. It’s constructed around formal syllogisms in which meaning flickers like those things you see on the periphery of your vision when you’re really tired, but it makes no sense at all. There are references to the Gold Standard and the Constitution, but there are also references to “conscience dreaming” and the US government trying to control the structure of English grammar. It doesn’t really hold together as an ideology, because Jared Loughner is a crazy person. That’s bad news for the people trying to triangulate his actions within contemporary American politics, and there are a lot of them. In the aftermath of his senseless attack, both halves of our fractured national discourse are scrambling to make Jared Loughner a charactering in some narrative they’ve been condemning all along.

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