How "rhetoric" can get you shot

The shooting of Republicans at the ball diamond this past week had its predictable result.  Some folks engaged in and advocated a bipartisan bon homie.  For others it intensified the blame-placing and angry invective against the party they detest.

But  a small group, those who study and try to explain what we loosely call rhetoric, simply shrugged their shoulders and said malice thrives.  What is taught in colleges and some high schools as rhetoric is quite different than what is referred to as rhetoric in the media.  [See Please Don't Call It Rhetoric, Shirley.]  People who study and respect language know that words have consequences.  Words form the mental environments in which we all live and operate. They form our perceptions. They precede actions and motivate people to act.

Those who study the great atrocities of the world, such as the Holocaust, point out that the use of language is both the producer and the defining characteristic of those episodes.   They have predicted that the shooting at the Del Ray ball park in Alexandria, Va., was inevitable and more is to come.

Conservatives have taken delight in the fact that the now-dead shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, espoused  "liberal" ideas.  He lends example to the conservative contention that all the ills of the world are spawned by liberalism.  As a group which until recently owned the threat of political violence,  conservatives now try to shift that onto liberals.  For years the NRA and its conservative supporters have blared the message that  "you can’t fist fight tyranny,” and that liberal forces were conspiring to take away their guns.  As a gun-owning Washington  Post columnist says, "It should be no surprise that someone would shoot democratically elected representatives when we’ve been told for decades that that’s the patriotic redress to political grievances."  Now the conservatives are trying to contend that liberals are the advocates of political violence.  That contention is not supportable with facts, but the conservative advocacy of firearm violence as a political force has abundant evidence.

Nevertheless, experts in the study of the verbal environment have warned that the both sides of the political divide are arming themselves for prospective battle with their political opponents.  This was evident a few years ago when the Colorado legislature passed laws restricting the sales of assault-type weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines.  The laws sparked a political backlash, but also a spectacular rise in gun sales.  Dealers were running out of inventories. When asked about who was buying all the guns,  one dealer  said it was half-and-half between those who were arming against government tyranny and those who were arming against them.  Liberals, too, were preparing for eventual combat.

The propaganda that Obama, who called for background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, was out to confiscate all guns was simply a dishonest statement meant to enrage those who are beyond the reach of facts.  Scholars of rhetoric explain that rhetoric is the process of persuading through the logical analysis of facts through critical thought and accurate language.  When people are mentally bound by their prejudices and hatred, they are invulnerable  to facts, reason, and accurate language.  Differences can be settled only by force.  The Nazi takeover of Europe proves that malicious force can win and that tyrannical brainwashing can banish and vanquish knowledge and reason in the minds of people.  Often a majority wants only to have their dark hatreds and intellectual and moral failures endorsed as the normal state of human affairs. 

The hatred of liberalism and the debased mentalities that accept it as a creed have decades of evangelistic preaching behind its development.  Rush Limbaugh is a loud, typical evangelist of liberal hatred.  He maligns, defames, and espouses preposterous lies under the guise of entertainment.   It is entertainment in the same vein as Romans executing Christians in arenas filled with hate-enraged throngs cheering for their agonizing death.  No words of fact or reason can have any effect on such throngs.  And so it is with conservatives and liberals in our current political climate.  Valid rhetoric and productive discourse is not a consideration because it is not a possibility.

Enmity has a long and carefully tended incubation as a political weapon in the  U.S.  Significant portions of the population do not regard the opposite party as merely holding different views, but that it has malicious intentions.  The nature of the propaganda that blankets the social atmosphere bears that perception out.  The sources of the words we see and hear disgorge angry defamations as a matter of course.  Attack inspires counter-attack.   In a battle where the dominant intention is to inflict harm,  facts and reason have no effect.

The propaganda has urged the populace to arm itself against a takeover.  And both conservatives and liberals have done just that.
James Hodgkinson may have fired the first shot in a civil war that the "rhetoric" of our time has prepared us for and incited.

You should not be surprised if you get shot for your political or social affiliation.  The nature of our political discourse has made it inevitable.