I’ve been watching The Wire on HBO on demand and I have two things to say:
1.) Because of all the love this show got on NPR (Fresh Air in particular), cialis usaand I had always assumed The Wire was a liberal show on par with The West Wing. Plus, sildenafil I knew the writers of the show have said it was an indictment of capitalism and an argument to legalize drugs (which is a typically more liberal position).
But now that I’m half-way through the second season, I have to say I see nothing here for a liberal to be proud of.
In a city completely run by Democrats, the politicians are corrupt, and the unions that support the politicians are corrupt. Basically, government is a completely failure. I could understand if The Wire was written by anti-government libertarians, but it sure doesn’t make the Democrats seem anymore appealing to me…at least so far.
2.) If I hear one more character say, “yo,” I’m gonna pop a cap in someone’s ass.
I’ve lived in Wisconsin for 21 years. For nearly all that time, the state has been one of the most liberal in the country…home to Russ Feingold, the city of Madison, and Tammy Baldwin.
And, yet, now Wisconsin has become the launching pad for some of the most influential conservatives of our generation: Governor Scott Walker who defanged the government unions and and became the first governor in history to survive a recall.
Ron Johnson – an unknown businessman who dethroned liberal lion Russ Feingold to become one of the nation’s most conservative senators.
Reince Priebus – the head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin is now the head of the Republican party nationally.
And Congressman Paul Ryan is running to be Vice President of the United States.
How did so many Conservative powerhouses come from such a liberal state?
The Fremen are a tribe of desert warriors in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.
In the novels, the Fremen were able to conquer the entire galaxy because they were raised in one of the most hostile environments imaginable-a world where mere survival required constant vigilance, discipline, and a willingness to fight.
I think something similar happened in Wisconsin. The political environment here has been so hostile to Conservatives for the last two decades, that any politician determined to be a Conservative in Wisconsin had to be tougher and more committed than they might have been in a state like Texas.
In the Dune novels, the man who lead the Fremen to victory was named Paul.
I wonder how Mr. Ryan would feel about taking on a new nickname?
Of course, even one mass shooting is one too many, but does 60 or so over 30 years really justify calling mass shootings an epidemic? The fact that 800 or so people lost their lives in these shootings is completely tragic and I’m not trying to trivialize the depth of that loss.
But I am calling for a little perspective: in that same period of time in the United States, there have been at least a couple of thousand people killed by lightning.
According to the New York Times, about 5,000 people in the U.S. die of food poisoning every year. If that average holds true over the last three decades that would translate to about 150,000 deaths.
And from 1976 to 2006 somewhere between 3,000 and 49,000 people died of the common flu.
Would we say that deaths by lightning, food poisoning, or flu are epidemic?
Probably not.
Then maybe we shouldn’t apply the word to these 60 horrible, but very uncommon, tragedies.
I’m sure gun control won’t stop them. Even if you could un-invent guns, people would just use bombs, or arson, or poison, or park trucks on train tracks, push generators into public pools or do a thousand more horrible things that I can’t even guess it.
It’s the people who are the problem, not the tool they choose. (A fact so self-evident, I don’t know why I even have to mention it. After all, millions of people have access to all these devices of mass murder and never even think about using them.)
But how do you control people? Especially in a free society?
Are the killers always mentally ill? Sometimes suicidal? Politically motivated? Religiously motivated?
Do we need different approaches to the different root causes?
I really just don’t know.
What I do know is we will never cure the problem while we keep focusing on the symptoms (the use of guns for example) instead of the diseases.
Even though there’s absolutely no evidence that limiting gun magazines to 10 rounds would have prevented the shootings in Oak Creek, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is using the occasion to insist that we do just that.
Rather than argue that forcing a shooter to reload more often won’t really slow them down, I’ll just let you see for yourself:
Being in a wheelchair gives you a unique perspective on the world. This blog features many of my views on politics, art, science, and entertainment. My name is Elliot Stearns. More...
