Leveraging grief for fun and profit.

Grigg and Silber weigh in on the recent "movie massacre" in Aurora, Colorado.  We've already established that the usual blood-dancers are predictably whipped up, organized, and pushing with all due vigor, but these writers offer some larger context.

Grigg, in his typical incomparable fashion, offers this observation upon learning that "the murderer of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki announced that he would travel to Colorado to bless the traumatized city of Aurora with his healing presence":

When drone-fired missiles wipe out wedding parties and funerals; when drone operators exploit the panic and chaos of an initial strike to stage follow-up attacks targeting emergency personnel – these acts are consecrated by the Dear Leader’s approval, and thus cannot be compared to the rampage committed by a private individual responsible for killing a dozen people and wounding scores of others in Aurora.

Oh, right, I do tend to forget those things. 

Silber, in his likewise inimitable style, makes the same basic observation, but even more broadly.

Keeping in mind the murders regularly committed by the U.S. government, and the murders of innocent human beings regularly ordered by Obama himself, we must recognize that [Obama's] remarks are the equivalent of the expressions of grief offered by the serial killer in my fictional exercise. These are the remarks of a man who has suffered an irreparable break with reality, a man who who has rendered himself unable to connect obviously related facts. If Obama genuinely meant these comments -- if he understood how these remarks apply with far greater force to him ("we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this") -- his realization of the monster he has allowed himself to become would reduce him to gibbering incoherence for the remainder of his life. In varying degrees, the same is true of any individual who remains in the national government at this point.

More generally, this is American culture today. Like the killer in my story, many Americans hurl themselves with fundamentally false, deeply disturbed enthusiasm into public demonstrations of grief over the needless deaths of some human beings -- those human beings they see as being much like themselves, when the deaths happen in what could be their own neighborhood. As for all the murders committed by their government with a systematic dedication as insane as that of any serial killer: silence.

Please do chase both of those links, and read their whole contents.  There is much, much more than these excerpts, and it's all relevant.

And share.  These are conversations the nation should be having, but isn't.