American High Noons
The TV screen today looks like the vision of a demented performance artist. You can click from images of wildly cheering crowds in a Manhattan canyon celebrating what 25 young man did on a baseball field to talking heads and replays of a massacre of other young people in Texas and then suddenly to an Orlando, Florida office building for the familiar confusion in the first moments after another shooting spree.
This is a portrait of 21st century America, light and dark, torn by high emotions in a new Age of Anxiety, worlds away from the black-and-white vision of “High Noon” on Turner Classic Movies last night ending with a simple facedown between good and evil.
After the news of Ft. Hood yesterday, the President came forward with prayers for the victims and their families, promising to find out what happened and why but, for all his eloquence, Barack Obama is at a loss to make sense of the senseless. In the mad mosaic of our era, he is even accused of “frightening insensitivity” for that failure.
For a moment, real life has pushed political rhetoric to the background but when the confetti has been swept up and the bodies buried, America will still be torn by the fears and hatreds raging through its bloodstream as unemployment reaches double digits.
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2 Responses to “American High Noons”
Hmmm….High Noon with Gary Cooper. What is the inference here? A showdown with evil….the republians?
Makes perfect sense.
Republican = Evil
yessss indeedy
I loathe the incessant attempts by individuals both in and outside the press to find a “motivation” for an act like the Ft. Hood massacre. There really is only one thing one can say about Nidal Malik Hasan: He was crazy – full stop.
I'm sure that on both ends of the political spectrum there will be endless blathering over a) the mistreatment of Muslims in this country or b) what a vile religion Islam is.
For every Nisan living in the West, there are millions of Muslims who are never inclined to mass murder. Nisan was nuts. Trying to explain the thoughts and actions of such a person is like trying to keep a snowflake from melting in your hands.
There really is no way that even nominally civilized people can ever understand the mind that can perform such an action.
Why should this president or any other be able to comprehend it? In the face of such evil, it is impossible to be articulate. The best you can do is sympathize and give succor to those involved.