RogBlog

Backdrop: Gabrielle Giffords was shot today in Tucson.

So I walk into this taco shop this afternoon to get a burrito.  At the ordering counter is a white guy, maybe late 50s, white-haired in a Harvard sweatshirt and horn-rimmed glasses.  Seems mild-mannered enough. He’s talking in crap Spanish to the staff, and I recognize that he’s trying to talk about the Giffords shooting.  I say, “I know what you’re talking about, the shooting in Tucson.”  Eventually he switches to English and says, nineteen people got shot at this rally.  The congresswoman was shot point-blank in the head, he says, and she survived.

I’m surprised: I’d heard that Giffords had died.  “She’s alive?” I ask.

He shrugs his shoulders.  “We all knew she was empty-headed!” he replies.  Presumably he was trying to tell this joke to the restaurant staff in his crap Spanish before I got involved.

Needless to say, I did not react well to this, told him that this was the Congressional representative my mother had voted for, and asked him to get the hell out of the restaurant.  His responses were telling: “Don’t you have a sense of humor?”  and “By the end of the year the writing’s going to be in the streets, and hundreds or thousands of people are going to be dead”, because the government is screwing us over and people aren’t going to take it anymore.

I told him that “you’re what’s wrong with this country,” which I now recognize is a pretty crummy comeback, because the immediate response was “no, you’re what’s wrong with this country; you’re a lamb being led blindly by the government.”

The conversation continued in ways that aren’t really worth describing in further detail; but crucially, at no point did this man express any condolence or disapproval of the Tucson gunman’s action.  I’m still parsing the details of the incident in my mind, but one basic take-home message strikes me above all else.  If here in California I can run into someone who essentially approves the ruthless slaughter of an elected official and numerous other bystanders on the grounds that he disagrees with the official’s political stances within a few hours of the event, then there are far more wackos out there than anyone thinks, and this country is in serious danger.