What Jared Loughner did--how is that different from what the U.S. military and Corporate Conservative thugs do every day?

mug shot of mass murderer Jared Loughner is from here

If Jared Loughner, a white het male U.S citizen, had successfully entered the U.S. armed services, and had he opened fire on a few Afghan or Iraqi men, raping some women before or after, he might be getting a Congressional Medal of Honor. He wouldn't be considered insane for doing so, and he wouldn't be called "evil". But he didn't. He opposed both U.S. wars as international war crimes according to the articles of the Geneva Convention and he made disrespectful comments about "God". Those are some of our soulless and thoroughly corrupt pro-war mass media's favorite clues that someone might be insane. His whiteness and maleness will not be seen as clues. If he were Black, Muslim, and male, he'd be regarded not as a killer or a gunman, but as a terrorist. It takes a lot for a U.S. white man, Christian or not, to be termed a terrorist. It takes very little for a Black, Brown, or Muslim man to be regarded as such.

The media has a story to tell--a single story, of how GREAT the U.S. is, and how it can overcome adversity, such as threats and overt acts of terrorism it sociopathically doesn't see itself perpetrating. We are reminded of a false truth so often that one has to wonder what would happen if the media stopped pummeling us with this propaganda for even one hour. Here is that simple and false truth: "the U.S. is good".

We are encouraged tonight to "be better" by President Obama. "Only a more civil and honest public discourse" can show respect to the white people who are slain and injured, we are told. Only? "We may not be able to stop evil in the world", the President reminds us, which is coded language meaning, "We might need to war against Asia for another seventy years". How about President Obama, and the Republican-led Houses stopping the mass production of fire arms, weapons of war, the invading and occupying of foreign countries, and the ceasing of training of poor people, disproportionately of color, to be paid and PTSD-afflicted killers for a country as evil as any the Earth has known?

President Obama tells us, "We should do everything we can do to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations!" He is speaking of a kind of false innocence he is assuming children have, willfully ignoring how many children are molested and raped by the age of puberty; ignoring how many children gain access to pornography through their parent's computers, or, in the olden days, through their fathers' pornography magazine collection, never stashed away well enough; ignoring how children absorb early the way their care-givers speak about "immigrants", "foreigners", "enemies", and "terrorists" often pretending the terms are interchangeable. (Never mind that Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, M. D. Chapman, and Jared Loughner, and thousands of unnamed rapists of American Indian women are white het men, documented-while-palien U.S. citizens, and killers and terrorists.)

Given that the government and media tell us we should expect to continue to wage war against Black and Brown people, against Asians for the last many decades, against Indigenous people for the last several hundred years, against women across race, through to this day and well into tomorrow.

A few white people lost their lives and others were seriously injured. My heart goes out to the loved ones, family and friends, of those who were hurt or killed by Jared Loughner, including federal judge John Roll, 63; and Christina Taylor Green, age 9 (born Sept. 11, 2001), a softball player invited along to the meeting as a treat by a neighbor; Rep. Giffords' aide Gabe Zimmerman, 30; Dorothy Murray, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Scheck, 79.

One person almost lost her life because she was a woman with some pro-woman political stances, such as being pro-Choice: defending the rights of individual women to determine whether or not they may seek and obtain an abortion to terminate an welcomed pregnancy, including those unwelcomed by a brother or father's incest and a boyfriend or husband's rape. Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords will be in the news as a survivor of a "lone wolf" madman, but the media won't focus on the mass murderer as a white het male misogynist or anti-feminist who specifically wanted the "b-word" to "die", and who was frustrated about his dating life. He won't be called "white" and "heterosexual" because those terms don't carry stigma in the U.S. Instead, he'll be called "a troubled young man" who occupied "a very dark world". "Dark" is the important term, as it reinforces whiteness and lightness as good, and blackness and darkness with evil.

What the corporate media won't tell you is that Jared Loughner's personality was not quite as sociopathic as any U.S. mega-corporations's practices and that of their CEOs and COOs, the U.S. military's leaders and operations, or the long-standing personality of the U.S. government. For more, please see The Corporation.

What the U.S. media exists to do is NOT focus on THE PROBLEM, and instead distract us from THE PROBLEM with relatively minor--however tragic and horrific--incidents. That over a half of a million Haitians have been injured or killed since the White-Man-Made disaster one year ago. You'd think the on-going crisis would warrant more air-time today than what happened in Tucson, AZ.

But one white person, especially if U.S. (and especially if male), has always been worth more than a few dozen thousand lives of people of color. Just note how we regard white U.S. soldiers who die, compared to Central Asian women who die in our gendered and raced wars against them, to occupy and control their land the way white het men seek to occupy and control women across race and region.

How many times has the news media alerted us, regionally or nationally, of a new U.S. casualty of one of our corrupt, racist, empire-strengthening wars against Asia? How many deaths of individuals from Iraq or Afghanistan--non-combatants, civilians, children, women, men, have we heard reported as if their lives matters as much as one U.S. rich white het man? When will those wealthy Corporate Conservative Christian white men stop  committing evil against women and children, globally, including by not doing a damn thing to end human trafficking or poverty?

I am listening to a president speak who will never admit to the sociopathic horrors he oversees, who predicts all evil to continue. He and the newly elected Republican thugs will continue to protect and defend U.S. and Western white het male supremacy, the white right to commit genocide and men's right to rape women, in part through corporately controlled exploitation and possession of women-as-sexxx-things. He and the elected Democrats and Republicans to both Houses will continue to perpetrate this and more atrocity by any means necessary. This will not be reported to you on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, or Comedy Central.

There has never been anything civil about what the U.S. government and corporate media do to poor people of color, globally. The U.S. media and military's leaders and spokespeople have never been honest about what the U.S. government and giant corporations exist to do. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians died and continue to die, Haitian and non-Haitian women are raped and continue to be raped, because of the past and present actions of the U.S. government, European governments, and white male capitalist pimps and greed-mongers. Let's start with that bit of honesty and see if we can "be better".