The Goldberg

File

by Jonah Goldberg

Dear Reader (including the roughly 100 percent of my readership who never offer
suggestions for Dear Reader gags),
Other than the actual murder and maiming, the thing I hate the most about mass
murderers of all stripes -- be they psychopaths, jihadists, white supremacists,
Luddites, gangsters, or a radical faction of Up with People -- is the mad rush by
observers to yoke the slaughter to a political agenda.
Im not excluding my own side, or myself, from this indictment. If you hung out on
Twitter on Wednesday afternoon, you could feel the eagerness and frustration out
there. Like my dogs working themselves up into a frenzy as I put on my shoes too
slowly for their perambulatory needs, people strained against the chains of the news
flow, yearning to get to the point where they could launch their Ah ha! attacks at the
other side.
One could feel the dark hope in the TV coverage when word broke there was a
Planned Parenthood near the site of the mayhem in San Bernardino. You could hear
the fingers crossing over at MSNBC: Please, let it be a white, anti-abortion, Ted
Cruz donor named Sven Borgenson or Chet McDongickle! The thought occurred to
me while I was watching all this unfold in the Fox greenroom that someone at the
Southern Poverty Law Center picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
But the longer it took for law enforcement and the media to release the names of the
perpetrators the more obvious it was that there werent going to be any Chet
McDongickle Most Wanted posters.
It turned out -- this time -- that the murderers had Muslim names. And they were
terrorists. And the disappointment in some quarters is almost palpable. I caught
some of Morning Joe from my hotel room before I left for the airport. The caption for
one discussion was Were They Radicalized? I keep seeing stories asking this
question as if its some great mystery we may never get to the bottom of.
Just curious: What discrete piece of info are we waiting for to get a definitive answer
to that question? Because I thought it might be the thousands of rounds of ammo,
the remote-control-car-bombs, the decision to abandon their six-month-old daughter,
the contacts with terror suspects and, oh yeah, the murder of 14 people. But hey,
thats just me.
So we were right this time. But all one has to do is consult that sick feeling we all
had when the news first broke that it could have gone the other way. In which case

we would be having a replay of the argument we had last week, when Robert Dear
barricaded himself inside a Planned Parenthood and murdered three people.
And I hate it. Either way, I hate it. I hate everything about it. I hate to be seduced,
even slightly, into that way of thinking. I hate the rush to score atrocities on a political
calculus, before we even have time to breathe, never mind mourn.
I wrote about this after the Newtown shooting (probably more eloquently than Im
managing here on a flight back from Houston), and I still feel the same way.
A Question of Manners
Im no ingnue. I understand how politics works, particularly in an age when
politicians can openly say that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste and pay no
political price for it. In an era when political activism has become not just
institutionalized but industrialized, crises are market opportunities for the New Class,
and thus cannot be ignored.
Still, one irony is that terrorism by definition is violence deployed for political ends.
And our immediate response to terrorism is almost entirely political. What offends
me isnt the political response -- though some political responses are repugnant, as I
write in my column today. What Im getting at is the ugliness of the immediacy. Good
manners and basic decency often boil down to timing. If you owe me money, I will
probably ask you for it -- but not at your wifes funeral.
Manufacturing Meaning
New events are like lumps of wet clay. After an election, a calamity, an
assassination, mass murder, or a wardrobe malfunction, the meaning of the event is
moldable for only a brief time. Soon it hardens into a kind of totem, a patron saint of
a particular narrative.
For instance, a Communist killed JFK. But that fact was unacceptable, even
unthinkable. So elite liberal institutions, with only a modicum of centralized guidance,
mounted a crowd-sourced effort to mold the event into a totem of a more usable
narrative: Kennedy was killed by hate -- specifically, right-wing hate. It wasnt true.
It was literally a lie. But the clay hardened and for the next half-century our culture
has been genuflecting to a false idol.
Right now the media and the Democratic party are working very, very, hard to pound
the wet clay of San Bernardino into a story about runaway gun violence in America.
Bogus stats about there being a mass shooting on average once a day streak
across the media firmament like so much St. Elmos Fire. The fact that gun violence
has been in a decades-long decline doesnt count for much. Poor Charlie Cooke is
running around like the last artillery officer on a 19th-century British warship, trying to
return fire from each cannon station.
Jihad Me at Hello
I myself am not quite the Second Amendment absolutist Charlie and others around
here are, though by the standards of the New York Times or Daily News, I count as
an unreconstructed gun nut (and I agree with Jim Geraghty that these mass murders
make wanting a gun of your own more logical). Nonetheless, it just seems to me that

the murderers being jihadist terrorists is the more important fact. Frankly, I dont give
a rats ass about Californias gun-control laws -- the state has even stricter pipebomb-control laws, and Mr. and Mrs. Farook flouted those, too. Oh, and the laws
against first-degree murder? They showed flagrant disregard for them.
I should say that I think the hybrid attack theory is still plausible to me. I suspect
that the original target wasnt the Christmas party. My hunch is that Syed Farook
went to the party and Bob from accounting stole his stapler or told him the ice-cream
cake wasnt halal and, in a rage, Farouk called an audible. He ran home, told his
mail-order jihadist bride, Its go-time! After a brief detour to drop their baby girl off at
grandmas and inscribe themselves in the Book of Worst Parents Ever, they went
and murdered a bunch of innocent people. The willing suspension of reason about
this is just amazing. If this was simply about workplace violence, not only would
there not be the thousands of rounds of ammo and the pipe bombs, its also very
unlikely that Mrs. Farouk would agree to join in the murder.
If it all werent so sad and dangerous, it would be funny to watch folks on CNN and
elsewhere try to elevate the importance of the workplace-violence angle or suggest
that somehow Farook was offended by a Christmas party. Heres the thing: If you
decide to kill your co-workers -- who threw you and your wife a baby shower! -because you suddenly take offense at Christmas parties, you are still the bad guy.
Oh, and blaming this on post-partum depression isnt as dumb as blaming a missing
flight on a black hole, but thats a pretty low bar.
The search to find some mitigating rationale (to borrow a term from John Kerry) for
the attack is a perfect example of how the media desperately wants to find a way to
blame Americans or Christians or just simply change the subject. (And dont even
get me started on this idiocy.)
Its a micro-version of the White Houses blame-the-video response to Benghazi.
The blame cannot ever lie with jihadists, we must have provoked the attack
somehow. Its like half the country needs to be sat down and just told over and over
again: Its not your fault.
Yeah, yeah, sure, workplace violence can be a real problem. But if the hybrid theory
is correct, it doesnt eliminate the fact that they were preparing to kill a bunch of
other innocent people. Things could have been going great at the office and wed still
be talking about a jihadist attack. Maybe not today, maybe not in San Bernardino,
but somewhere and soon.
But workplace violence, gun control, and of course, the inevitable anti-Muslim
backlash are the stories we will hear so much about, if only because when some
facts are too terrible to contemplate, some people will inevitably contemplate
something else.