Jared Lee Loughner once asked Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, "What is government when words are meaningless?"
Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with words and their meanings. He demanded deductive arguments and rejected inductive arguments completely, but couldn't recognize the difference between the two. Lost in his own incoherence, Jared's mind saw only his own dreamstate as reality, and this reality as the dream. And who can blame him.
Words have meanings. These meanings are agreed upon and placed into a big book which we call the dictionary. But over the last decade or so, we as a culture have been changing the language, blurring the meanings of words. We call things that which they are not and demand that everyone accept this new definition. Communist, Anarchist, Socialist, Fascist. These words have meanings. And we have allowed the punditry to usurp their meanings and label those around us with false terms used only to incite fear and illicit the desired response.
In an educated America, this false labeling could not occur. So, the punditry rejects the educated and chooses instead to follow a shout the loudest and it's true method. Death tax. The Angry Left. Death panels. Hillarycare or more recently Obamacare.
Espoused beliefs that are never followed like: Fiscal responsibility, Never forget the heroes of 9/11, Support the troops, A pledge to America, all lead to a world where the words that are being said are meaningless, because those saying them are not telling the truth, they are not being real, they are fake. And in Jared's disturbed mind, these people who were not real they were fake people.
Jared once asked Rep. Giffords a question, when she didn't answer the question to his liking, he told his friends that she was a fake. And from that point on, if he saw or heard her name, he became upset. He didn't bring it up, but if it was already there, he expressed his discontent and his belief that she, like all in Washington, were fake, a feeling many of us have had and would readily agree with were we there to hear Jared say it.
But, Jared took it further than the rest of us. He saw something dire in the way language was being used. Something sinister and ultimately infinite. He saw a conspiracy that changed the date to an infinite year, one that could never change and could not be escaped from. He saw alternate realities in which the world was not like this and found that he could visit those worlds through lucid dreams. He saw pictures from Mars and saw a conspiracy in which NASA was doctoring up images of space to fool the American people. He believed the Mars Rover mission and all of the Space Shuttle missions had been faked. There simply was no real in this reality.
The image above is a billboard for Tuscon radio station, KNST, Tuscons Conservative talk radio. It is located just three miles from the Safeway where Jared Lee Loughner opened fire. And it is a perfect example of how we usurp the meanings of things.
straight shooter
n. Informal
One who is honest and forthright.
But, if we place bullet holes around that title, it changes it's meaning. It no longer just means honest. It means something else entirely. Blood libel means something too, or did until Sarah Palin used the term the other day and now it means something completely different. Because she ( or rather her handlers )says so. We allow these people to invent their own meanings for things and redefine our culture in the process. Without definitive meaning, there is no discourse, no debate, no consensus , no compromise. We spend our time debating the meanings of words, instead of the actual issue at hand. Without definitive meaning, the words just become a white noise. Like the people of Babel, our speech has become confounded. Our words have become meaningless.
