Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4

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Wishful Space for a Safer Place / Marc Ouellette

[1] A recent issue of Reconstruction, along with a good deal of the current one, treats the combination of "space and place." Given the space to write and a place to put it, thoughts immediately turned to a focus on those two themes, as well. More specifically, the place is the U.S. and the space is one for protesting-or even questioning-the thing that the place has become. As much as I sympathize with, laud and wish I could participate in the protests in Ferguson, New York and elsewhere I cannot help but feel that these are too narrowly focussed and miss the root cause of the problem. Simply put, the very foundation of the U.S. and its enshrinement of unethical, immoral and inhumane practices and tenets within the constitution, all three branches of government and simple quotidian existence permit and perpetuate a culture predicated on the immediacy of violence, especially the seemingly ineluctable appeal to guns. Two years ago, I wrote on a similar topic following the massacre at Sandy Hook. What if anything has changed about the space in which that happened and the places where it has happened since?

[2] The all-American belief, practice, right, culture, instinct, etc. to "get yer gun" precedes, conditions and transcends all other values, customs and behaviours. This is true not only of the response to a twelve-year-old boy with a toy gun in Cleveland, or to an unarmed young man with a handful of stolen cigars in Missouri, or the woman shot by her sixty-four-year-old husband at a Christmas party last week, but also to the mother in Idaho whose infant son may well be the youngest perpetrator of accidental homicide in history. It also extends to the idiotic-"civility," as it has developed prevents me from calling it by its true name-reaction of Fox News and its viewers to the recent hostage situation in Sydney. No, guns in the hands of every citizen would not prevent or even eliminate such events. Gun ownership only increases the likelihood of more errant bullets hitting more innocent targets. The highly trained, expertly practiced "heroes" in Boston managed to hit everything but the Tsnaraev brother with several hundred rounds! At the Ambassador bridge, a clearly deranged man hoping for suicide-by-police and unable to find it on the Canadian side found eager if inaccurate Homeland Security "heroes" on the other side. What if nobody had a gun, or an expectation that someone else had a gun, or the expectation that everyone is a threat, or the expectation that fatal violence is the always already response to any perceived slight, inconvenience, offence or "disrespect"?

[3] Forget terrorists infiltrating either space or place, every one of the examples above is as American as Adam Lanza, Harris and Klebold, James Holmes or the little boy in Vancouver, WA who brought a handgun to school with over 400 rounds. From birth til death, "get yer gun" is every bit as ingrained as I hope please and thank you are for my children. I recall reading Northrop Frye's analysis of the book of Exodus and its reminder that every revolution, from the Bastille to the already mythologized Arab Spring, has one singular task: put down all future revolutions. A quick look at the obsessively paranoid for the sake of being obsessively paranoid responses to protests, not just in Ferguson but also at UC Davis and elsewhere, suggests that the U.S. still perceives its revolution as having ended moments ago. We are talking about a country that voted against a global moratorium on capital punishment and whose sitting President authorizes the most high-tech extension of that practice and its relative, the Second Amendment, in the form of drone strikes, and does so at a rate that would have required Dick Cheney back to hospital for a pacemaker able to handle the heightened arousal the violent orgy would surely induce. Thus, the space of the problem stretches from the youngest citizens to the highest office of the land. The shootings run from coast to coast to coast and from north to south. Moreover, the drones and the "democratization" make this mentality either an export or way of establishing an ever increasing space for the places in which "get yer gun" is the preferred response to any situation, from burning eggs to baking fish sticks, from walking with your hands in your pockets to wearing a hoodie in one's own gated community, from shooting a perceived intruder to wiping out an Afghan wedding party with one allegedly questionable guest.

[4] As much as I deplore racism, and find its American version to be despicably virulent, I know it is only one form of state-sanctioned violence. Moreover, the continued mistreatment of Aboriginal women in Canada and my own country's obstinate, shameful, immoral and inhumane attitude towards them stands as testimony that American exceptionalism, even in this regard, is just one very ugly myth. Indeed, it is part of the same myth and the same violence perpetuated and perpetrated by any and all who allow the Second Amendment and its particular culture of exceptionalism to exist. This has to extend to those who defer to it, who acquiesce to it and who are resigned to it. One of the hardest lessons of hegemonic structures is recognizing that tacit agreement not only still comprises consent but is the most powerful form. This is important because tacit consent demonstrates that there are no spaces or places for dissent, question or protest. The reality of a violent response, enshrined in law, culture and practice becomes both a rationale and an outcome. Every threat must be put down, by any means necessary. As the recent report on America's torture program reveals, even imagined threats count. Such a space is hardly one for the pursuit of life, liberty or happiness. Indeed, it constitutes a place that devalues all three. Nothing speaks louder to this fact than the embarrassing infant mortality rates that still prevail. I commend my colleagues who put together curricula that interrogates what happened in Ferguson (and elsewhere) and its roots in American culture, but please when doing so, take advantage of the space you have and find a place for an "enhance" interrogation of the casual acceptance of violence that underlies that racism. Quite frankly, it is not just woven, it is the very fibre of the nation.

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