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The most revealing glimpse last week's Arizona nightmare afforded was not another account of the American character which continues to fetishize the very guns destroying it, but a chance to view the elemental composition of the Right WIng in bold, blinding relief.
It takes no effort for horrid events to bring people together, nor to articulate the pain of a tragedy's effects; nor is it unexpected for those events to devolve into blame as a byproduct of the sudden rage spurred by such a seemingly random shock.
But as the Right feverishly scrambled to distance itself from their culpability in fomenting an atmosphere fertile for potential (and actualized) violence, a crucial element was revealed to be missing from its makeup, the inclusion of which would be essential to the implementation of a successful Democratic society:
Compassion.
The "compassionate conservatism" of Ronald Reagan's day always seemed a token gesture at best, seeing as the tide of thoughtful conservative discourse had already begun to turn in the direction its bluntly fundamentalist religious masters were steering it. And fueled by the more sub-rosa Neo-Con agenda which lay beneath its pious, platitude-spouting exterior, the idea of genuine compassion seemed jokey from the start, a crumb thrown the Left's way. Such cynical jockeying for position reached its apotheosis in the choice of Michael Steele as the RNC's chairman to counter the Left's (and the voting public's) selection of Obama. "See?" they seemed to say. "We can do that, too!"
The Right's strengths always lay in its ability to first tenderize then galvanize an audience and reduce complex circumstances to easily digestible slogans in the service of facilitating its own aims. Unfortunately, those aims never seem to take the concerns of those doing the heavy lifting---the People themselves---into practical consideration. Right leaning ideologies from Neo-Conservatism to Ayn Rand-soaked libertarianism seem to function beautifully on paper but shoddily in practice. To me, the key to that failure seems to be those philosophies' built-in disdain for characteristics which they deem to be weakening but which are inescapably human and therefore a necessary part of any ideological endeavor.
So it was---and is---with Compassion. It (along with its fellow agenda-gutting ingredient Empathy) was conspicuously absent from the Right last week in its protesting-too-much as it has been for the last ten years or so. In the same way arts funding has been systematically cut from school programs as being unnecessary (or proper armor for our soldiers at war) so Compassion is equally dispensed with as being a hindrance to victory.
Because what would really serve the Right in their frequent, flinty, fear-mongering moments is an acknowledgment of their own humanity or, as improbable as such soul-searching may sound, the more than occasional lack thereof; the striving to create a "conservative" society in which every individual is accountable and self-regulatory and where government should exist minimally if at all is either a pipe dream or a shell game or both.
Further, the idea that such brutal events like those in Arizona would also peripherally aid the Right's agenda which its policies could not accomplish through reasonable governance alone is almost too depressing to contemplate. But to the winning-is-everything Right Wing mind, it would seem to be an acceptable casualty. So to speak.
After all, Compassion would require thought, feeling and introspection, elements disdained by the Right and its recent history of cold, impersonal policies, elements of humanity that would stand in the way of the total ideological victory the Right clearly seeks.