NYCweboy

The Part About Nidal Hasan Being Muslim

It was, depending on your perspective, bound to happen or incredibly insensitive and prejudiced. Once Nidal Malik Hasan's name was out there as the shooter at Fort Hood, somebody was bound to note the name... and leap to a conclusion. And clearly, some did.

As it turns out, Dr. Hasan was apparently an observant Muslim who followed religious traditions. He prayed every day. He wore traditional clothing. He was aware, and resentful, of anti-Muslim prejudices that became apparent after 9/11.

... And none of that makes him an example of "home grown terrorism."

Time and investigation will tell if there's any connection to be made, or other indication to consider, but for the moment, nothing about Nidal Malik Hasan suggests a connection to terrorist organizations, or that his act had a terrorist component. And I doubt it will - his family, who seem to have no need to hide or not talk about the man they knew, describe a sad, lonely person who they can't imagine resorting to violence.  Which speaks volumes, I think, more about what we see, and don't see, when we describe another's mental health.

In our quest to make mass shootings about something, anything but the mental health of the person doing the shooting, we all pick distractions. In the case of Seung Hui Cho, many liberals honed in on the ability to acquire guns easily in Virginia, while conservatives resisted any talk of gun controls... both sides ignoring more obvious solutions like improving campus mental health services, or identifying the steps the University could have takemn to separate Cho from the school.

With Nidal Hasan, we get the distraction of knowing that it was a Muslim soldier who resorted to violence, despite the fact that we know that all sorts of soldiers with mental health issues are doing the same thing. Ironically, the military aspect may have robbed liberals of their usual fallback of blaming the gun; we can do lots of things to rein in some gun sales... but military soldiers and weapons are likely to be together no matter what we do.

And so liberals have had to counter the "ohmygodmuslimradicalislamterror" moment with admitting the obvious - that Hasan probably acted alone, and that some sort of mental health issue was probably involved. Which leads, uncomfortably, to the discussion of soldiers and mental health issues and treatment problems we've been trying to avoid for a long, long time. Which may be why, despite little else happening in the news, the Fort Hood shooting is quietly sinking to the bottom of the news coverage pile, now the place of tributes, memorias, and video montages to sad music.

For all the rejection of snap judgments about Islam=Terrorism, we shouldn't, and we can't, just ignore that Hasan was Muslim, and that his life in a religious minority was somehow not a part of him or what happened. We need to talk about this in order to make, at least, a couple of obvious points: that if we plan to class Hasan as "Muslim terrorist" we've just made the "War on Terror" impossible to fight or win, and that, if we plan to hold these kinds of views of Muslims, we should be asking ourselves far more thoroughly just what it is we're still doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. Because if we can't ratchet down or deal with these prejudices and false assumptions, we're nowhere in figuring out how we plan to coexist with the Islamic world. And no matter what crazy conservative war types suggest... we're not going to defeat the whole idea of Islam with our Army - an Army that contains Americans who are themselves Muslim.

It's easy to call the revelations about Hasan's religious beliefs a distraction, even the unnecessary invitation to expression of unwarranted fears and prejudice. But the liberal inclination to tamp down any discussion of a difficult topic for the potential of some extreme to offend doesn't help us deconstruct, demystify or figure out the relevant aspects of the story. We have to find a way to deal with the part about Nidal Hasan being Muslim so that we can put his actions into a context, sort out what matters, and what doesn't. And than, I keep hoping, figure out how all of this context helps us to better understand the mental health issues that really need to be explored.

Friday Evening Floralude

jinb
 

The Post I Keep Writing After A Mass Shooting

...but first: so much for that "Republican Revival" after Tuesday's election. If your "incredible momentum" can be stalled simply by a major news event sweeping you off the front page... perhaps tales of a Republican Renaissance are a bit premature.

I don't mean to minimize the horrific events in Fort Hood or trivialize them into a political discussion... but yesterday's mass shooting, as these things do, made a quick reordering of priorities possible, and made clear that much of the noise in politics lately has been irrelevant to the real struggles in our real lives. Watching Representative Joe Carter - whose district includes Fort Hood - or Kay Bailey Hutchinson deal, calmly and soberly, with an unfolding event underscored how rarely, these days, we get a news event where the last relevant detail is who's right, or left.

Like many, I was stunned into relative silence as events unfolded yesterday afternoon; for hours, there was so little information, so little clarity around what had happened that it was impossible to know what to say... and yet, it was clear, there'd be something. And by the end of the night, I was struck by the fact that what's clear about yesterday's tragedy is what's been clear in precious ones, and someone needs to say it, yet again: the shootings at Fort Hood are going to be about a man who was mentally ill. And until we do something much more extensive, and more honestly, about identifying and treating mental illnesses, we're dancing around the edges of disaster.

The Election Results: Yes, They Could... But It's Not Very Likely

In the end, it came down to expecting more: even Bob McDonnell couldn't deliver the expected 20 point rout of Creigh Deeds, just 19. We expected more drama, less certainty, more divisiveness, less muddle. We got none of it... and what we deserved. So now what?

If there's a thread to link a variety of mixed election results it seems, largely, like what I thought going in: this was anger, by and large that was taken out on the nearest and most incumbent... and beyond that, there's not much to tell, because Republicans have no idea how to capitalize on what actually worked.

Conservatives might have gotten their dream of a "right wing revival" storyline... but all those eggs in the NY 23 basket were a mistake - the results made clear that internal right side dissension mostly hurts their side, sweeping Bill Owens to a modest victory (no Democrat since before the Civil War in that region), and showing that national intervention in local elections is usually a bad idea. Conservatives had argued that a tight three way tie which Owens prevailed in would help their cause with Owens too weak to pull the seat in a two way future race; but Scozzafava managed to wreck that by dropping out, endorsing Owens... and remaining on the ballot to pull just enough votes to wreck Hoffman.

Conservatives may deny the obvious message in the loss, but that doesn't mean their ability to wreck the careers of moderates isn't suicidial: Voters who were angry enough to pick Scozzafava over Hoffman after she "dropped out" are Republicans who don't like the far right wing, and don't mind making it heard, and don't care that a Democrat would win as the result. That can't help the far right, and has little or nothing to do with anyone outside of the ever narrowing circle on their side. The failure to win NY 23 is huge, has enormous national implications (Marco Rubio, your clue phone is ringing) and will probably be the latest example in right wing denial over reality, a reality that clearly suggests that internal divisiveness and narrowing of the base is hurting, not helping Republicans. And it can't be stopped.

When Autumn Leaves Start To Fall...

I'd love to say I got tons of work done, but my days off were pretty much what I thought they'd be - a lot of resting relaxing and recuperating away from the online grind (and I have the 900 backed up e-mails to show for it).

I also raked a lot of leaves.

Leaf raking is a chore, no doubt about it; but after a (dull) morning of political talk and catching up on my new obssession (USA's White Collar), I was ready for manual labor and a new project: clearing a plot to expand our garden and plant bulbs.

I'm no plant person... but gardens of colorful flowers... I can do. And I want to do. And that makes the leaves a necessary, not altogether unpleasant, step along the way.

Making the piles turned out to be surprisingly speedy and easy... it's the bagging, I realized that's the headache. When you get to bag 4, and still everything seems chaotic and undone... it's hard to see the endpoint. But I just kept bagging away, and reducing the piles one by one.

In the end, six bags total, it was worth it: the spot is identified, and the trip to get the bulbs, and the dirt, is next on my list. And without the ground cover, the beauty of our wild, untamed, fading garden as it moves from fall to winter is actually kind of striking. Fall's colors - the riches of gold and bronze and red - look especially nice against the expanse of uncovered lawn, itself dying away.

I don't love fall - or the fading light now that we've fallen back in time - because it symbolizes that moment when leaves fade, and fall and the cycle of death to rebirth moves to... well, death. I believe in love and life and light... and that's why "endless summer", or maybe "eternal spring,"  I think, may be the season I want most. But I like seasons, and the change of seasons... living in the Sun Belt, always warm, never a cold day or enough rain or the thrill of first snow... that just feels wrong. Always has.

Six bags, and a lovely back yard later, the autumn leaves continue to fall, the light fades, the days grow shorter and colder and the year moves to its conclusion. And as I resume my writer's journey, and plan a garden for next spring... it's nice to have the distractions of the rest of life, for a moment, to remind me - remind you and all of us - that we are more than our politics, our disputes, our national and world problems. And what we can do, when it seems like too much, is rest, recover... and rake. It's not the worst way to pass the time.

Mad Men... And The Shot Heard Round The Office

From the beginning of Mad Men's current "1963" season, one obvious event loomed large over the proceedings; it could hardly be termed "foreshadowing" when Roger Sterling's over-pampered daughter obliviously announced her wedding date in the first episode, timed to be exactly the day after the Kennedy Assassination. Once that piece was in place, the only question was how many episodes it would take to get there.

This past Sunday answered that question, and the answer was what Mad Men basically is: a frustrating combination of stylistic brilliance, heavy handed literalism, and sledgehammer subtlety. The power, promise, and problem of Mad Men lies in its historicity - that reliving the sixties will provide some sort of interesting insights into how we got here, what it was then, or what we can learn differently. But for all its good looks and snappy presentation, Mad Men gets caught, repeatedly, in a cycle of stunning obviousness: we kind of know what happened, we kind of know why it happened... and Mad Men is all too happy, too often to settle for little more. And perhaps it's no surprise that when Mad Men delivers on that "kind of" expectation... it gets lauded for reminding us of what we already think we know.

For an episode that consisted, too often, of people standing around and, well, watching television, "The Grown Ups" managed, in small moments, to underplay the moment effectively enough, but in total, the episode was little more than competent, and less than overwhelming. The end of an era, apparently, is more fizzle than pop.