Where Bobby Jindal sleeps at night
somebody gets out the shovels:In the blog post -- titled "We fill Our Culture With Garbage, And We Reap The Result" -- Jindal blamed the prevalence of mass shootings in America on "deep and serious cultural decay in our society," jumping from a condemnation of violence in media and a reference to abortion to a discussion of the reported absence of the father of the Harper Mercer in the young man's life.Charlie Pierce likes to say "these really are the mole people." Jindal would have to dig up to reach the level of the mole people.
"This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns," Jindal wrote. "Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here."
"He brags that he has never held a gun in his life and that he had no idea that his son had any guns.
Why didn’t he know? Because he failed to raise his son. He should be ashamed of himself, and he owes us all an apology," Jindal wrote. "When he was asked what his relationship was with his son, he said he hadn’t seen him in a while because he lived with his mother. Case Closed."
Jindal went on to call out "shallow and simple minded liberals" for blaming "pieces of hardware for the problem."
"If anyone is at all serious about changing any of this, they must address the root problems, and those are cultural decay, the glorification of evil, the devaluation of human life, the breakdown of the family, and specifically the complete abdication of fathers," Jindal wrote.
Jindal is certainly wrong in disparaging the role that gun control can play. But I think he's certainly right that there are other factors at play in creating such a large number of violent, disturbed and alienated young men, and that the wholesale abandonment of marriage and wives and children surely has had some role in their loneliness and lack of direction.
ReplyDeleteMy own suspicion is that Marx was right, that the great destroyer of the family is the all-devouring "free market," and that the sexual revolution was less an outburst of enlightenment than a commodification of sex, a substitution of consumerist values of choice and satisfaction over the old sacral order that has now become almost unintelligible.
I doubt that Jindal sees it quite that way. I am of course all for the usual gun control measures, strict background checks, limits on firepower, etc. I take what I would consider an "originalist" stance on the second amendment--premising the right on a well-regulated militia entails a right to regulate and a responsibility. But the Supreme Court has of course said otherwise.
It's odd, I think, that whereas, on most crime issues, Democrats talk about root causes--poverty and unemployment--and Republicans talk about tougher laws and punishment, but when it comes to guns, the opposite seems to happen. I don't know when any of that got to be an either/or. Surely both seem to need addressing. Not that I know how, of course. The best I can do is Livy: We can neither bear our vices, nor bear their remedies.