Sargent, “Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth” (1889)
Monday
About the Thousand Oaks shooting that claimed 12 lives: I have written far too many blog essays on mass shootings over the nine years of this blog, to the point that, at one point, I just began updating past posts. It was as though I had nothing new to say. Tayo’s grandmother sums up my feelings in a comment at the end of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony:
“I guess I must be getting old because these goings-on around Laguna don’t get me excited anymore.” She sighed and laid her head back on the chair. “It seems like I already heard these stories before…only thing is, the names sound different.”
Now it’s Thousand Oaks, before that it was Squirrel Hill, before that Parkland, before that…
The Middle Ages captured this incessant repetition through the wheel of fortune, which rolled relentlessly on without any hint of progression. This is all very well for fatalistic times, but we who live in a scientific age believe that progress is possible. We still have faith, although it’s weaker now, that the tools of social science and empirical inquiry will show us how to build a better world.
It’s therefore particularly demoralizing that a few gun fanatics and a powerful lobbying group can lock us forever in a revolving wheel. Now our children regard lockdown drills as part of their normal landscape.
The past midterm elections saw some shift, the second of which I will write about today. On the one hand, liberal politicians are speaking out more forcefully against guns, and some with F ratings from the NRA bested those with A+ ratings. This didn’t happen as widely as I would have liked but it’s a start.
On the other hand, we have politicians who have hardened even more into pro-gun stances. I’m thinking particularly of the senator recently elected from my own state, who isn’t even bothering to send out “thoughts and prayers” to the victims. Asked about what should be done about mass killings following 1000 Oaks, Trump groupie Marsha Blackburn replied,
What we do is say, how do we make certain that we protect the Second Amendment and protect our citizens? We’ve always done that in this country.
Blackburn, incidentally, received over a million dollars from the NRA in her election bid.
Her callous remarks represent a monstrous although now predictable shutting down of empathy. Blackburn shows herself to be a Lady Macbeth.
As a woman, Lady Macbeth knows that she is expected to be more empathetic than men and so makes a point of rooting out any such feelings. Fearing that her husband is “too full o’ the milk of human kindness,” she will counter what she sees as a failing by setting herself as a counter example. She calls upon her murderous thoughts to “unsex me here” and to “come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall”:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers…
To shore up her faltering husband, she returns to the image:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
Whatever womanly compassion Marsha Blackburn might have for the shooting victims has been swallowed up, as with Lady Macbeth, in a blaze of ambition. She’s not herself dashing people’s brains out, but she’s supporting gun policies that lead to that result.
Before he died, GOP operative Lee Atwater repented for introducing a new kind of dirty politics into mainstream politics. These included race baiting and framing opposing politicians. Experiencing something akin to Lady Macbeth’s later moment of repentance—”all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”—may have saved his soul, but he set the country on a path from which it has never recovered.
Trump and Blackburn are his heirs, and whether they will ever become remorseful about the invisible blood on their hands remains to be seen.
Clarification: While empathy has traditionally been gendered female so that it seems particularly horrible when a woman shuts down her heart, I should clarify that men and women alike become inhuman when they refuse to empathize. Jesus was talking about both genders when he identified the unforgivable sin as spurning or violating the divine spark within.
Previous Posts on Mass Killings
Life Is a Reality TV Show, My Friend
Murakami and Labeling Survivors as Crisis Actors
In Support of Today’s Anti-NRA Marchers
Mass Killings, Our Most Dangerous Game
Stephen King Looks to Children for Hope
The NRA Preying on Anxious Men
Manchester Suicide Bombing: Grendel Evil vs. Beowulf Strength of Mind
This Time Grendel Chose Umpqua
Obama’s Eulogy and Morrison’s Baby Suggs
Pennywise Kills North Carolina Muslims
Grendel as a Norwegian Christian Fascist
Dostoevsky and the Arizona Shootings
Lost Paradise Syndrome in Tucson
Atwood’s Dystopias and the Gun Business
Satan Strikes Again, This Time in Aurora
Grendel’s Invasion of Fort Hood