Things are getting a bit tense in the Commonwealth, y'all.

The swift expansion of local pro-gun organizing in Virginia has also attracted the attention of national anti-government militias and white supremacist groups, who have “glommed on to” the grassroots movement, hoping to use it as a potential flashpoint that could lead to civil war and social breakdown, according to an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors extremist groups.

Some observers worry these tensions may come to a head on 20 January, when a lobby day against gun control at Virginia’s state capitol is expected to attract thousands of people, including members of anti-government groups from other states. Local residents are concerned the day could turn violent, like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia.

Death Addiction

Oh, for fuck’s sake, can I get through typing a single essay without another alert from CNN coming across my desktop that there is a shooting going on, being contained, finally over? This is ridiculously coincidental; if I wrote this into a script, it would be considered too contrived to be allowed.

This whole month has been nothing but one piece of breaking news after another of shootings, violence, protests, wrong-doings on a horrible scale, injustice in the extreme playing out on screens and phones all around the world.

I have known since my teens that the rule of news is that “If it bleeds, it leads.” But this is going much further than mere sensationalism and human interest. This is the obsession with the ultimate expression of toxic masculinity. It’s as though we are craving seeing the violence, addicted to nodding our heads and saying, “Yes, it really is bad out there.” We have gotten to the point where tragedy and death are out entertainment of choice, and we need more and more of it, in ever-increasingly violent and dramatic forms, to satiate our itch.

We are death addicts. Trauma drama is our currency, and we trade it through the social media channels like money lenders in front of a temple, only in this story there is no outraged teenage messiah to pull down the pillars and run the offenders off, all while delivering an impassioned shaming about how we ought to behave.

On one matter I can agree with the moral majority and the Reaganites: We seem to have lost our core values. When in the world did we decide that death and destruction were entertaining? When did we decide that matters of fashion trumped matters of family, that there is no societal responsibility, that greed is its own reward?

A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway

Let’s start this rant with a reminder that Hemingway, a man’s man in the expat days at the freewheeling turn of the twentieth century, was a mosaic of the masculinity narrative: a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, gun-wielding, suit-wearing, elephant-killing, womanizing force on safari and rolling through the salons of Paris, casting his personality into all the nooks and crannies around him, filling the space and sucking out the air. But for all his seeming success, prowess and power, he was a deeply unsatisfied man, one who would eventually face a firing squad of his own making as he shot himself, ending a life that had become too painful to continue.

If not even white men with enough privilege to leave home, live off the income of their families while carousing in foreign lands can stand the message we are all of us supposed to live and uphold, what chance does anyone of the rest of us ever have?

The contemporary art and literature are rife with discontent and disgust at the modern, pre-crash era, from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to any number of works decrying corporate man, to the newly crafted voice of fear and uncertainty that is science fiction and all the mistrust of the dehumanizing elements and aspects of technology that the genre allows us to explore. The twenties wasn’t just fast and loose in the dance hall or on Wall Street; in Chicago and New York, the Italian mob was fighting tooth and nail for power over turf and transit and taxes, the usual purview of governments from time immemorial.

After the crash, those in power, most notably the FDR’s brain trust, the advisors who helped craft the New Deal, saw that traditional American adherence to the hands-off capitalist model, more narrative and rhetoric than actual policy or procedure, had taken the whole of the country from bad beginnings to worse ends by leaving too many holes and not providing any safety nets. The frontier was closed by the department of the interior in 1890 and the era of Industrialization was officially king, but within a generation, policies that favored the factory and its owner were decried as downright un-American, a callous framework for abuse and neglect that were actively sought to be ferreted out by the New Deal.

Today, we have again been seduced by the narrative and rhetoric of self-sufficiency and every man for himself, only now our society provides even less support for the corporate man or the manufacturing Joe. If we do not quickly reverse our course, it will again take us from bad beginnings to disastrous endings, and the writing is on the wall in the blood of black men, police officers and elementary school children of how destructive a path this is.

“Healthy masculinity means hope for the world in places where we have long felt only hopelessness.” One wonders if Hemingway would have liked more options. For all that he succeeded in a society where Wilde was condemned and imprisoned, it seems that Hemingway was the least happy and satisfied of his gang, the most interesting people in the world, while Wilde was vaguely bemused by everyone else’s confusion. While he may well have lost sleep and worried privately, Wilde certainly managed to hold the public veneer of one who was far removed and likely above the fray of common concerns such as adherence to the social code that others crafted long before he was born and to which he had never subscribed.

Oliver Wilde’s weapons remained, as ever, his words and his kind, unflappable demeanor in the face of hostility, confusion, fear, accusation and incarceration. Ernest Hemingway, steeped in the masculinity narrative that expressed itself through guns, wars, knives, domination had little in his toolbox to deal with his life off the page. Failed marriages, lost friends, rejection of family and country doesn’t disappear with a pulitzer, and he ultimately turned to the only tool that made any sense to him.

We absolutely must stop shooting. Ourselves, as well as each other. We need to stop the war on men, the war on women, the war on the poor, the war on the weak, the war on the old, the war on children. We need to stop. One century is long enough.

#StopShooting.

"A Gun Buying Death Spiral"

We, as a nation, have collectively lost our minds when it comes to guns.

Commentators suggest Americans are now trapped in a gun-buying death spiral, where mass shootings spark talk of lax gun control measures, prompting many to believe they need to go out and buy more guns. Then there’s another mass shooting, and on it goes.

How many guns do we need? Well, that's getting harder and harder to figure, since the fear is getting larger every day. With guns, as with money, it's hard to know how much is enough. Brent Nicholson's hoard in South Carolina is confounding police.

“This has completely changed our definition of an ass-load of guns,” said Chesterfield County Sheriff Jay Brooks. Six weeks after the discovery, officers are still cataloging the weapons, many of which have proved stolen, and the final tally is expected to be close to 5,000. “I don’t know if there’s ever been (a seizure) this big anywhere before,” Brooks says.

Gun violence is persistent, pernicious, and pervasive, with over 355 mass shootings this year alone, more than one a day. The conservative right, speaking on behalf of the NRA, wants us to believe that the answer to this insane situation is to make guns easier to buy. Last month we used guns frequently, but not necessarily wisely.