Narrative Wrestling After Colorado Planned Parenthood Shooting Dishonors the Dead

First above every evil that arises out of an act of violence is the death of the innocent. There’s nothing to compare to the loss of life and the grief of loved ones, and nothing much that can be said about those tragedies, nothing from a stranger anyway, nothing that really means anything.

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So let me leave all that be. Let me just say this: the now-customary ugliness of Narrative Wrestling — of fighting for control over the meaning of the event — dishonors both the dead and the living. It should become socially unacceptable. It should be recognized as the mark of a low and corrupt sensibility — because that’s what it is.

Some wild-eyed lunatic opens fire in a Colorado Planned Parenthood, killing three, including a police officer. Even while the event is in progress, the Narrative Jackals swarm the bodies, trying to drag them into their camp.

It’s “hateful rhetoric” against Planned Parenthood that caused the attack, says the Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains president. It’s “Christian” or “right-wing” terrorism, say the goony tunes on Twitter. And of course, from our now truly unpleasant and mean-spirited president, it’s all about the guns, just more proof that we should abandon the Second Amendment.

And let’s not forget the media. In moments like this, it is always wise to remember Klavan’s First Rule of Mainstream Media Reporting: Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative; when those prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration — and treating it as representative is deemed hateful.

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Thus we get the CNN reporter (a modern phrase that has replaced the more old-fashioned “arrant knave”) who said the Colorado shooting was “the latest of a string of attacks on abortion providing facilities,” even though he couldn’t name a more recent one than the killing of George Tiller more than six years ago.

The idea behind all this is that the side that wins the narrative will then acquire the power to convince ill-informed Americans that they should…  whatever… go on giving tax dollars to Planned Parenthood’s baby-killing mills…  or give up their right to bear arms… or give up their constitutional protection to practice their religion… or whatever bright and shiny slavery the left has cooked up to remake the world in their ever-so-virtuous image.

Lying for power, that’s all it is. What moral garbage. A crazy man killed people. Maybe he was against abortion. Would that make ripping children out of their mother’s wombs right? Maybe he was Christian. Would that make Christianity wrong? Maybe he had a gun. Does that mean decent men and women shouldn’t be able to protect themselves?

There is only one philosophy on earth today that routinely endangers the lives of innocents and that’s Islamism. Islamism causes fatal acts of violence not every six years but every few minutes, and not just here but in locations around the globe. The people Islamism inspires to deal death aren’t crazy. They are moved by an oppressive, vicious and violent idea. The fact that it’s a religious idea doesn’t make it sacred, and doesn’t cast any shadow of blame on good and true religious beliefs and practices. Islamism is a threat to free and decent people everywhere. That’s a fact. American gun rights are no threat. Neither are anti-abortion ideas. That’s just narrative: the truth “twisted by knaves to set a trap for fools,” to quote Kipling.

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To quote Daffy Duck: “It’s despicable.”

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