When news first broke of the shooting spree that left six dead
in Arizona, the only thing liberals seemed to care about was the
killer’s motive. They
almost instantly surmised, without any evidence at
all, that the cause of this massacre was some kind of right-wing
extremism for which they could blame Sarah Palin, Fox News, Rush
Limbaugh and the Tea Party movement.
As more and more evidence
pointed away from their explanation of choice, however,
liberals seemed to lose interest in finding clues to the political
framework of the madness that police say caused 22-year-old Jared
Lee Loughner to target Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
In a
story on the front page of today’s Washington Post,
for example, three staff writers expend 2,756 words describing
Loughner’s descent into murderous madness. Among other things,
the Post story describes marathon Monopoly games,
Loughern’s early promise as a jazz saxophonist, his love of sci-fi
novels by Philip K. Dick and his breakup with his
high-school girlfriend. But in all those 2,756 words — yes, I
counted — there is one important word that is missing:
Zeitgeist.
That’s the name of a 2007
documentary that has developed a cult following among
conspiracy theorists. Among other things, Zeitgeist
attacks Christianity as “the fraud of the age,” suggests that the
9/11 attacks were an inside job perpetrated by sinister forces in
the U.S. government, depicts international bankers scheming
for world domination, and warns against malign plots to embed
computer chips in people. In an
interview that aired Wednesday on ABC News, Loughner’s former
friend Zach Osler said, “I really think that this
Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared
Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives
in.”
Despite this clue from Osler, even though the entire two hours
of Zeitgeist are available online —
I’ve embedded it at my personal blog, in case you want to see
it — it doesn’t rate a mention from the Washington
Post. Nor do any other major media seem interested in
following up on the
worldwide “Zeitgeist Movement,” which involves the so-called “Venus
Project,” the utopian socialist fantasy of 94-year-old
Jaque Fresco.
As Jesse
Walker of Reason magazine says, Loughner’s “profound”
interest in Zeitgeist “clears things up a bit” in
regard to the murder suspect’s incoherent online ramblings about
monetary theory:
The best label would probably be “New Age paranoia.” If you’ve
ever gone browsing in an occult bookstore (and you really should;
it’s like browsing in a science fiction bookstore, only the authors
really believe the stories they’re writing, or pretend to), you may
have seen a shelf labeled “conspiracies” right alongside the
sections marked “astrology” or “Tarot.” People who write about
fringe politics often miss the extent to which New Agers serve as a
transmission belt, allowing ideas from the left, the right, and the
counterculture — not to mention more outré folks like the UFO
buffs — to slide from one subculture to another.
While it would be unfair to say that Jaque Fresco and
Zeitgeist director Peter Joseph caused Saturday’s
atrocity, Loughner’s obsession with this atheistic paranoid
gobbledygook is probably the closest we’re going to get to a
political explanation of the Tucson shootings.
And let the reader imagine what the Washington
Post would have written if the accused gunman’s
friend had told a network news crew that Loughner was an avid
reader of The American Spectator and that R. Emmett
Tyrrell Jr. had a “profound impact” on his worldview.
