Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.
Several of these books are dystopian novels: Animal Farm, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and We The Living, all of which fit into a general theme of novels which deal with social themes, including The Wizard Of OZ, To Kill A Mockingbird, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Gulliver's Travels.
Of course, there are a few texts that should be of immediate interest: Mein Kampf, The Republic, and The Communist Manifesto. Plato's Republic influenced both Nazism and Communism, and it is likely that Loughner read The Republic as primarily a political piece (rather than as a model of the soul). Many people have expressed surprise that he lists Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. I'm not in the least bit surprised, as both national socialism and international socialism are both, well, socialism, and are both collectivist ideologies. So he seems consistent in his support for collectivism.
What seems to have many people confused is his obsession with grammar, and his claim that the government is engaging in mind control through grammar. I'm not going to argue that he's not crazy for believing this, especially with as far as he seems to have taken it, but at the same time, this in fact reflects some ideas developed by some very not-crazy people -- one being George Orwell (who is, of course, the author of Animal Farm, which he listed). Orwell of course argued that one has to be careful because our thoughts can be controlled through the manipulation of language. Nietzsche (who deals directly with the issue of grammar), the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and the leftist linguist George Lakoff each argued the same thing -- but the latter two at least are very much in favor of such manipulations. I won't pretend that Loughner read Nietzsche, Heidegger or Lakoff -- though Lakoff's ideas on this is widely available through his Huffington Post articles, such as his one on framing. I only mention them to point out that such ideas are not entirely crazy, or even uncommonly held. Further, they may be more coherent than most people know or understand. I see a consistent interest in collectivism, dystopian ideas, and the manipulation of people (consistent with his interests in collectivism, the themes of dystopian literature, and his thoughts on grammar/language). People want him to be crazy because it is too frightening to think that he actually may not be. Of course, this articleciting his postings makes the argument that he is crazy. And perhaps he is (though the author of the article is wrong about the incoherence of the books selected, as observed above). The stuff he rambles on about on years makes no sense, but rest sounds like the kinds of arguments I read from altogether too many of my Freshman composition students. I wish I were exaggerating when I say that.
3 comments:
I think that Loughner's writings make sense in a way.
The "currency" schtick is interesting in that I think that he may be hitting the nail on the head. A lot of folks are going on about currency, and arguing that there is some global, generally Jewish conspiracy. Listening to the currency folks rant about someone other other's control of the medium of economic exchange in the light of Loughner's spin, I wonder whether they are harping on about control over the medium of economic exchange, are not really obsessed with control over the medium in general.
Mr. Loughner also goes on about how it is impossible to center or fix a new currency, or language, upon any gold standard. Time and place are all relative. There is no start to time, no centre of the universe.
Without some transcendent standard (e.g. Plato's ideas) or supernatural super-adressee (God) there is nothing upon which, in private at least, we might pin the value of our new language down.
Realising that there is no gold standard of language - his rejection of positivism - he might just have gone on to read some Witgenstien, and realised that currency becomes valued and meaningful through use. It is not the goverment or Big Brother that is controlling the dictionary but a lot of socially interacting peers. Alas, rather than join that language game he decided to kill a few of its players.
I see his actions as the knee jerk reaction of a Bible Belter, or indeed an American, to the loss of foudations.
There is another guy on Youtube who writes on a piece of paper "I can steal your property" and then compares his piece of paper to the US Constitution. People in the US have believed their Bibleand Constitution for so long that they may continue to have a tendencey to freak out when the realise that in fact, nothing was written in stone.
thought as a poet yourself you'd be interested in checking out this poem of loughners that leaked onto the internet by a fellow student. it is from spring 2010:
http://i.imgur.com/Og40Z.jpg
The guy was a nihilist, a lefty -- and believed both that that words had no fixed meaning and are weapons of social control.
Odd that Derrida, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, and the rest of the Post Modern / Western Marxist pantheon aren't on this reading list, while Plato is ...
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