Without being political, I'd like to simply comment on the way some news outlets have described his essay. If you've read the essay, on The Smoking Gun website perhaps, then you've seen it for what it is -- a carefully composed, well written essay. And by that I mean the sentence structure is clear, the paragraph breaks correctly made, the argument carefully built, etc. From a storytelling point of view, he effectively provides a character arc when describing his life, and how it led him to his act of insurrection. All that can be said without agreeing or disagreeing with his thesis that the middle class is being exploited by the elite and left without any defense from the politicians who have been openly bought. It is simply a matter of objectively evaluating the writing and argumentative skills he brought to bear in his essay. Which brings me to my point about the media:
Some news outlets describe the essay as a "rant", and some as "rambling". Some as a "rambling rant". Yet it was not!
Observing the media, expecting neutral reporting, I was surprised to see those exceptionally subjective words being used to describe what he wrote. It was almost as if reporters instinctively felt the need to recast the guy's essay as the product of a madman, rather than consider it for what it was -- an argument that appeared to be sound.
The New York Times was one of the very few papers to state that his argument was actually materially correct in many respects:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19tax.html
That's quite a rarity, for a news organization to be impartial. That so many other outlets decided not to be, was a brush with how media must have been like in the USSR -- semi-fictional and placating.
Some say we create a future that we are familiar with, so we will instinctively create an Orwellian future, even though we've all read "1984" and got the point that it was bad. We'll create it anyway, because it is at least familiar. This was an example of that sort of recasting of the facts that really, we should never do.
The only way to ensure that this sort of tragedy never happens again is to make sure that we attend to any of the problems that were pointed out, if any of the problems are real, and resolve them. The NY Times says they are real. So what happens next?
Well that wraps up my comments on this event. I just had that impression, about his essay and the news coverage last week, and thought it was worth noting. I am less interested in how every political camp is trying to suggest the guy must have been a this, or a that -- always exactly into whatever opposing side that camp already has. Progressives calling him a teabagger. Conservatives calling him a communist. All reading whatever they want into what he wrote, with barely any evidence to support their claims one way or another. He was apparently a liberal conservative capitalism communist, if everyone is to be believed. And that in itself makes it futile to even discuss politics about this case, even if we could.
