A culture of amendement entitlement

In the sage view of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel society progresses towards greater and greater freedom. And with that freedom comes greater and greater responsibility to uphold the norms, institutions, and laws, which support this free society.

We can contrast this early 19th century picture of history and society with the contemporary United States and its version of consumer democracy under the natural law of capital. And we need look no further than a movie theater in Florida where a retired cop shot a man dead for using his cellular phone during a movie.

To appropriate an internet meme: "I'm sorry. I cannot hear your First Amendment rights over the sound of my Second Amendment rights."

But perhaps there's a truth to this turd of wisdom. Gun fire is louder than the human voice, speaking freely.

Three aspects to the story stick out in my mind, which make it a representative anecdote for contemporary American culture, especially in the jingoistic Republican state of Florida, that dangling dick of America, the same one that corrupted 2000 presidential election results leading to the Constitutional crime of delivering the presidency to George Bush by Court-ordered fiat.

First, a man was using his cellular phone to send or answer a text. Why? Because he could, not because he knows he shouldn't have. He simply had the capability to use his phone as easy as his capability to speak and he did something that he does countless times throughout the day and in so so doing he violated the public social norms regulating movie theater behavior.

Second, a man retaliated against this affront to his right to an unperturbed theater experience through the use of his concealed weapon. This man, elderly, retired from the police force at 51, perhaps having spent too much free time before a Fox news broadcast, himself, a product of his own media consumption habits. Trial testimony reveals that he was texting as well. Go figure.

Third, another theatergoer to the event noted that "it sounded like a gunshot, but [I] wasn't sure if it was real or from the previews because they had just shown a preview for 'Robocop,' which had a lot of gunshots in it."

This little time capsule sums up the contemporary American experience. One man exercises his first amendment right simply because he can, emboldened by the always-present, always-on communication technology: the cellular phone. Another man exercises his second amendment right to bear arms, simply because he can conceal this small firearm, unimpeded, on his person, emboldened by a culture flanked by images of John Wayne and Wayne LaPierre that turn gun possession into a (w)holy American right. Third, a witness is unsure if the gunshot was real or part of a movie trailer showing at the time given the ubiquitous presence of the gun and its continuous discharge in our forms of entertainment.

Only the third man gets a pass. The first two are led like a horse to water by the technologies at hand: the phone and the gun. The function of each and their presence on the person offer logics of practice that circumvent alternatives. A recent article concerning the rude gestures of parents and loved ones who stop, mid conversation or mid presence to answer texts is but one way in which people get enslaved to the cellular phone's constant interpellation of the user. When the phone hails you, you stop what you're doing to look at the screen and respond. Likewise, the man who has gone so far as to see his life in enough danger to pack heat has conceded to the logic of use.  Under normal circumstances he may de-escalate conflict or walk away but in this case he has the answer to conflict. Bang. Bang.

Florida is rife with instances of conflict precipitated by the gun where a man who normally wouldn't confront another does so through his surreptitious self-deputization via the gun. He engages in risky conversations with people he normally would not, and so emboldened by his hidden power, he challenges the other to produce an answer to why he's walking in this neighborhood or to turn down loud music only to have the manner and nature of the query be an affront to the person confronted. The demand escalates into a conflict that ends with the concealer producing his "right" and using it with the effect of ending the conversation in a pool of blood.

Guns aren't simply a manifestation of a philosophy of liberty. They aren't simply a bulwark against encroachments on those liberties. They are discursive resources deployed in interactions with others. And like any mode of power in discourse, they distort that discourse. The gun, a monologic weapon, means "I'm going to tell you what to do because I can." Furthermore it has the tendency to impose the gun wielder's meaning upon the situation. As others have said about using violent force: "It sends a clear message." The irony here is that a dead person has a better 'understanding' of your message.


I'm reminded of that cellular phone commercial: "Can you hear me now?"

The phone annihilates space like the gun. It allows the voice to travel a greater distance than it can normally can, unaided. The gun allows the teeth to travel a greater distance than they normally can, unaided. The phone a weapon in its own right, allows strangers and even stranger behavior to persist in the presence of others by a user blinded by numerous robotic uses of this device to often not recognize the social violation its use causes.

And that poor guy in the theater can't differentiate what's real from what's in the movie. This theater, that analogy for the practical limits to free speech. You can't scream fire in there. This theater, a theater for the drama of the gun. You can't open fire in there.

But you pay to watch the actors do just this all the time. And you carry that phone or that gun all the time, each providing you a reality shaped by the very technologies at hand. When you pretend to entertain others through a clever text, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona. When you wield your weapon in the defense of a phantom concept against a phantom menace, maybe you're channeling a movie star's persona.

"Go ahead, make my day."
@loudtribesmen

#secondamendment