I planned to write about Politburo tactics, self-annointed patrollers and policers on the dailykos website - I think it has become a terrible problem and has severely limited and lowered the discourse there - and then I thought about the shooting in Illinois.

These shootings are becoming alarmingly and freighteningly frequent - isn't this the second one in about two weeks? While these shooters are obvioulsy deranged, I can't help but think that the shootings are somehow related to the volatile, tense climate in the country right now, and to our increasingly violent culture.

There are so many factors, too many to list. Some, to start: reality shows in which we watch people be denigrated, publicly humilitated, dehumanized, "pimped out;" the celebrity media, which hounds people like dogs on a hunt; the internet, where a mob mentality has taken hold, as Lee Siegel argues in his recent book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob - and that includes dailykos, where the discourse is no longer about politics at all, but rather about "trolls" and "sockpuppets" and "snark" and the like, and where people are bullied, hounded, ridiculed, and humiliated for offering informed opinion.

Certainly not be be discounted for the sense of latent, but explosive anger and the eruption of extreme violence in America as you read this is the Iraq war itself, which is now coming home in a way no one anticipated, but which was inevitable; the total lack of accountability in government; the gross and repeated abuses of power and the war on civil rights; the denigrating of language on the part of the government, the emptying out of langauge in lies and propaganda; the denigration of language in the media, i.e. the use of pornographic slang as if it were aceptable civil discourse; and uncivil discourse on the internet, where people say whatever they want with no repercussions; the triumph of the corporate ethos over every aspect of everyday life; years of fear-mongering and war-mongering. All play a part.

These recurring shootings are one manifestation of this treacherous atmosphere.

But most people -- still moral, ethical, not deranged -- now use the internet to lash out, to express their anger, fury, rage; they use it to say and do things they would never do in real life. One example is the mother who set up a fake profile on MySpace and taunted a neighbor's daughter until the poor girl killed herself. But most cases are much more subtle, not fatal.

To decry an advancing technology runs the risk of being called reactionary - as Siegel points out in his book. I don't mind being called reactionary if it means taking a stand for decency , for taking a stand against violence of any kind, be it physcial or mental.  

I was personally troubled by many aspects of dailykos- there is a violence there, too, and it is accepted and even celebrated - the entire "kos" vocabulary of trolls and snark and sockpuppets and HR'd and TR'd and mojo and so on - the fact that there is a form of person-to-person censorship - if you don't agree with or like an opinion you just "hide" it - and a mob or crowd mentality where anonymous people group together and decide to taunt or harrange a particular user in order to drive them away. It is the worst form of junior high school antics, and what makes it chilling here is that it is perpetrated by adults.

Siegel says: "The internet is the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolted, elevated, asocial individual."

That is the kind of person who committed those shootings today. But something similar also exists in a much less extreme form on dailykos. Asocial personality types who feel empowered to police and patrol, to "troll" people or "disappear" people for no reason other than that they can, or use obscene language and insult to harrange instead of disagree or engage.

Some more thoughts from Seigel: "What kind of idea do we have of the world when, day after day, we sit in front of our screens and enter further and further into the illusion that we ourselves are actually creating our own external reality out of our own internal desires? We become impatient with realities that don't gratify our impulses or satifsy our picture of reality. We find it harder to accept the immutable limitations imposed by identity, talent, personality. We start to behave in public as if were were acting in private, and we begin to fill our private world with gargantuan public appetites. In other words, we find it hard to bear simply being human."

His notion that we "fill our private world with gargantuan public appetities" is fascinating, and applies, I think, not just to the way people shop online these days. On political sites like this one, we attempt to take the whole spread of the country and of the campaign, whole states, mass rallies, into the private space of our homes, our home offices, our bedrooms.  By being here we invite everyone else on the site, everyone who posts a nasty comment, into our homes. And we thus also invite into our homes all the unfulfilled urges, the irrational drives, the negative desires of the masses.

It would be interesting to try to square all this with what is happening in the democratic primaries.

How can the the violence, these recurring mass shootings, be squared with the euphoria and joy people feel watching the Obama campaign?

How much of the misdirected negativity and misogeny floating around the culture is being projected onto Hillary Clinton?

Ecstacy and degredation - the twin poles of our political and popular culture.

The generalized culture of violence will not reverse itself or retreat anytime soon. Not even Obama can stop that.

We need a return to a more civil and enlightened discourse. We need a new enlightenment.