Don't Blame the Books
Gabrielle Giffords
Laura Miller's Salon.com column, "The real message of Loughner's book list," challenges the notion that a crazed killer's reading list can reveal much about his motives: "By studying Loughner's book list for clues to the political leanings that somehow 'drove' him to commit murder, commentators are behaving a lot like crazy people themselves," she writes. Miller does acknowledge that some of the titles on Loughner's list seem typical of a rebellious and troubled young person, but that mental illness is the driving factor here, not literature. "But Loughner is almost certainly insane and, like the countless other mentally disturbed people who send similar ravings to media outlets around the world, his ideas would have been ignored as incoherent and irrelevant if he hadn't fired a gun into a crowd of people Saturday. The fact that he did fire that gun, however, doesn't make his delusions suddenly meaningful. It doesn't make his list of favorite books significant. Crazy people who make headlines and change history are still crazy." Read the entire Salon.com article here.
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Much Ado About Publishing
Choosing Crazy
Many issues exploded on Saturday, January 8, 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner, a mentally ill young man, shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) point blank in the head in an attempted assassination.He also wounded and killed others -- including a judge and a nine-year-old girl -- outside the Tucson grocery store where Giffords was holding a meet and greet for constituents.
Loughner is in custody, and is no doubt having a psychiatric evaluation. Nobody will be surprised if he is diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Mentally ill people often fixate on particular issues, including politics and religion, and here is where things can get tricky: The actions of a delusional murderer can prompt serious attention to those surrounding issues.
In this case it's not just the obvious two -- gun control and mental health -- it's also the violent rhetoric that has become the norm in the political arena.
It's not just sad, it's despicable, that it took the murder of innocents and the grave wounding of a member of Congress for this issue to be taken seriously.
While nothing should interfere with free speech, it's not unreasonable to want -- and to expect -- those in politics to behave like responsible adults, not sixth grade bullies.
Unfortunately, there has been, and will no doubt continue to be, a great financial incentive to fanning the crazy flames.
And by "crazy," I don't mean mentally ill people whose illnesses prevent them from having a choice about whether to behave sanely or not.
By "crazy," I mean the behavior of the people who do have a choice: the politicians and political operatives, TV hosts and talking heads, the radio and blogging blowhards.
Their crazy antics bring in viewers and readers.
Their crazy antics sell books.
Their crazy antics make us all long for an intelligent society where the grown-ups in charge and the grown-ups in the media aren't behaving worse than the lunatics on The Jerry Springer Show.
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As a journalist, columnist, essayist, and media critic, Nina L. Diamond's work has appeared in many publications, including Omni magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.
She was a regular contributor to a number of "late, great" national, regional, and newspaper Sunday magazines, including Omni; the award-winning South Florida magazine; and Sunshine, the Ft. Lauderdale (now South Florida) Sun-Sentinel's Sunday magazine.
She covers the arts and sciences; the media, publishing, and current affairs; and writes feature articles, interviews, commentary, humor/satire/parody, essays, and reviews.
Ms. Diamond is also the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers (Lotus Press) and the unfortunately titled Purify Your Body (Three Rivers Press/Crown/Random House) , a book of natural health reporting which has been a selection of The Book-of-the-Month Club's One Spirit Book Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club.
For its entire run from 1984-1998, she was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, which aired on WLRN-FM in Miami.
She has appeared on Oprah, discussing the publishing industry, but, in a case of very bad timing, that appearance was two years before her first book was published.
She has written her Much Ado About Publishing column for Independent Publisher since 2003.
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Read some of Nina's previous Much Ado About Publishing columns:
The Nice Guy Behind Evil Wylie: A Conversation with Andrew Shaffer
De-Witched, Authored & Remaindered
Moron Press: The Finest in Dreck Lit
Playing 20 Questions with Evil Wylie
When LOL Meets PPF
Sunday in the Park with Scarlett, Seuss, Webster, Zhivago & Salinger
There's No Such Thing As a Quick Remote
Thanks for the Genes
From Blog to Eternity