graphic: ©2011 Melissa Kelley

The current public hue and cry over stopping the “vitriol” and “eliminationist rhetoric” seems to me like shutting the barn door after the horses are already out.  Isn’t it possible that “eliminationist rhetoric” may now be over?  Right now?

I was so heartbroken and angry over the Tucson tragedies, and like Paul Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion), I was not particularly surprised that it happened.  I have heard the talking heads throwing around the most irresponsible ideas, words and images, and I don’t think you have to be leaning left to have felt the same frisson.

I have to admit, though, that I am looking forward to the arena where the cavalier or careless use of violent imagery or suggestion will be political suicide--or at least an invitation to have eggs and rotten tomatoes (real or metaphorical) thrown at you.  (My husband says that’s violent imagery—throwing eggs and rotten tomatoes—but hey, at least it’s not a Glock.)  Who thinks that from this point onward Sarah Palin, or anybody else for that matter, is going to approve any campaign graphics featuring crosshairs?  (Or surveyor’s symbols either.)

 So on to the next thing:  eliminating the term eliminationist.

What a dud of a word.  It sounds like somebody whose religion is practiced by umbilical meditation, colonics and toxic cleansing.  Or a little like Bolshevist-speak…  It lends advocating murder and mayhem a kind of pinko intellectual respectability. 

Its shortcoming as a label is its failure to express the smarmy immorality of it all—the malicious cowardice of stopping short of actually espousing violence, of barely creeping past the suggestion of a suggestion.  Using violent imagery to persuade or to be sensational is surely to be aware that ones words are inflammatory in some sense.   There’s no getting around it.

“Eliminationist” is inadequate.  If someone is indulging in this rhetoric, they must not escape the charge that they are advocating murder and anarchy.  Period.   Maybe only a little bit.  But isn’t that like being a little bit pregnant?

(And by the way, here’s a pretty good explanation of what “eliminationist rhetoric” actually is: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/01/what-is-violent-rhetoric#more-18397)

 P.S.  I liked the fact that when I constructed the graphic, Microsoft Word helpfully pointed out that “eliminationist” is not a word.  So I left the little red squiggly line in.