I'm sure they're not at all related

[mazzie]

March 16:

Sen. Charles Grassley is so angry over AIG bonuses that he says the executives should resign or kill themselves.

In a comment aired this afternoon on WMT, an Iowa radio station, Grassley (R-Iowa) said: “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things — resign, or go commit suicide.”

Today:

Police: Death of Freddie Mac CFO may be suicide.

Comments

Your mileage may vary, of course.

[verymelm.livejournal.com]

I think even if it was made in jest, it was in poor taste. That level of hyperbolic rhetoric is more and more frequent and people think nothing of saying so-and-so should die without really understanding how it can (and likely is) eroding how much we as a society value human life. This has been on my mind of late - the idea that how we speak and talk about those who so something we disagree with reflects a decaying societal respect for our individual personhood - and it's admittedly an extreme example, though I wonder if it would have gotten any notice at all had Mr. Kellerman's demise not coincided with it. It is just part of accepted rhetoric at present, which in my opinion is a shame.

Re: Your mileage may vary, of course.

[mazzie.livejournal.com]

I agree wholeheartedly that it was in poor taste, even if it was rhetoric, satire, jest, or whatever he chooses to label it after the fact. It did get press at the time though, and was met with criticism and outrage.

I don't think the way we talk about those with whom we disagree has undergone a substantive overall change of late. Ad hominem has been around (and cheered and jeered) as long as differences of opinion have. we might be more frequently subjected to it with the onslaught of the internet and everyone now not only having an opinion and an asshole, but also a keyboard. And it's clearly in vogue in certain circles.

May be triggery; obviously delete if you find it so.

[verymelm.livejournal.com]

Yes, it has been. I'm trying to sort out why it seems different, or more omnipresent now. The best I can come up with at the moment is that during the period of the American Revolution when people were shouting things like "Death to the Tyrants" they actually meant it - not that it makes it better, but I think (which is speculation, of course, as I wasn't around at that time to know) they weren't using it as rhetoric so much as they actually wanted the English aristocracy to die and would often create effigies demonstrating just how violently. They understood the power of the violent act - it was, in fact, used for precisely that reason and they *meant* it to be that vicious.

Now references to such violent acts are used so much for rhetoric that the true gruesomeness of the actual act is overlooked. I had an acquaintance who frequently used (or uses as I'm sure he still does) the term "rape" as an expletive, often in combination with other descriptors, in situations where he feels, for instance, that he's been charged too much for something. I cringed every time I heard it, and asked him to stop using it, which he objected to as my attempting to censor him. He is, suffice it to say, no longer an acquaintance that is welcome in my home. But I hear it - and read it - more and more frequently from more sources, along with exclamations of how someone who's annoyed someone else should "die". It's that kind of thing - that it seems that we've become so inured to the trauma of violence that we use the language in common parlance as if it were nothing - that is, I think, what upsets me.