Portrait of things to come

Just after midnight on Saturday I was driving back to San Francisco, and as I passed by Interstate 580 on the way to the Bay Bridge I could see that traffic was at a complete standstill.  It turns out this was the reason:

The incident started around midnight when two CHP officers tried to stop a white Toyota Tundra pickup that had been speeding and weaving in and out of traffic on westbound Interstate 580, said CHP Officer Sam Morgan.

The officers used a loudspeaker to direct the driver off the freeway, but he stopped on I-580 west of Grand Avenue, Morgan said.

As officers walked toward the pickup, they saw the man pick up a handgun and open fire on the officers, police said. […] They said the driver was armed with a rifle and a shotgun as well as the handgun and fired at least two of the weapons during the shootout.

He was wearing body armor, by the way, so it seems clear that he had a plan in mind.  So why did this guy go postal, according to his mother?

"He hasn't been able to get a job because he's an ex-felon and nobody will hire him," she said.

She said her son, who had been a carpenter and a cabinetmaker before his imprisonment, was angry about his unemployment and about "what's happening to our country."

Williams watched the news on television and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," his mother said.

Ok, so here's some schmuck who's felt the tender mercies of radical corporate capitalism and has been subjected to right-wing judicial philosophy.  And who did he conclude was the most appropriate target for his rage?  Why, Congress and its numerous "left-wing agenda items" (like funding multiple wars, bailing out Wall Street, handing over more power to health insurance corporations, etc, etc), of course.  And he's not the only one.

I'm sure we can all guess which "news on television" Williams was watching, and I have to say that the warping of this one human mind truly was an impressive feat by the right-wing propaganda machine in this country.  And I'm not exactly going far out on a limb when I predict that we'll be seeing much, much more of the fruits of their tireless labors over the next few years.

But as much credit as they deserve, one reason they can succeed in drilling these fantasies into people's heads is because there is no competing left narrative in the mainstream.  That's partially due to various institutions functioning exactly as they're intended to and squelching that narrative whenever it rears its ugly head, of course, but it's also a result of the fact that the putative left in this country worships at the twin altars of "pragmatism" and "reform", and has nothing but contempt for anyone who speaks or acts from principle.  It's constitutionally incapable of offering people a story that would help them make sense of the daily atrocities they're subjected to, and in that vacuum the hideous distortions of reality spewed by the right are just that much more able to take root.

And when the actual left aligns itself with this ersatz left—as it has for years, and shows no sign of stopping—it does its own little part to ensure that we'll have many more gun-toting lunatics like Williams in our future.

UPDATE: More details on Williams' plan:

Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother's Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco on Sunday with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the ACLU and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.

Williams, an anti-government zealot on parole for bank robbery, had hoped to "start a revolution" with the bloodshed at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, authorities said.

Thank goodness there are patriots willing to defend us from civil liberties organizations and funding for environmental protection—two of the most severe left-wing threats to our freedoms today, I'm sure we'd all agree.