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First off, I'd like to say that the evidence that I've seen makes me believe, with many others, that Jared Loughner is schizophrenic. As other observers have pointed out, his age when he began gradually to withdraw is consistent with the usual onset of schizophrenia--in the late teens and early twenties. We also know that among those who are genetically inclined towards schizophrenia, the use of marijuana makes it significantly more likely that they will suffer an onset episode. Mercifully, I don't have to go through a full recitation of the evidence, because Salon--after Joan Walsh's initial idiocies--has interviewed the psychiatrist author of Surviving Schizophrenia, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who lays out the case as elegantly as anyone could.
As regards the parents, there's been a great deal of huffing and puffing about their supposedly having barricaded themselves inside their house, and refused to talk to the FBI. What I hear is that they actually barred the front door against journalists and photographers, although pictures of the front and back door of their property managed to find themselves into at least one British paper. Should they have known and done something about their son's condition? As Dr. Torrey says, hindsight is 100%.
When my own son A. suffered his psychotic break at the age of nine--he is a member of a rarer subset, called childhood-onset schizophrenia--my wife and I did a great deal of "bargaining," to use the grief parlance. She is a Waldorf teacher, and was inclined to try her colleagues' advice about diet, structured environment, homeopathy, and exercise. It wasn't until A. set his nightshirt on fire (thankfully, it was quickly extinguished) in order to lash out at us that we decided the situation was beyond our control.
What followed was a year of his being in and out of institutions where nobody had seen this relatively rare condition, Vermont being small. He was finally properly diagnosed at the NIMH in Bethesda.
I don't want to linger on the horrors of having one's child insist that you're not his real parents, but simulacra substituted in order to deceive him, or laughing about the counsels of DeVille Dog, or wailing that he's dead, a ghost, that you killed him, and asking why (you can read about alienation of affect in Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error). It takes me back to a place I don't want to revisit.
What I will say is that Jared Loughner's ideolect is inflected with bits and pieces of deconstructive linguistic theory. The basic idea is that words only refer to other words, in a closed system of signification. This closed system is biased in such a way as to preserve and replicate the power relations that conservatively define a society. The analysis is fundamentally paranoid: "phalloocentrism," for instance, re-inscribes in each generation the predominance of masculinism; science is a masculinist language; the way that grammar and syntax structure our notions of causality are biased and restrictive. There is no "objective" (at least human) "reality" apart from the signification conferred on it by language. It depends on the definition of what "is" is.
Under such conditions, why should anyone "privilege" anyone else's version of "reality" over one's own? Paper scrip is a fiction when it is not backed by the full faith and credit of a faithful and creditable institution (gold operating as a kind of "transcendental signifier"). The flag is nonsense, to be burned or (in Bill Ayers's case) stood upon. Gender is a mind-forged manacle. God is a cod. Dreams are reality; reality but a dream. The intellectual, peering down on the little people whose little lives have built his ivory tower tenure, knows all this, and cackles, "what fools these mortals be."
Undoubtedly, Dr. Torrey is right: we as a society should feel more obliged to provide the treatment the mentally ill need, whether we believe they have the "right" to their insanity (recast as "alternative consciousness") or not. As a general rule, they are much more dangerous to themselves than to others. Early diagnosis and intervention can probably help: the shorter the psychotic episode(s) and the longer the schizophrenic is on medication--which, to be honest, is something like a chemical straitjacket, to use a dreaded <em>metaphor</em>--the more normative their thoughts and behaviors become. There is research afoot into medicating those at significant risk in anticipation of the symptoms. Undoubtedly, some civil rights advocates will resist such treatments.
Augustine25 makes the very evocative point on Twitter that Jared Loughner believed the Space Shuttle program was a scam. Therefore, Congresswoman Giffords was a national politician taking part in the scam, by way of her astronaut husband. "What is government, if words have no meaning?" he is said to have asked her at another town-hall style meeting back in 2007. Indeed. But to listen to Ezra Klein holding forth on the archaism and therefore interpretive intractability of the Constitution, which is a living document that needs to be re-interpreted in the light of what is convenient to the agendas of the moment, is to hear an echo of Loughner, saying that it is . . . whatever: an impediment to our nihilistic utopia, if people insist too much on "literalism"--as though the Founders were very careful to make their language unambiguous or some such.
So, when David Corn claims that the Right's rhetoric is much more violent than the Left's, he's full of it. There's a violence to defacement, to iconoclasm, to intellectual snobbery, to deliberate misprision in the service of ideology, to bearing false witness, and to blame. There is a violence to purchasing power with broken promises. There is a violence to redefining the social contract to take away choices in exchange for "benefits" that will not materialize. There is a violence inherent in the power of the state to compel behaviors that ought to be voluntary. There is a violence in invading privacy in the name of a false "security." There is a violence in libel, in the PC imposition of speech codes, in giving bailed-out auto companies to unions, in trying to fashion from an atrocity an opportunity for denunciation of your political opponents, in trying to recast reality in conformity with one's opinions.
I'm not calling for the banning of deconstruction or marijuana, or guns, or saying that all schizophrenics should be forcibly treated for their conditions, or institutionalized (although I think that would be better for many of them, who instead end up in prison). I'm just asking for a little honesty, a little less pietistic fraud, a little less compulsion "for our own good."
There is a great deal of romanticization of the Other in academic discourse. Those who regard identity as a social construct foisted upon subjects in order to manipulate them may even find in schizophrenia an aspirational ideal of plastic self-fashioning.
Nonetheless, once the state begins to calculate the costs of serving that population, it may begin to institute . . . disincentives . . . for bringing any into this society. The great god Diversity demands that the Other be coddled, nurtured and admired.
As long as it votes, and as long as it doesn't cost too much.
