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Another shooting.
This one at the Capital/Maryland Gazette offices in Annapolis. It’s a newspaper I can remember from my Baltimore childhood. Though my family had a subscription to the Baltimore Sun, every once in a while one of my parents would pick up a copy of the venerable Maryland Gazette from a local newsagent, largely because the Gazette’s coverage of the ofttimes bizarre politics of Maryland’s inbred, postage stamp capital excelled that of either the Baltimore Sun or the Washington Post.
Now, as has happened so often, a shooter has invaded the workplace and shot up the joint, killing five and “gravely injuring” several others.
As always, our first, involuntary reaction is to invoke the deity.
Oh, my God.
Our second reaction, equally ineluctable and equally inevitable, is to start engaging in a frantic round of obsessional speculation, accompanied by conspiracy theorizing, as shocked, aggrieved nation struggles to come to terms with the latest massacre. We know that a shooter is in custody. Yet we do not know yet what the shooter’s motivations may have been, whether the shooter was acting alone, or whether the shooter was part of some larger criminal or terrorist enterprise.
But, while imagination is as good for a fool as a physic, as my West Texas grandmother used to like to say, in the immediate aftermath of the events which transpired in Annapolis this afternoon we should perhaps take a deep breath, and wait to speculate, to point fingers, to clutch pearls, to engage in partisan recrimination, or to engage in Trumpian tweeting until the authorities have had a chance to gather additional information.
Right now, before we risk jumping to what may well be unsupportable and unsustainable conclusions, we should take a deep breath, and quietly, carefully, and with complete honesty of self and purpose, ask ourselves what do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
I remember asking these questions after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by Jared Lee Loughner, along with senior U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll, who died of his injuries, and 16 others on January 8, 2011. What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
I suggested at the time, and do so again now, that it may well be far too early, and the data may be far too insufficient, for us to be able to formulate any hypotheses about the shooting. Nevertheless, we live in qualitatively different times now than then.
Seven-and-a-half years ago, the political climate in this country was divisive, but we did not have a president in office whom Russian American journalist Masha Gessen has suggested is a fascist, even if the government over which he presides is not. Seven-and-a-half years ago, America seemed to be more calm, more centered, more rational. Aside from various sufferers of Obama Derangement Syndrome, the country was not tribalized or Balkanized to nearly the extent that it is today.
In just a few hours since the shooting occurred, partisans and activists on both sides of the political divide have launched the inevitable complaints, barbs, and allegations against one another that seem to be virtually inevitable in Donald Trump’s America. Moreover, indications are already emerging that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s troll army is preparing to enter the fray, to use active measures to propagate as much disinformation as possible, as they did within 45 minutes of the Parkland, Florida shooting, and as they have now been exposed as having done in connection with the Minneapolis death of Philando Castille, where Russian trolls organized phony protests and fake Facebook groups as part of their information warfare campaign against the United States.
Indeed, it is also possible that no matter what the root causes or etiology of today’s events in Annapolis may have been, the Trump administration will respond in one of two ways. Either the administration will try its level best to ignore the shootings or depict them as the single act of the so-called lone wolf shooter, motivated by some sort of mental illness, thus stigmatizing the mentally ill while exonerating everybody else, or the administration will, should the shooter prove to be a member of a minority, to urge an anti-immigrant propaganda or an anti-“terrorist” one.
Given the unbelievable, and nakedly cynical, tactics of this administration, with its bland indifference to how poor the optics of its constant appeals to rabid partisanship and its constant pandering to its base may be to the majority of Americans who are not on the so-called Trump train, we can reasonably expect that this president and this administration will do their damnedest to wring every possible ounce of partisan political advantage out of the outrage outside of Annapolis.
Sadly, a state capital where the most newsworthy events for years had been Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel’s tax troubles, and Gov. William Donald Schaefer’s unconventional relationship with Hilda Mae Snoops, has now joined the unhappy league of American massacre sites. Annapolis can now join a murderers’ row that includes New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Bernardino, Santa Fe, Texas, Orlando and Parkland, Florida, Tucson, Columbine, and on and on and on.
Oh, my dear little Annapolis, Annapolis of so many fond memories, quirky, funky, endearingly weird, not a state capital like the others. With what has happened today, heresy has come to Eden.
What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove? Whatever the answers these questions may be, we’re not going to like any of them one little bit.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He spent several years of his childhood living in Baltimore and has many fond memories of the endearingly weird little state capital where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay.
