Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Knoxville gunman: 'I hope others do the same.'
The four-page "suicide note" Jim David Adkisson left in his car on the Sunday morning last summer when he took a shotgun into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church in Knoxville was finally released yesterday after Adkisson pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder. It's a thoroughly depressing read: a desperate man's pastiche of paranoid right-wing talking points about the evils of liberalism.
Adkisson attacked Unitarian Universalists because he saw them as liberal activists. He wrote, for example:
Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate, & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the Mainstream Media. But I knew these people were inaccesible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same, it's the only way we can rid America of this cancer/this pestilence!
I hope he doesn't get his wish.
By the way, I'm sure some enterprising student of right-wing radio will soon analyze Adkisson's manifesto to show exactly where each of the text's phrases and delusional charges against liberalism originated.
Copyright © 2009 by Philocrites | Posted 10 February 2009 at 9:42 PM
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Philocrites
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Commentary by Chris Walton on Unitarian Universalism, liberal Christianity, American religion, and liberal culture. Contact me.
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3 comments:
Martin Voelker:
February 16, 2009 06:38 PM | Permalink for this comment
I have not read about this horrible case lately but has it been determined yet whether this killer has been certified as mentally ill (clinically, that is, not just by his actions)?
Of course the big problem is that mental illness and being consumed by ideologically fanned hatred lie close together and may become hard to distinguish. One might say it's the action that shows it but if one looks at lynch mobs it becomes apparent that otherwise sane people are totally capable of acting out their absurd and cruel phantasies.
Please keep up updated on whether an point by point attribution of the killer's sources appears.
Silence Didfine:
February 17, 2009 09:20 PM | Permalink for this comment
I'm sorry, my dear Martin, but the ship has sailed as to a certification of insanity. A judge permitted his legal representative to have him plead guilty. That would make them complicit to Adkisson's self-professed guilty plea and rejection of a not guilty plea by reason of insanity.
We already know the sources of the killer's sources. They were sitting on his bookshelf the day he took two lives.
And why must we simply "hope" that he doesn't get his wish? This fool took partisanship to its sad, illogical, and destructive conclusion. Why not work toward overcoming it instead? Isn't that the path less traveled by? Won't that make all the difference?
Paul Maurice Martin:
February 23, 2009 09:38 PM | Permalink for this comment
I've always thought Rush Limbaugh has a lot to account for. When I first heard his radio show in the early eighties, when he was insulting the Clintons in personal, ridiculous ways, I honestly thought that it was some kind of parody.
I had no idea millions would take this guy's "ideas" seriously.
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