The below is my transcription of a portion of the interview which appeared with Gerald Thronton, brother of the man who went into a Kirkwood MO council meeting and opened fire, killing 5. It occured on Fox News' Studio B today. You can watch the full interview at fox here ... but be aware, if you're using Firefox, you may not be able to get it to play. Any errors in transcription are mine, of course, and the story is a copyright story of Fox News. I have added emphasis in accordance with my point, it does NOT reflect the vocal inflection of the participants.
You can understand a person's meaning because we don't understand anyone's ability to mean what they mean. We can only relate to it as we feel we understand it to be by the words that were said. ...
[Reporter asks about GT's description of brother being at war, objecting that he just "went in and shot and killed 5 innoucent people"]
Well that's your opinion, the war statement is my opinion its based on factor that when talks break down between people at odds either they can go in separate directions or they can chose to escalate it to a violent stage and they would be considered [to be at?] war as anyone would use when talking about violence dealing with an issue that more people feel they have a right to be a part of. Some are even forced to be in that frame.
Reporter- maybe I'm misunderstanding but it sounds like you're defending ...]
Well you see everyone wants to be able to put a final note on it as whether it was right or wrong. There's no way to satisfy any and everyone because no one really feels what my brother felt, no one really feels what the persons who were shot and dead felt and therefor those persons are the ultimate ones that feel whether they should have did or could have done anything differently.
The interview goes on in the same vein. The reporter tries unsuccessfully to get GT to admit that killing is wrong, and they get into a debate about the meaning of war. It was funny and bit humiliating when President Clinton pulled this about the meaning of "Sex" and "is", but to hear this sort of thing used to defend the murder of innocents is alarming to say the least!
I have never heard such a stunning example of the postmodern view that everything is subjective, and there is no objective or external reality or truth. It was no less than chilling to hear this in regards to such a heinous and wanton act of evil.
To read more about postmodernism, there are many sources on the web. I'm not saying all aspects of it are wrong and evil like this... indeed, I live out a very postmodern life in some ways. One of my late father's professors at Valparaiso University taught him an aphorism (the source of which I've not been able to track down... I think the prof was OP Kretzmann) that "When you exaggerate a truth you create a falsehood."
A few select bits from the Wiki about Pomo
postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality
...
In its broadest context, postmodernism can be seen as a world view. For instance, Walter Truett Anderson identifies postmodernism as one of four world views. These four worldviews are the postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed, the scientific-rational in which truth is 'found' through methodical, disciplined inquiry, the social-traditional in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilisation and the neo-romantic in which truth is found either through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.[7]A related intellectual / philosophical school is relativism
Relativism is the idea that some element or aspect of experience or culture is relative to, i.e., dependent on, some other element or aspect. Some relativists claim that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of their historical or cultural context. The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. One argument for relativism suggests that our own cognitive bias prevents us from observing something objectively with our own senses, and notational bias will apply to whatever we can allegedly measure without using our senses. In addition, we have a culture bias — shared with other trusted observers — which we cannot eliminate. A counterargument to this states that subjective certainty and concrete objects and causes form part of our everyday life, and that there is no great value in discarding such useful ideas as isomorphism, objectivity and a final truth. (For more information on the "usefulness" of ideas, see Pragmatism.)
2 comments:
Folks can argue philosophy and rationalize all fucking day long. But the bottom line is MURDER is intrasocietal. WAR is intersocietal. Thornton was a murderer. He deserved what he got. And his dumbass brother needs to get a friggin' clue. RG, I think the last line of your post sums it up perfectly.
I sent copies of that post to people who live where we once lived and worked, and not surprisingly we know people who knew the deceased. To them, Thornton's comments were desecratory... he couldn't've done worse had he gone to the funeral homes and relieved himself into the caskets.
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