Sorry to get to this so late, but it's finally bugged me so much that I've decided to dig right down to the bottom of it.

Jack:

@ arne

Say what you will. He does something. Then he criticises others for such.

Wrong. He's criticising one person, Obama, for politicizing the issue the very day that it happened, while the blood was still fresh and the smoke still hung in the air. That is worlds apart from discussing it two days later. Glenn makes it sound like CK is saying no one should ever discuss this event and then calls him a hypocrite because he had already discussed it. That's ludicrous; Glenn's point hinges on a fallacy.

This is simply false, as anyone can readily see by reading CK's column in its entirety. (Yes, I know it's painful, but...) Jack is simply substituting what he wished CK had written for what he actually wrote.

Here's CK's relevant lead-in paragraph about Obama:

It is inevitable, I suppose, that advocates of one social policy or another will try to use the Virginia Tech massacre to their advantage. But it is simply dismaying that a serious presidential candidate should use it as the ideological frame for his set-piece issues.

Notice there is nothing about when Obama said it. CK's only concerned about what Obama said, and he goes on to quote and then criticize it in the follow 5 paragrphs.

It's only in the very last paragraph of his column (paragraph #6 after the one quoted above) that he brings up the "decent interval" trope. It plays no role whatsoever in his argument. It is merely a rhetorical exit device.

Instead, the meat of CK's argument is two-fold: (1) that we should not "get ideological mileage" out of it, (2) that Obama's ideology is wrong. Of course, it needs stating right out front that conservatives always define their positions as "common sense," "simple humanity," "ancient wisdom" or some other such non-ideological formulation, as opposed to everyone else being all ideological. So the hypocrisy is there from the get-go. No assembly required.

And--surprise! surprise!--this is exactly what CK does at the very beginning of his piece:

What can be said about the Virginia Tech massacre? Very little. What should be said? Even less. The lives of 32 innocents, chosen randomly and without purpose, are extinguished most brutally by a deeply disturbed gunman. With an event such as this, consisting of nothing but suffering and tragedy, the only important questions are those of theodicy, of divine justice. Unfortunately, in today's supercharged political atmosphere, there is the inevitable rush to get ideological mileage out of the carnage.

CK's ideology is first presented in the unbolded section above. It is then elaborated in the bolded section to delegitimate anyone else presenting their ideology.

This becomes quite explicit when he goes on his anti-gun control tirade, beginning in the very next paragraph:

It did not take long for the perennial debate about gun control to break out, preceded by the inevitable scolding and clucking abroad about America's lax gun laws.

It never occurs to CK that if you don't live within our gun culture, the "inevitable scolding and clucking" might be every bit as natural and unforced as his own instintive reflex to say "the only important questions are those of theodicy, of divine justice."

But, honestly, when a whole city in Iran is flattened by an earthquake, might they not instantly say "the only important questions are those of theodicy, of divine justice," while Californians such as myself (paying $1200 a year to pay off earthquake reinforcement bonds) think instead of their lack of modern building codes?

In short, what we have in CK's column is a complex mish-mash of muddled thinking, with multiple causes, at least one of which is his inability to stand outside of himself and his social surround. This is fairly typical of conservatives, due to the affinity between conservative ideology and level three thinking in Robert Kegan's typology of cognitive development--in which the self as subject is composed of the social roles and relationships of its social surround. Likewise, there is an affinity between liberal ideology and level four thinking, which takes social rols and relationships as object.

To my way of thinking, this is really the root cause of CK's problem: he is "In Over His Head" (to paraphrase the title of Kegan's most extensive book on the subject) in the modern world, and thus (1) cannot handle the some of the mental challenges it presents and (2) resents the fact that others, who function at higher levels of development are more capable of responding in a variety of different ways, no single one of which may be the "one true right and only way."

This is really what sets CK off, so far as I can tell, and once he's set off, there's just no stopping him. He has to just vent and vent until he feels better.

While rightwing authoritarianism can do a great deal to illuminate rightwing behavior, sometimes cognitive development provides a more illuminating perspective. IMHO, this is just such an occassion.

p.s. One last point: Obama's observation about the numerous other forms of violence--what are frequently referred to as "structural violence"--are a further example of something relatively self-evident to those at level 4 and above, but that seems contrived at best to those at level 3 and below.

Yet, the statistics are overwhelming. I attended a hearing yesterday on the revised 2007 Air Quality Management Plan of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. One handout had statistics from the California Air Resources Board: Premature deaths from air pollution: 5400. In contrast, the number of murders in LA Country last year was 402.

So it makes sense to regard air pollution as a form of mass violence. But a level three consciousness requires individual actors. Jim shot Bill. Without that sort of prototypical paradigm, the attribution of violence seems patently absurd. And it is. But only relatively to the level three subject's capacity to understand.