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Poem on Jared L. Loughner's shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Loughner's "loosening associations" -- and especially his attention to grammar as a means of secession from individual culpability and civil responsibility -- are a distillation of an early-21st Century trend in which sociopolitical language has moved beyond a traditional Socratic rhetorical mode employed to persuade others, but is now a metarhetoric by which individuals persuade themselves into not simply new belief systems, but new ways of being. If ever the Age of Reason had an antithesis, this moment marks it. Once words were expressions of ideas; Loughner defines a status in which ideas are a result of words, a kind of pixelized version of rational thought wherein the loss of resolution -- of commonly-held notions of meaning -- allows more widely vacillating social behavior.
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