For some time now I’ve been thinking about starting to write about what I see in the news. Not as political commentary exactly, but rather as an extension of my work as an arts critic—a critical lens on how I see ideas being formed not only in the media but also among the online communities I find myself part of. I resisted for a long time because it’s a slippery-slope down into the think-piece industrial complex, but I figured I’d give it a stab.

Today, I want to write about “terrorism.” I hate the word. I think it’s overused. I think people rely on it as a rhetorical crutch. And all of that does real work in the world that I find very frightening.

Terrorism is a subject on which so much has been written, which intersects with so many different sorts of discourses, there’s not too much to add. Yet ironically, we in America seem to constantly be fighting about who is or is not a terrorist. Consider the man who just murdered three people in a mass shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood. Intersecting as it does with the messy and vicious Republican presidential primaries, liberal and even mainstream publications have been tracking with intense interest which candidates have chosen to name these shootings “terrorism,” which apparently would imply a willingness to risk alienating Christian Evangelical voters, who might not look so unfavorably upon an individual motivated to kill in the name of protecting unborn children. Continue reading →