A Safeway In Arizona by Tom Zoelner

From The Week of September 03, 2012 Blame is a senseless exercise. As much as it may satisfy our anger to indulge in it, it solves nothing. For to blame is to suppose that we possess all the information necessary to properly apportion it which is almost never the case. In fact, blame actually harms our efforts to divine the truth. Not only is it used by the guilty as a shield against the slings and arrows of the righteous, it cautions wary bystanders that any slip, any misjudgement, any disaster on their watch is bound to bring opprobrium down on their heads. And if that is inevitable, then why not lie and obfuscate? Why not block and evade as a means of self-preservation? If truth means anything to us, then blame must be relinquished as a weapon. For it is only in a full understanding of a catastrophe that we can know how to fairly dish it out. Mr. Zoelner conveys this vital lesson with tragic clarity in this masterful memoir.

Gabriele Giffords was one of the good ones. The daughter of a prosperous, Arizona family, she grew up curious and passionate in a world all-too-often gripped by narrow minds and fixed opinions. Dedicated to the notion of bettering her community, she devoted years of her life to public service, first as a state senator and then as a Congresswoman, spending thousands of hours listening to the wishes and the complaints of her constituents and trying to square those needs with the dictates of her party. And though her efforts sometimes failed to satisfy, they earned her widespread respect in a deeply partisan world.

On January 8th, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old college dropout, walked into a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, where Ms. Giffords was holding a public event, and did his best to destroy all of this promise. Firing once, at close range, he sent a bullet into the Congresswoman's brain that would have killed her but for the quick thinking of those nearby and the medical expertise of the surgeons who saved her life. Six other souls were not so lucky, cut down by the fire of a young man enthralled to a case of paranoid schizophrenia which prompted him to execute his terrible and senseless plan. The shooting would not only change the lives of those who survived the attack, it would not only burden the spirits of the families who lost loved ones in the violence, it would shine a powerful spotlight on public discourse in the United States, igniting a brief but potent backlash against incivility and harshness in political speech considered to be marring the nation.

For Mr. Zoelner, however, the wounds would go far deeper and say far more about Arizona than it would the country to which it belongs. A son of the same Tucson community that shaped Ms. Giffords, Mr. Zoelner, an American journalist, uses the terrible shooting as a launch point for an investigation into Arizonan society. In chronicling its history, particularly after the onset of air conditioning which fuelled an explosive expansion in the state's population, he describes Arizona as a community of transplanted souls, people who have chosen to make a new beginning in this expanse of sun-drenched desert. This polyglot of elseness, combined with the oppressive heat that plagues the state during the year's warmer months, prevents, he argues, any natural links from being forged in the prefab communities that spring up around the waves of immigrants. Instead, families stick to themselves, in their temperature-controlled homes, their problems sealed away behind doors that rarely open for idle conversation.

This isolation, coupled with criminally lax gun laws and Ms. Giffords' contentious 2010 reelection to Congress, created, Mr. Zoelner persuasively contends, the perfect target for Jared Loughner who, acting upon conspiracies drummed up by his illness, committed an act of terrorism that caused much soul-searching throughout the nation. It also prompted Mr. Zoelner to write this powerful memoir which emotionally captures not only the pain of Loughner's victims, but the charisma of Gabriele Giffords about whom Mr. Zoelner is clearly and deeply fond. His distress is palpable throughout, bestowing upon the work a kind of aching vitality that is profoundly moving.

Mr. Zoelner is careful to caution his readers that he is less than unbiased about the events of January 8th, 2011. And though we can appreciate his openness about his connections to Ms. Giffords and her politics, he quietly demonstrates, throughout his work, that he is a man possess of an opened and powerful mind. For unlike many others who jumped to conclusions about Loughner and the shooting, eagerly fitting black hats upon those who best fit their prejudices, the author does nothing of the sort. Rather, he casts the widest net possible for those responsible, finding that, instead of catching individuals, he has hooked a confluence of broader trends that combined to harm Gabriele Giffords on that fateful day and will continue to harm others in the future if not arrested and reversed. For the mentally ill cannot be so blithely ignored, nor guns so loosely monitored, nor community links so easily cut without consequences, without numbness and despair and violence setting in.

This is exquisite work which, while hardly objective, is fodder for the thoughtful mind. (5/5 Stars)