Requiem for Bill Sparkman

Bill SparkmanMuch hay has been made over the death of census worker Bill Sparkman.  Sparkman, an Eagle Scout and substitute elementary school teacher, was found hanged in rural Kentucky with the word "FED" scrawled on his chest.  

The internet is practically on fire with discussion on both sides of the fence.  The freepers (members of the Free Republic forums) have, in classic form, blamed Sparkman for "sticking his nose where he doesn't belong".  Liberals are partially pinning the blame on Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann who publicly announced last June that she would not fill out the census report, and then proceeded to link the census with the Japanese internment camps of World War II.  

Other right wingers have already hopped a few steps forward on the crazy board, and are declaring Sparkman's death a "False Flag" maneuver, presumably engineered by ACORN.  (I am still not sure how ACORN became the center of paranoid conspiracy theories.  I keep reading about it, but I still don't get it.)

And people on both sides of the fence have noted that Sparkman was hung to death, which is shall we say an iconic action in the South.  Sparkman was white, but many people wonder if the killer was lynching Obama by proxy.

What does this have to do with Rush Limbaugh?  Well, a lot of people are blaming his hatred of "the Fed" and his racism for inflaming the passions of some poor crazy Appalachian hillbilly. Limbaugh and Glen Beck are both on trial in the popular mind for this killing, and I can understand that perspective.  Right wing shock jocks play on their audience's paranoia, they use inflammatory speech to whip their audience into a frenzy, and the teabagger tactics engineered by Fox News paint the government as the ultimate bad guy.

But you know what?  One thing is certain: Sparkman was killed by a crazy person.  No one lynches a complete stranger just to make a political point.  That is the act of a crazy person.  Yes, black people used to be lynched by perfectly normal people back in the day, but lynching was a sanctioned activity back then.  It is not a sanctioned activity now.  No town sheriff in the country would look the other way while a hapless federal employee was being strangled to death, regardless of their race.

If we accept that Bill Sparkman's killer was a crazy person, then we have to let Rush Limbaugh off the hook.  Limbaugh can be blamed for inciting his audience to do a lot of crazy things, but I'm afraid that murder isn't one of them.  

As much as I would like to rub Rush's nose in it, I can't in good conscience blame him for this horrific tragedy.  Any more than I can blame "rock music" for driving kids insane in the 90s, or for Dungeons and Dragons for driving kids to suicide in the 80s.  The truth is that crazy people do crazy things - such is the way of the world, and sad to say, the only person who can be blamed is the crazy person themselves.