I have, thus far, been refraining from using this space for pure commentary and reportage, because I have wanted to stretch my literary muscles and nudge myself towards creating more challenging and more broadly appealing material than merely my opinions on the day’s news.

But this is one of those historic days where commentary seems mandatory. It feels like to not talk about today’s tragedy would be foolish, like ignoring the white hot meteor that is not the top floor of your house just because you’d palnned to work in the basement today, and I want to get my thoughts down fresh before I have had too much time to think about it.

For those who have not yet heard : In Tuscon, Arizona today, a gunman shot and killed six people, including a prominent judge, and twelve others were wounded non-fatally, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Here’s my thoughts, in no particular order.

1. Not of primary importance but worth getting out of the way first : It bothers me a little that if a tragedy happens to a group of people, all of whom are equally valid living humans in the eyes of the law and ethics, nevertheless, the headline will be “Most famous person in the group has tragedy occur to them! Also, some other people, we guess. ” Six people are dead. None of them are in the headline as it is being reported around the globe. The headline is about Gabrielle Giffords, who is alive, despitebeing shoot clean through the head. Admittedly, she was the primary target of the attack and from a sociopolitical point of view that is extremely important. But I still have to wonder what the families of the people who were actually killed by this madman are thinking about the press furor completely ignoring their departed loves one because they were just not famous enough to be interesting to the press, even dead.

2. After the Republican congressional victory in November, I predicted that there would be an incident fairly soon that would be a jarring, game-changing incident which would finally make people step back from all the superheated rhetoric and venomous vitriol and start to think about consequences and temperature. My biggest dear since Obama won in 2008 was that this would take the form of another Oklahoma City type event, something so enormous and horrible that it would be like another 9/11 and people would be picking up the pieces for decades.

After all, the Oklahoma City bombers were right ring extremists during an age where the intellectual and political leadership of the right wing of American politics were screaming for Bill Clinton’s head on a plate, trying to impeach him, and vilifying all Democrats. And that was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the madness surrounding Barack Obama’s rise to power. The level of rage and frustration and uttery insanity that is both represented by and in responsible for the Tea Party movement and the eager and rechless stoking that Fox News provides in bulk dosage 24 hours a day.

But after the 2010 election, anoher poissibility antered my mind : not another Oklahoma City but another Kent State. I could quite easily imagine a group of angry Tea Party protestors, drunk on group outrage and that evil nector self-righteous fury, in a tense standoff with state troopers trying to keep them from storming and looting some government building, and one of the younger troopers thinks he sees a gun, and suddenly a dozen or so middle-aged white people are gunned down in a hail of trooper fire, and everything gets one whole hell of a lot worse.

Today’s incident is nothing like that. This is more like the random senseless act of some Weather Underground style radical fringe group at the height of tension in the late 60’s. It’s a sign of how bad the times have gotten, but it’s not quite the epoch-shattering event that Kent State became.

But hey, the Republicans have only held Congress for what, three days? Plenty of time left for the right wing to completely fail to learn anything from this, continue to build the pressure up, and have some nutcase pop off and do something that will make today’s incident an almost laughable footnote, or perhaps a widely quoted warning tremor before the major earthquake.

3. Having just seen it for the first time ever recently, I can’t help bu think of the De Niro classic Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle was just a lone nut who wanted to kill a Senator for complicated person reasons that were only marginally political, or for that matter, sane. And yet, that movie brought so much of what was going on in the world of the late 70’s into focus that it became far more than just the story of one lonely and disturbed man’s descent into self-righteous madness. It became the film that made an era really look at itself and ask where all this was headed.

I am sure that before this spring is over, there will be the big budget movie based on this incident. I will be curious to see how the incident is spun in it.

Well that’s my thoughts for now. Maybe more later, but for now, I will forget all about it and try to go back to a non serious life.