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“A
Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting
Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in
America” by Tom Zoellner; Viking ($26.95)
———
The best
material in Tom Zoellner’s “A Safeway in Arizona:
What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the
Grand Canyon State and Life in America” comes at the
beginning: a moment-by-moment breakdown of the events of
Jan. 8, 2011, when, during a Congress on Your Corner
event at a Safeway store in Tucson, 22-year-old Jared
Lee Loughner opened fire with a 9-millimeter Glock,
wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and killing
six others in a rampage that took “approximately
fifteen seconds from start to finish.”
These are
the facts, and Zoellner, a former reporter at the
Arizona Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle, does a
good job of setting them out for us, breaking down the
chaos and giving it an order, telling us something of
the victims, who they were and where they were standing,
as well as the small, essential acts of bravery that
prevented Loughner, in all likelihood, from causing
further harm.
Once this
opening is finished, “A Safeway in Arizona” faces
some irresolvable problems — problems of construction
and, even more, of interpretation and form. In writing
about the Giffords shooting, Zoellner has taken on a
story that is, for now anyway, open-ended, full of
unanswered questions about the congresswoman’s
recovery and the fate of her assailant, who has yet to
go on trial. How, then, do we get to the center of it,
when the center has yet to be determined? What gives
this the coherence of a book? As it turns out, such
issues ultimately derail Zoellner’s efforts, which, of
necessity perhaps, quickly turn outward, considering the
culture of Arizona and asking whether the state’s
“peculiar oxygen (was) in some way responsible for the
decision of a twenty-two-year-old man to go down to the
grocery to assassinate his congresswoman?”
Zoellner’s answer? Yes and no, which makes for another
set of problems, since it leaves us never completely
sure of where he stands.
This
matter of Zoellner’s standing, his positioning in the
story, is important because, as he acknowledges from the
early going, he and Giffords are friends. He worked on
her campaigns and hung out with her in her Barrio Viejo
neighborhood south of Tucson’s downtown. Some of the
most affecting writing in the book, in fact, involves
these peregrinations, their visits “to a hipster bar
on Congress Street” or to the shrine of El Tiradito,
“the castaway” — a “crumbling brick crib full of
flickering glass candles” that dates to the 1870s but
remains unrecognized by the Catholic Church “because
it commemorates the death of a sinner.”
Here, we
get a taste not just of Zoellner’s relationship with
Giffords but also of Arizona history, and the tensions
that define the state. It’s not a far stretch from the
outcast status of El Tiradito to the immigration battles
embodied by Senate Bill 1070 or the desperation of a
graying white power structure to maintain its influence
over an increasingly Latino populace.
Such
issues come up often in “A Safeway in Arizona,” as
Zoellner seeks to use the Giffords shooting as a mirror
to reflect the unresolved conflicts of the state. One by
one, he cycles through real estate development,
immigration, gun rights, the rise of the tea party, the
breakdown of community — all as a way of getting at a
larger context, in which the attack might make a twisted
kind of sense. Although he backs away from the notion
that heightened rhetoric, both in Arizona and on the
national level, might have influenced the shooter (“I
don’t think,” he writes in the closing pages,
“that the atmosphere of twenty-first-century Arizona
made this crime inevitable or was the motivating cause
of it. There was only one responsible human party: Jared
Lee Loughner, who is gravely mentally ill”), he
can’t help coming back to the sense that it may have
been a factor all the same.
“Loughner’s
feelings of existential helplessness were a distorted
amplification of what surrounded him that year in
Arizona: a lack of jobs, a lack of confidence in the
future, an angry dialogue, a sense that politicians were
ultimately to blame, and that only a courageous act of
restoration could improve the outlook,” Zoellner
writes. And yet, if that’s the case, what of
Loughner’s profound psychological derangement, which
Zoellner also documents? What of his belief that
Loughner might have been stopped had only someone —
parent, fellow student, administrator at Pima Community
College, from which he was suspended three months before
the shooting — “start(ed) a legal process to get
(him) some treatment or committed to a hospital”?
Here we
have a key contradiction of “A Safeway in Arizona,”
which veers between seeing the Giffords shooting as
emblematic and isolated, as a metaphor for a larger
social dysfunction and the act of a disturbed young man.
Zoellner, it seems, believes it’s both, but he never
quite articulates that convincingly. Again, it’s a
matter of knowing where he stands — but even more, it
has to do with his inability to find a through-line, to
frame the shooting in the broader terms he seeks.
Certainly,
Giffords became a lightning rod in the year before she
was attacked by Loughner: targeted on an election map by
Sarah Palin, disparaged for her “yes” vote on the
healthcare bill. Certainly, Arizona is a state with many
problems, perhaps most centrally, Zoellner suggests, its
lack of a population with deep roots. Still, there’s
no particular evidence that the Giffords shooting has
anything to say about the place itself. What is it about
Arizona? For all that Zoellner wants to connect the
dots, if his book has anything to tell us, it’s that
this could have happened anywhere.
In the
end, that brings us back to the essential problem of a
project such as this one: that it is impossible to tell
a story before it is done. There’s still too much we
don’t know about the Giffords shooting, beginning with
the fate of Giffords herself.
As for
Loughner, it’s clear from the traces he left behind
that he’s as dissociated as they come. “I’m in a
terrible place,” he declared in a video posted on
YouTube in fall 2010: a brief moment of clarity in an
otherwise rambling monologue. It is from out of such a
place that he acted on Jan. 8, 2011 — a place that,
despite Zoellner’s arguments to the contrary, has less
to do with Arizona than with his own bleak and jumbled
inner world.
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