When I heard about the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, I was reading Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction. It’s about American politics in the year 2044 and – despite being written back in the Stone Age of 1988 – often reads as eerily prophetic.

Early on in the novel, a political agent is targeted by a “homicidal lunatic”. Why? Because his enemies have software that automatically generates hate-mongering messages about him and forwards them to those who’ll be most influenced:

“That’s spam from a junk mailbot. I’ve seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can’t even punctuate!”

“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”

There’s no need for Manchurian Candidates in Distraction; you just bombard those “core-targets” with the right messages and wait for someone to snap and pull the trigger. Is this the sci-fi version of illustrating a map of your political opponents with gun targets, or telling your supporters to reload instead of retreating?

I don’t really have anything coherent to add to the sea of what’s already been said about the possible links between violent rhetoric and violent action. I do think it’s both fascinating and awful, though, that the shooter was also obsessed with the cause-and-effect of language. As Bob Rehak wrote: “I think some virus of language did finally get to Loughner; I think words ate him alive.”

In Australia’s last federal election, the media’s weapon of choice was a knife. When Julia Gillard replaced her predecessor Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, we were told over and over again that Rudd had been “knifed” by Gillard. Every appearance, every press conference, journalists wailed about Rudd’s knifing. Eventually you had to wonder if the metaphor had escaped them. Maybe they honestly thought he’d been stabbed, literally if not fatally. Why else would they be so determined to use the word, again and again? They must’ve been wondering why the police didn’t take their panicked phone calls!

Keith Olbermann called for the end of gun metaphors in politics, and many subsequently pointed out that violent political metaphor is nothing new. Sports are the same. One team winning, one team losing? That’s just not interesting enough. A quick google search for “football” plus “demolished” or “obliterated” or “destroyed” shows how many teams apparently disintegrated upon loss, never to play again.

(Don’t even get me started on “I’d hit that” as a substitute for “I’d like to have sex with her”, or the casual “George Lucas raped my childhood!” school of internet commentary.)

Perhaps I’m too cynical even for politics – man, that’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? – but I don’t think politicians honestly want their opponents dead. It’s almost sadder than that. I think it’s just the desperate hyperbole of those who think their audiences are drifting away.

We compare elections to sporting matches. We compare sporting matches to all-out war. Do veterans flinch to hear their horrifying experiences described in the same terms we use for teams of men running a ball back and forth across a field for an afternoon?

I can’t seem to make myself watch the videos left by the Arizona shooter, but I’m haunted after reading this statement: “All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep.”

A man using words to try to convince himself he’s a human being.