On the difference between a surveyor's symbol and a gun site symbol ...

Could it be that someone didn't understand the subtle difference between a surveyor's marker symbol, and a gun sight symbol?

Here's a surveyor's marker, or so they said, here and sundry other places, back in March last year:

And this, it seems, is a cross-hair:
Which makes me wonder what Shuttercock thinks it's doing, offering all these images of crosshairs, gun and target sights, as part of its stock image range, here:

Of course you could just as easily blather on about how the symbol on the Palin map was eerily like the musical symbol for coda in music:


Of course that'd still require some jawboning to explain the rhetoric of taking a stand, and taking back the 20. But I guess that's just a rhetorical reference to Davy Crockett and the gang taking a stand at the Alamo, seeing as how it was such a peaceable thing to do, and the taking of Iwo Jima, seeing as how it only involved a flag raising ceremony.

Ah well, the blogs are in a frenzy, and who can blame them - Eliminationist rhetoric and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords: There are plenty of precursors - and Tucson Shooter Identified as Jared Lee Lughner - and with already too much information about the shooter, as in Jared Lee Loughner Identified as Gabrielle Giffords shooter, and much, much more to come.

If nothing else, the media are currently confirming the conspiracy theory on view in that terrible film Conspiracy Theory, featuring Mel Gibson as a conspiracy theorist, with a hapless Julia Roberts sitting next to him:

Jerry drives. The RADIO PLAYS SOFTLY. Liza sits as far
over as possible. Quiet, then finally...

JERRY
Ted Bundy. David Berkowitz.
Richard Speck.

The names just hang in the air. Liza is scared.
Finally, curiosity gets the best of her.

LIZA
What about them?

JERRY
How come serial killers have two
names, but lone gunman assassins
have three. John Wilkes Booth.
Mark David Chapman. Lee Harvey
Oswald.

LIZA
(after a beat)
John Hinkley. The guy who shot
Reagan. He only had two names.

JERRY
(without hesitation)
Reagan didn't die. If he had
died, everybody would know what
Johnny's middle name was.

(John Hinckley Jr.'s middle name was Warnock).

Well now we can add Jared Lee Loughner's middle name to the list we know. And wonder what Sarah Palin was thinking when she issued her statement about the stand taken in Tucson. Knowing that her campaign map will now stand next to her name for a long time to come ...

Guns, religious and political fundamentalism are a heady brew (not to mention the weird psychopathology of the lone shooter), and the United States is currently a paranoid state armed to the gills with personal weaponry.

That's a helluva lot more likely to bring about armageddon by 2012 than a few birds and fish falling out of the sky, which naturally in the States has been seen as signs of an approaching end times ...

It's moments like these that I always revert to The Second Coming by Yeats, and remember that while there are moments of madness, he wrote it in 1919, after the first world war, but before the second, and that while the beast keeps slouching, it's full craziness is yet to be born:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There's something about those two lines and Sarah Palin:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

My hunch is that for the rough beast to have its hour come round at last, and slouch towards Bethlehem to be born, the United States will need to elect Sarah Palin as its president ...