Vacation: Day 8 – Ain’t it cute?

“What’s right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.” – Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

It’s 1985, and I’ve acquired an unwanted friend. He’s a fellow student in my freshman art open studio class who has glommed on to me because of my collection of EC horror comic reprints. Over the course of the school year, he will regale me with tales about Alice Cooper, current slasher movie offerings (recounted in pornographic detail), and his plans to make a Freddy Krueger glove in metal shop.

It’s 1989, and I’ve just written an essay for Student Government Day which draws heavily on the lyrics to “Bodies” by the Sex Pistols. Although I am pro-choice, I thought it would be amusing to provoke my ultra-liberal English teacher with phrases like “converting children into clouds of greasy black smoke drifting from an incinerator’s vent.”

It’s 1994, and I’m walking with a friend along Memorial Drive, and trying (and failing) to not listen to his euphoric praise for Natural Born Killers. “It opens all sorts of new directions!” he exclaims. “Yeah, but they all lead to the abyss,” is my response.

It’s 1999, and I spend the entire long bus ride from Woburn center to Wellington Station listening to a group of teenage boys rave loudly about some new videogame for the Playstation. “Dude, you can, like, set folks on fire and they scream and shit! It’s fucking awesome! And when you shoot someone, chunks of skin fly off!”

It’s 2007, and the torture-porn flick Captivity has lowered the bar for sadism masquerading as mass market entertainment, and I wonder to myself, what the fuck is wrong with this country?

Oh, yes. It has abnegated its sense of empathy and respect for others in favor of empty nihilism. Call it Bread and Circuses 2.0. (Only there’s no bread, because fuck you if you can’t afford food.)

As someone who has worn the punk rock mantle, I am acutely aware of the appeal of nihilist transgression. I never thought I’d see it taken out of the context of playful subversion and played totally straight for the masses, though.

Fear – I Don’t Care About You (from The Record, 1982) – The official song of the Libertarian Party...or it would be, but the idea of getting together to pick a song seemed like something Big Government would do, so the members went home to work on their Ludwig Von Mises/Ayn Rand slashfic instead.

The Misfits – Last Caress (from Static Age, 1978) – The melodic side of pure evil.

we don’t torture, we’re a civilized nation

…or so claimed G.W. Bush the other day, shortly before he began prodding Congress to enact legislation legalizing secret military tribunals and the outsourcing of prisoner interrogations. Such steps are necessary, we are told, to shield military and governmental officials from being tried as war criminals. This is a war, we are told, and the government needs to use every available tool to prosecute it.

In any case, the definition of torture, as determined by the present administration, has been narrowed to include only those actions which will result in serious injury or death. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in his previous role as White House counsel, worked hard to find exploitable loopholes in the national and international war crimes statutes in order to justify the administration’s handling of prisoners. Concerns about prisoner treatment are shrugged off or derided as being soft on those who would do our nation harm. Fear mongering with a hint of racism always goes over well with the red state crowd.

Our post-industrial society is infatuated with the myth of the “hard man”, the proactive badass unconstrained by petty rules and bureaucratic timidity: someone who provides simple, preferably visceral, solutions to complex problems. In our modern world, where it can sometimes feel like every aspect of one’s life is delimited by external forces, the notion of stepping outside the boundaries to “get things done” has a strong appeal.

The traditional iteration of this archetype used to abide by a code of personal honor and responsibility to the greater good. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” wrote Raymond Chandler in 1945. This character aspect has since been abandoned. Sheriff Kane and Phillip Marlowe have been pushed aside in favor of trash-talking thugs of the Mike Hammer variety, Machiavellian predators whose “goodness” is measured in the rawest utilitarian terms.

That may work in the controlled environment of an artificial universe, but not in the real world. Real-life pretenders to hard man status either find themselves rendered ineffectual by the constraints they vowed to bypass (like two entertainers-turned-governors were), or they resort to vicious and unrestrained methods in pursuit of their goals (like the present administration is currently doing). The allure of the myth is so strong that even when the hideous nature of these actions comes out – waterboarding, anal rape, and torture via attack dogs – there will be segments of the population willing to rationalize the procedures.

“Our enemies have done worse,” they’ll argue, abandoning ideological pretexts in favor of a barbaric race to the bottom. National exceptionalism, that somnambulist sibling to conscientious patriotism, is the only justification they ever really need. America does no wrong, which is fortunate considering the damage it causes in doing "right".

Au Pairs – Armagh (from Playing With a Different Sex, 1981) – The title of this post comes from this track about the treatment of female IRA prisoners by the British authorities. The line has been stuck in my head since Bush made his announcements on secret prisons and torture earlier this week.

Dead Kennedys – Bleed For Me (from Plastic Surgery Disasters, 1981) –You know things have gotten bad when Jello Biafra’s lyrics are more relevant today than they were twenty five years ago. There’s an earlier version of this song, with Carter references instead of Reagan ones, featured in the 1981 film, Urgh! A Music War. You can watch the segment here. “There’s no punk rock in Argentina.”