Uber Alles

You see the billboards for the series Dexter all over LA these days. A boyish, All-American face smiling in a big close up…and then as you drive past you notice that the face is splattered with blood. Dexter, the eponymous hero of the series, is a serial killer employed by the FBI to locate other serial killers. When the Kevin Costner film Mr. Brooks came out I wrote about how the psychopath has become the new American archetype, and Dexter is clearly another move in this same direction. The observation would be more shocking except that, in this worship of the killer, American culture is simply catching up to American political reality. George W. Bush, after all, has been diagnosed by many psychologists as a man with overt sociopathic (if not psychopathic) tendencies.

What’s interesting to note lately is the pride the American Right feels about its own psychopathic tendencies. Pre-emptive aggression has become a civic duty. To massacre innocents is to express patriotism. The hired killers of Blackwater who have been blowing away Iraqi civilians are to be accorded heroic status for demonstrating the defining American virtues of murderous aggression, nihilistic disregard for others and complete imperviousness to any form of moral restraint. Anything less would be weak, and in the feedback loop created by our endless violence, to be weak is to invite death. This is the reducto ad absurdum of Capitalism played out on a world-wide scale, a potentially species-ending challenge we show no signs of surviving. The recipe of the Right is always to double down with the violence, and all the signs point to first use of tactical nukes against Iran as the next bid. Things will spiral downward from there.

On a small planet in a distant corner of a medium-sized galaxy there once was a species that developed a remarkable cranial capacity but, unfortunately, was unable to understand, let alone master, its own violent impulses. These impulses were given free reign by an economic system that quickly led to cancer-like environmental degradation and endless warfare. The main extinction happened quickly. Some final embers lingered on for another century or so, but now that little corner of the cosmos is tranquil once again. RIP.

It’s difficult not to feel that sort of pessimism given what’s been happening in the States over the last few weeks. Continued news of the polar ice caps giving way to open water and meanwhile the Petraeus-Move On ad nonsense…the repeated capitulations of the Democrats as recalcitrant Republicans continue to undermine the Constitution and the rule of law…news of nuclear missiles somehow, mistakenly we are told, being moved to launch sites aimed at the Middle East…reports of super-secret meetings of high level Republican aparachiks and right wing zealots such as Tim La Haye under the guise of “fund raising,” with mad dog Dick Cheney as the top bill. What are they planning, these self-appointed “deciders?” What agreements are being reached?

The real mystery is whether these folks will hand over the reins of power, even to another Republican. To do so would mean locating a previously well-hidden regard for Constitutional prerogatives. If they decide NOT TO follow such traditions, who would oppose them and how? And what are they then capable of?
Guy Zimmerman