On Villains and Villainy

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” – Gerald Seymour in Harry’s Game

When I first heard the Joker movie with Jaoquin Phoenix was being made, I admit I was disturbed in the slightest. Critics of pop culture have long criticized what has seemed like a gradual and unnecessary decent into what seems like an anything-goes mentality for entertainment’s sake. The inundation of sex, drugs, and violence in pop culture appears to be on one hand merely for the sake of titillation yet on the other hand a reflection of the Western world’s dark underbelly it seems the average citizen doesn’t want to concede exists nor accept their explicit or implicit role in.* It is, however, the glorification of the villain that has troubled me the most when it comes to pop culture. I can name countless movies, not to mention countless musical artists, whose villains and villainy outshine their protagonists.

[Perhaps the same can be said for the world at large.]

To be clear, I prefer my villains to be complicated, for their motivations to be more than evil simply because that’s who the villain cannot help being. Certainly, the new Joker movie is a reflective character analysis in this regard. Even the long string of Marvel movies were part of a story arc that centered around stopping a ‘mad’ Titan, Thanos, from wiping out half the life in the universe. His murderous methods aside – which we assume are wrong – it’s difficult to say what’s wrong with Thanos’ motivations for those of you who are aware of them. I think it’s fair to want interesting villains – the world is not black-and-white after all – but we’ve reached the point where in America’s culture at least, we’re literally rooting for the bad guy.

Case in point; at last night’s WWE’s Hell In A Cell Pay-per-View (I apologize for still keeping tabs on professional wrestling at my age), a character called The Fiend did not win the championship match and fans in the audience were audibly upset. This Fiend character is very popular among the internet wrestling community to the point that fans would rather see him crowned champion than have a face (good guy) retain the gold. I agree that the character is interesting and that the heel (bad guy) needs to win on occasion to maintain the delicate and eternal dance between good and evil alive for the sake of storytelling, but for a crowd to nearly riot when the heel doesn’t win indicates something is possibly wrong with either the Western psyche, the current rules of society, or perhaps a matter of definitions. (It is possibly all of these.) I can point to actual current events to make my case.

The election of Donald Trump to President of the United States in 2016 couldn’t make my point clearer, being of the opinion that Donald Trump is clearly a villain. Why; what has he done that is so wrong? I could name a number of things and not be nearly exhaustive: Asking foreign powers to interfere in U.S. elections, accepting the word of despots over his own intelligence community, cavorting with said same despots, backing out of treaties with traditional allies and treating them with contempt, rolling back environmental and civil protections, coddling white supremists and stoking xenophobia, ignoring the U.S. Constitution (this is perhaps because he’s clearly never read it), embezzling from his charities, doing nothing about gun violence, and generally acting like a third-grade schoolyard bully. While I understand the frustration of many modern American voters with the federal government, I was aghast to find out a large swath of the U.S. thought Donald Trump was the answer. In my opinion, I can’t say Donald Trump has never done any good as U.S. president – even a broken clock is right twice a day by accident – but does the good outweigh the bad? No, because all things considered, the person in question wouldn’t be a villain. Inevitably, then, we’re forced to think about what exactly makes someone a villain.

What is a villain? The definition of ‘villain’ is broad throughout various dictionaries, meaning anything from the antithesis of the protagonist in fiction to generally someone doing harm to others in reality. In either case, a villain is typically breaking the law. They are considered dangerous or have behaved heinously towards any given person or group of people. A villain is often considered immoral, and therein lies a problem.

To some people, Donald Trump is a hero, a freedom fighter even. He is a protagonist to all those who feel they’ve been ignored, stepped on, or otherwise aggrieved by the federal government. The current president of the U.S. doesn’t play by the established laws, traditions, or unwritten social contract. This makes him a terrorist to some (in that word’s broadest sense) and a hero to others who feel that the current laws, traditions, and unwritten social contract need to be revised or reset to reflect some unspecified glory somewhere in America’s history. (Possible interpretation: When they felt more entitled.) So if a villain can also be a hero, there must either be something wrong with our definition or perhaps there is no such thing as a villain, objectively speaking.

It’s easy to contend there is something wrong with the definition. Scores of English words are too broad in their definition to be of much use or are outright confusing; ask anyone studying the English language. I contend that in modern U.S. culture, the definition of ‘villain’ is so ambiguous as to be vague to the point that many people would not know when they are behaving as a villain. (I’m not sure which is worse, a villain who knows they’re a villain or one who doesn’t know they’re a villain.) It also seems wrong to label anyone who offends us or that we simply don’t like as a villain, but that does seem to be the manner in which many Americans now operate.

Do villains exist, objectively speaking? Not if all cultures are relative, something we have to assume if not all cultures can agree that murder is wrong. (There’s always a caveat.) Villains can exist within a given culture, certainly, as there is no doubt that people have existed that have flouted the laws of a society they are seemingly a part of. Again, though, this allows a villain to be a hero to society’s downtrodden or any one outside of a society that would like to see that society fail. So it’s hard to say villains actually exist anymore than we can now say heroes exist. Now we can see that heroes merely prop up the rules of society, and this would make them villains in someone’s eyes somewhere.

My original feelings towards the Joker movie have to be misgiven. After all, what does his nemesis Batman do but prop up the rules in Gotham City? Imagine Batman having grown up in 1930’s Germany; what would he have been but a Nazi superhero come WWII? Thank goodness he’s not, but Batman must be seen as a villain by some law enforcement agencies; there are procedures for catching and detaining criminals and subsequently putting them on trial. When this sense of fairness is broken can we agree this is something villainous? In the Joker movie, the central figure that is Arthur Fleck is driven insane by a thousand unfair psychological cuts, so can we blame him for the anarchy that ensues?  Can we blame a mass shooter who goes on a rampage because they think they’ve been treated unfairly?

Hopefully you are saying ‘yes’ because you agree that murdering innocent people, people who have not directly affected the shooter, are being murdered and we have to agree this is wrong no matter what society we belong to. Breaking two fairness rules – making two wrongs – does not result in a right, correct? Unfortunately, any given mass shooter or lawbreaker will have sympathizers. (To say nothing of laws that should be broken either because they are apparently unethical or quite ridiculous.) It would make more sense for a mass shooter to only kill the people that have affected them assuming the punishment fits the crime against them and we’ve never seen that.

If we invoke this rule of fairness which we, Western culture, seem to have forgotten as of late it might be easier to gauge who the villains are when the doctrine of fairness is broken. Given the current impeachment inquiry regarding Donald Trump, his proponents can argue for an investigation into the Bidens ad nauseum, and I’d be okay with that, but so should there just as well be an investigation into Trump as well. The fact that Donald trump obstructs justice in a manner that most of us cannot violates the fairness doctrine. I think it therefore reasonable to construe him as a villain. Then again, his proponents see this ‘unfair’ characterization as exactly what’s wrong with current American culture (despite these same people not wanting to do anything about solving the problem of mass shootings, which I view as villainous). I can’t imagine asking a Donald Trump supporter what they think made Obama such a villain because it seems like their definition is going to wind up being arbitrary. In fairness, though, I am willing to hear them out. Villains on the other hand hear no one out and simply assume they are entirely in the right.

PHILOSOPHY: DEADER THAN EVER

Be wary of certainty; one’s degree of inaccuracy is often inversely proportional to their insistence of accuracy. – Theory Parker

I find myself needing to leave social media. The question is not why; it’s a waste of time if you don’t have an undying need for people to like you. If there’s any question about leaving social media, it would be why not? What do any of us get out of social media? Yes, there’s the dopamine boost we get from people ‘liking’ something we post – that undying need again – but this simply amounts to one of the many drugs we could all do without. Among its other uses, social media is used to announce the ongoings of our businesses, which really is just 21^st century panhandling. (Worst among this trend is GoFundMe, in which everyone begs for money because somehow their situation is unique and deserving of the rest of us throwing our money at it. On a rare occasion, special circumstances do arise or an actually useful invention come along, but spare me your need to raise money for your classroom.) Perhaps social media gives us a chance to congregate with other like minds, albeit in the most superficial way because really, who has time for an entire phone call, an entire conversation? I know I don’t because I’m too busy working, working all the time, with people, and when I’m done with that I don’t want to deal with more people. This is not to say I don’t like my family and friends; I’m just exhausted. And I’m more exhausted by what I see on the internet. We look at posts from family and friends and it’s never too long before something – some kind of train wreck often political in nature – catches our eye. Noooooo, I often say to myself of some headline before being forced by curiosity, amazement, or (usually) disgust to delve deeper. This cannot be the world we are living in. It just can’t.

The internet is without question one of the worst things to ever happen to mankind. Yes, it has allowed us to connect on an unprecedented level with people far and wide. And yes, it has allowed us access to an unprecedented amount of information. Both of these things is what has kept the world from turning away from the insanity it has always known, instead using the internet to strengthen beliefs and tribal ties. Instead of using the access to information to study different cultures and perhaps change archaic ways of thinking, people dove headfirst into the concrete pool of confirmation bias to strengthen their ties to whatever community it is they consider themselves a part of. The internet gave people access to others of like mind and hence we have been given a world that instead of getting any better* has given new rise to authoritative governments around the globe. Militant Islam would not have nearly as many members as they do now if not for the internet. Vladmir Putin controls the internet and all other media in Russia to keep himself in power. China and North Korea likewise control what can be accessed through the internet. And you simply cannot go on the internet in America without catching a glimpse of the alt-right and the regressive left frothing at you and each other. Even if you somehow avoid that, there is sure to be someone who has something nasty to say about something no matter how innocuous the post.

Given an unfettered path to confirming one’s bias,’ philosophy became roadkill along the way. The last thing you’ll ever read on the internet is someone beginning their post with, “I may be wrong, but…” There is simply no reflection of thought, no self-analysis of ideas or one’s beliefs. Social media has become nothing more than a game of saying how right one thinks they are about whatever bullshit they want to believe. And surely if one uses ALL CAPS to say it, it becomes all the more true. There is simply no reasoning with anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis. Try to think of the last time you actually changed someone’s mind – difficult isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve done it myself since 2010 when I showed a college freshman the data on CFC’s and how it affected the ozone layer, thus convincing him that human activity can have an effect on the environment. This was a rare and exceptional case perhaps because the young man’s mind was open to new ideas. But this is not the case for most people of any age. Entrenched belief is difficult to dislodge because people hate to be wrong; most people see being wrong as a defect instead of a virtue, something to learn from.

Philosopher’s themselves are also to blame for the death of philosophy. Physicist Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was dead back in 2011, making note that today’s philosophers have not kept up with or have failed to take into account the data emerging from the sciences. And why would they when most philosophers’ views can be ‘confirmed’ by others of similar thinking on the internet? You can search the ‘pros’ of communism with at-the-ready counter-arguments against its detractors within seconds, nevermind any lack of objectivity. Unfortunately philosophers are people, too, and like most people are typically not above confirmation bias. Despite real-world evidence that communism simply doesn’t work in practice, many young idealists still think it can. (Ah, ah, ah –Like every other attempt at communism, China is only communist on paper.)

The failure of philosophers to ‘keep up’ combined with the effect the internet has had on people has given Americans a country hijacked by the regressive left and the alt-reich. You read these people’s comment’s on the internet every day, whose typical comment is usually rife with some false assertion and/or unblinking hypocrisy. False assertions are one thing – we don’t typically have time to fact-check everything – but the hypocrisy is breathtaking. For example, Putin and Russia were basically enemies during President Obama’s tenure but because Trump is friends with Putin, Russia was somehow never our enemy after Trump’s election. Or take Sarah Huckabee Sander’s attack on a business owner for booting her out of a restaurant while agreeing that a bakery had the right to refuse gay people service. But the regressive left is no prize either, who can’t see its own policy of denying anyone with a difference of opinion to speak at college campuses as fascist. You also cannot bring up the atrocities of any other race throughout history as only white people have committed crimes against humanity. Anyone who dares think is either dead or is dying in the middle.

All of this is why I’m a misanthrope. We can’t have discussions anymore, as if we ever could. For fuck sake, female scientists have had a historically rough time being taken seriously even though data should speak for itself. If scientists can’t be rational, what hope is there for everyone else? There is no hope. We’ll die by our own hand having never learned from the Roman Empire even though their collapse was well-documented. And if any philosopher hasn’t given up yet, they will eventually be hunted down and murdered by whichever side ultimately wins the culture war. That is what authoritative regimes do, after all. The U.S. is dealing with two right now that are engaged in an ideological war that will ironical kill nothing but ideas.

Depends on their PR person.

The United States: It's Not All Bad

“Today's the fourth of July / Another June has gone by / And when they light up our town / I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.” Aimee Mann

I often have difficulty finding nice things to say about my native country, the good ol’ U.S. of A. Given the various collective consciousness’ of Americans and not finding myself a part of any of their groups, I find it nearly impossible to consider myself an American; if anything, I consider myself a citizen of the world. Still, it would benefit me to find something nice to say about the country I live in despite the overwhelming stupidity I am often surrounded by. With that in mind, there is definitely something nice to say about the United States of America, namely, that it is a country that against all odds eventually gets it right. Sometimes it is a country that even apologizes.

I am speaking chiefly of two recent news items. One, the recent Supreme Court ruling that gays and lesbians be legally allowed to wed across the country; a shocking and staggering decision given the judges currently sitting on the Supreme Court. (Of course, the vote wasn’t unanimous. You can always count on Justice Scalia to be a dick to every non-white, non-Republican, non-Christian citizen.) Two, little more than a week earlier, a white supremacist shoots nine dead in South Carolina, prompting a weeks-long national backlash against the South’s traditional symbol of racial hatred, the Civil War era’s Confederate flag.

Naturally, the racists went practically Darwinian on us and attempted flooding the Internet with 'clever' memes like this one:

And the meme works…for about a second until you think about it even superficially. Did the U.S. government slaughter Native Americans and screw them out of their land? Yes. Did they intern innocent Japanese citizens during WWII? I believe so. Did the Bush Administration OK torture of Iraqis? You betcha. Is police brutality a major issue these days? Yes, yes it is. So, the thinking goes, the U.S. flag and the people it represents must be as bad if not worse than the Confederate flag and the people it represents.

Whoa, little fellers! There is one major difference between the U.S. flag and the Confederate flag and the people they respectively represent: The U.S. government eventually apologizes for the mistakes it makes. Even if such apologies are lip-service, apologies are often made and some kind of relationship is established between the victimized parties and the perpetrators. Those who are beholden to the Confederate flag have never done this or even tried; they have never said, “Gee, we’re really sorry for our ancestors doing what they did to your ancestors.” Instead, they continue to fly a flag – a symbol – of their continued hatred of groups of people simply because such proponents are dimwitted and unable to understand anything in the world beyond themselves. Proponents of the Confederate flag will insist that their flag is merely a part of their roots, conveniently leaving out the part about being racists who would gladly lynch a black person if they thought they could get away with it. While I personally see no need to apologize for anything someone in my family might have done to anyone else, I can have sympathy towards someone’s pain and remove symbols that indicate and reinforce what a terrible person I am. Upon a moment’s reflection, the formerly ‘clever’ meme is nothing of the sort.

Conversely, though it may come late in certain situations, the U.S. as a whole gets around to making an apology. In a few years, when it is seen that gay marriages didn’t cause the universe to implode, the U.S. will get around to apologizing to the LGBT community. "Hey, guys, we're real sorry we treated you as if you weren't human. That was messed up of us." This is  something great about America, something most other countries cannot say.If you are wronged, the U.S. will eventually apologize, hopefully not posthumously like, say, the Vatican is famous for.  

The gods be willing, the U.S. may even one day apologize to itself for being a black hole of idiocy.

(Figure out the problem with this one yet? The U.S. has no jurisdiction over the pyramids which are in Egypt. And, as far as I know, Egypt has never apologized for the fact that the pyramids were built by slaves, probably because tourism brings in a boat load of money. Surely, the Egyptian government doesn’t go out of it’s way to explain how the Pyramids at Giza were built. Hint: They were really built by aliens! A belief only Americans hold. Sigh.)

The Idiocy of Dinesh D'Souza

Last week, Fox News’ Sean Hannity had fellow demagogue Dinesh D’Souza on his show so that the proud immigrant-cum-old-white-man’s-proponent could cry foul for Costco pulling his book, “America,” out of its stores. Costco defended its actions on grounds that the book was selling poorly. D’Souza, whining like the cowardly liberal babies he’s always attacking, went on to make a number of logical fallacies in his defense. This really shouldn’t surprise us since logical fallacies are consistently D’Souza’s soup-de-jour.

Does D’Souza have a right to be upset about Costco’s actions? Sure, he has a right to be upset but that doesn’t mean that his being upset is justified. As a Republican and, moreover, the fact that D’Souza extols the virtue of free markets without or with minimal regulation in his latest book, Costco should be able to sell or not sell whatever it wants. This is where D’Souza’s defenders, Hannity among them, cry ‘censorship’ apparently not knowing what the word ‘censorship’ means in relation to free markets. So here you have Costco acting in exactly the manner Republicans want businesses to act, that is, until one of their own doesn’t like it. If Costco is guilty of censorship, aren’t Christian book stores guilty of censorship for not selling books that criticize Christian beliefs? (Remember, Christian book stores are not churches and therefore are for-profit, meaning they have to play by the same rules as every other business. Hypothetically, anyway, since we know which way the Supreme Court currently leans. Thanks, Hobby Lobby.)

But Hannity and D’Souza’s main argument is to tie Costco to the Obama Administration, basically saying that there was a conspiracy to pull the book from the store. Nevermind that a score of other books by Conservative authors remain on Costco’s shelves; the decision to pull “America” was purely political. I see. So, by that argument, whenever a company contributes campaign funds to a politician, we should be wary of those types of relationships. I do not necessarily disagree, but you can’t say Fox News ever brings such

Old White Guy in Indian clothing.

relationships to light when it’s their politicians and their lobbyists. If Fox News doesn’t report it, we can’t decide. Clever. But the strangest thing about this particular argument is that Hannity and D’Souza claim a mere $303, 000 in contributions to the Obama Administration from Costco, which they consider excessive but which the rest of us consider paltry compared to what, say, oil and coal energy companies contribute to the Republican party. (Yes, they contribute to Democrats, too, though not nearly as much.) So D’Souza isn’t being any more consistent than he’s being logical. We should be wary of people like that.

If for no other reason, D’Souza’s book “America” should be pulled for being a screed minimally based in logic or reasoning, though we should expect such a book from someone can’t operate without his logical fallacies. A quick flip through his book at Costco (they restocked it) is all that is needed to observe the same tired, old fallacies and poor reasoning. A very quick analysis in no particular order  reveals:

1 - D’Souza criticizes Obama and social progressives for trying to install an all-watching, all-knowing government whose mission is to keep us all ‘safe’ for our own good, nevermind that it was Bush Jr. who signed the Patriot Act into law. Hmm, sounds like Cherry-picking to me. Yeah, you’re never going to see D’Souza criticize Republicans who actions harm the country. It’s just that goddamn all-powerful Obama and those 900 Executive Orders. Nevermind that this number is an out and out lie and that currently the last Prez, Bush Jr., has signed more Executive Orders. 2 – The U.S. is set for a radical cultural change (and by extension, political change) that will demolish traditional American values. First, traditional values doesn't mean those values are inherently good. Second, the U.S. today is radically different than the U.S. in 1950, which was radically different form the U.S. in 1900, which was radically different from…Wow, D’Souza is a visionary. 3 – D’Souza implies that (the philosopher) Foucault’s political philosophies are mistaken by invoking Foucalt’s sex life. Ad hominem and genetic fallacies. 4 – The U.S. should not be morally condemned for conquering America and taking it from Native Americans since conquering other peoples is simply how humanity operates. On this account, I don’t see why D’Souza is upset by the growth and progress of social liberals in the U.S. since this is simply how humans operate. 5 – The U.S. is in decline, basically on all accounts, nevermind that this has been the case long before D’Souza came on the scene. So, again, not prophetic. The idea of “American Exceptionalism” was never real to begin with, but apparently no one told D’Souza. 6 – D’Souza decries the loss of the Constitution’s real meaning, where all men were created equal except slaves, while at the same time condemning slavery; these are internally inconsistent viewpoints. (At least we agree that reparations for slavery should not be paid.)

Most of us know D’Souza’s history as an immigrant who came to the U.S. and “made it” though he “made it” by basically believing and espousing all the things old white men with power believe and espouse. If someone like D’Souza “makes it” but is on the other side of the political spectrum, D’Souza regards that person as a threat to the U.S., nevermind that such success is what D’Souza is supposed to love about the U.S. I guess, but success only on his terms. 

[Oh, and btw, D'Souza pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions in May 2014. Way to display good ol' American values, Dinesh.]