Victimization and terrorism finally come full circle

I'm starting to wonder what the next evolution of American culture is going to be, since I would like to think the whole oppressed victim thing is beginning to grow beyond its practical limits. When everybody's a victim, maybe it finally looks stupid and counterproductive. It seems like a strange thing to aspire to, but every public figure who stumbles seems to dig their way out by attacking those who exploit their failures, or even just the people who point them out, which is somehow worse then screwing up in the first place. The real benefit of being a victim, though, is the relaxation of ethics.

Remember ten years ago when terrorism was a set of unethical methods of warfare, and BAD? Then everybody slowly started becoming a terrorist: first all our enemies, then everything harmful thing like child pornography became linked to terrorism, then any opposition to the administration's mandate became linked to terrorism. Finally there were logical inconsistencies in the definition, whereby Franklin Roosevelt, the Founding Fathers, and the Minutemen would all be caught up in the wave of terrorism spreading throughout history. Michael Collins and the IRB used to be invoked as an example of ambiguity of perspective, because they created urban guerrilla warfare and over the next 50 years the organization evolved into the Provisional IRA, who were indisputably a terrorist organization, but now there weren't any fine distinctions to be made.

And that's when the ethical lines needed to blur a bit more, and we all realized there's no moral judgment applied to the actions of terrorists, it's about their goals. FDR and Francis Marion may not have followed the rules of war, but it's okay because they were on the right side. "History is written by the winners" and "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" used to be about bias and distortion, but now they're quoted as proof that emotional perspective is not subject to logical observation. The KKK may have been terrorists, but a guy who bombs abortion clinics to spread fear is doing God's work, not terrorism. Then something even scarier happened, when method and ethics stopped mattering, the label stopped mattering so much, and now even the Good Guys are terrorists too. The Founding Fathers now were terrorists, just like the Iraqis, and we don't have to justify Dresden or Nagasaki.

Don't believe me? Christian kids are going to camps which justify themselves by invoking terrorism. The director of the bible camp Kids on Fire says, “I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places because, excuse me, we have the truth.” I don't care if she thinks they have the truth, I just care that the fact that somebody is brainwashing boys into blowing themselves up on the West Bank somehow means we have to do it too? Their stated goal is to take back America for Christians, and they pop balloons that say "government" on them as part of some exercise to identify their enemies. Then they all pray in front of a cardboard cut-out of... the president. Here's the thing, they have to be victims of an oppressive wave of secular culture that's out to destroy them, and they have to be losing. Government is the enemy, but somehow President Bush is not part of that, because he's a victim too.

My favorite though for the special ethical status of victims is the way for instance, women apparently identified with Kathy Bates breaking a man's ankles in Misery because even if it was a psychotic act of violence, it was still empowering. And it's not so ridiculous, the pervasive sugar-and-spice myth does make life that much worse for everybody, and it can take an image like a psychotic female stalker to make us even aware of it. What's weird though is being able to be proud of it somehow, like only being able to respond emotionally to the politics, and again you have to put aside any ethical or moral response. Sure it's fun to threaten the ruling class, but it's not so much fun when everybody's a victim, because then you get things in the same vein like Sen. George Allen saying he had a Confederate flag, a picture of confederate soldiers, and a noose in his office because of his rebellious youth. Invoking slavery and lynchings while governor of a southern state is certainly rebellious to common decency. My favorite though are these t-shirts from Aryan Wear, modeled here by white supremacist folk singers Prussian Blue.

They claim they're all about pride, not hatred, but can invoke mass murder on a scale so large as to have permanently changed institutions throughout the western world, and it works, because now they really are the victims of hatred, mine. Seriously, the sight of them does make me angry, but fortunately, I'm not a terrorist, and I don't care what they wear or sing or where they do it, I just worry about who's dumb enough to listen.