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| Find a boat and get low. Really low. |
If your watching it, its for you.
I.
No doubt you were far too smart to see yourself as gleefully cheering on the Hunger Games last Friday. Captivated as the brothers were hunted, chased, shot at, run over, blown up, injured and killed. Like the remaining 2 minutes of the 4th quarter in the Super Bowl you were wise enough not to see your own pathetic existence (or the lack of it) as the reason for your rapt attention. The premiere was commercial free. Lucky you.
Did you follow it on cable? Twitter maybe? The savvy among you tuned in the Boston Metro Police scanner feed. If your over 45 you ignored your children’s howling until the networks broke in. The word online was that this event was the death of the Main Stream Media, who were behind the first twittered events by several hours and even when they decided to go live they looked like that drunken uncle who, also missing fingers from the great war, was trying to get his ipad dongle into the proper port.
Like watching an exploding fertilizer plant, you just couldn’t pull yourself away. Good thing you are not fooled as you would have seen the symptom of your illness. At least this didn’t occur in a city like Los Angeles. The cops there would have leveled the neighborhood and burnt the suburbs down while gang banging your sister Katniss. But you didn’t listen to Dorner so that point is mute.
II.
When did cowering in your houses because an inept 19 year old was on the loose, then emerging from your self inflicted prison with a 10 second video of gunshots in some far off distance, then blessing your captors and going off to get drunk become #Boston Strong? What fucking backwards universe does one exist in for any of that to equate to perseverance, strength and resilience?
“Hey, fuckface! We were stuck in our houses all day watching CNN. That takes intestinal fortitude!!”
No doubt. Look, I get that your car was blocked in by the SWAT truck and your favorite watering hole was closed due to 18 media trucks backed in against the front door but lets not pretend your heroes ok. Two generations ago they would have grabbed a bat and took to the streets. Today we grab our smartphones and pray there is enough Doritos in the pantry. Oh fuck! There is only 1 Coke Zero left...
III.
The suspect, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, was found hiding in a boat just outside the area where the police had been conducting door-to-door searches all day, the Boston police commissioner, Edward Davis, said at a news conference Friday night.
“A man had gone out of his house after being inside the house all day, abiding by our request to stay inside,” Mr. Davis said, referring to the advice officials gave to residents to remain behind locked doors. “He walked outside and saw blood on a boat in the backyard. He then opened the tarp on the top of the boat, and he looked in and saw a man covered with blood. He retreated and called us.” - NYT
If it takes you hours to drive somewhere, set up and then knock someone down, you probably didn't need to knock him down. Not that Tsarnaev didn't deserve it, but in truth knocking him down was the boat owners right, not the police's. Read that again. The police have a partial monopoly on power because they promise us to use it judiciously, when necessary-- but we often forget that we humans retain a special right for scenarios, like the scenario of a homicidal maniac hiding wounded in a boat. That guy you're allowed to hit, if you can.
The point here is not that the owner should have tackled him. The point is the more police get to use our right of force, the more we become afraid, or even forget, to use it ourselves. Remember that it was a citizen disobeying the police state that finally found the kid. None of the gadgets and overwhelming presence found him. That show was for you dear spectator. But, the result is that the tenuous balance of power between citizen’s and police’s use of force slowly becomes a monopoly. And an expensive monopoly at that.
IV.
When Nietzsche said "God is dead" he meant that God is not necessary any more for our morality. When he says we killed God, he means that our science, skepticism, education, have pushed us past the point where believing in miracles is possible; but (and this is a biggie) as a consequence of this loss we are now lost, we have no goals, no aspirations, no values. God may have been made up, but believing in him at least gave us a reason to progress forward.
The resulting nihilism requires us to either despair, return back to medieval religion, or look deeper within us and find a new source of human values.
Yet... none of those things happened.
The post-modern twist is that we didn't kill God after all: we enslaved him. Instead of completely abandoning God or taking a leap of faith back to the "mystery" of God; instead of those opposite choices, God has been kept around as a manservant to our baser drives. We accept a "morality" exists but secretly retain the right of exception: "Yes, murder is wrong, except in this case I am justified.” There is always a justification when the narcissus strikes.
V.
But no one likes to see the consequences of abstract philosophy played out on the streets of Boston, so I'll just offer you some advice. The full of rage narcissists’ are the most violent not when they are insulted or attacked or hated but when they are abandoned to objective reality, the one that doesn't comply with their mirroring demands. You don’t bomb a marathon because you are stoked about Chechen independence but because no one takes you seriously and your own family thinks your a loser. Most likely because, well, you are. Now, you say, we will show them. Such a person invariably is backed by an enslaved God, which means all things are possible. Nothing is immoral, at least, not in this case...
See how this works? No? Read slowly. “But...in this case...It’s okay because...”
Ah, those words presuppose an even higher law than the one that says, "thou shalt not." That God-- which isn't a spiritual God at all anymore but a voice in your head-- the one that examines things on a case by case basis, always rules in favor of you the individual, which is why he was kept around in the first place. Thank god.
“Bombing innocents...Hiding on my sofa....not running a fertilizer plant safely are okay IN THIS PARTICULAR case because...”
And so we spend the time between now and the next commercial free, explosion packed manhunt debating the reasons that come after the word ‘because’ and debating about the idiots who are debating. Its a ratings bonanza. I guess we like to think it matters. We pick sides. Post screeds on Facebook and sleep like the heroes we just know deep down we really are.
N.
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