Criminal Minds

Everyone body sitting down, stand up!
And kill the right people
Lend a hand, Lend a killing hand
And kill the right people
--Kill the Right People, Flaming Fire
____________

It's t.v time again!

This time it is the program Criminal Minds (4/23/08), which is a riff on the Dexter theme of homicidal maniac made-good. Everybody has a role to play in the newly fascist U.S.A.

Two girls are kidnapped, with one being killed and the other held hostage. Hands are lopped off and all the other gory things which have become workaday components of television today, nicely blurring the line between reality and reality t.v., or at least, the ubiquitousness of such depicted desecrations would lead one to imagine this sort of thing going on all the time.

All this right before bedtime, no less, insuring that you better ask for that bottle of Lunesta they are advertising on the break. (The face of "branded advertising" 2.0 ?)

As an aside, the father of the hostage is a Witness Protection Program (WPP) member. You don't get to be in the WPP unless you've had a brush with some nasty behavior, and this man is your run-of-the-mill contract killer.

As you might have guessed, he goes freelance and hunts down the hostage-taker. He kneecaps one bad guy with a shotgun and obtains the hostage location. As always, it is location, location, location.

This killer then coldly executes the hostage-taking killer. Tit for tat, fade to black. Next scene: Father and ex-hostage daughter are happily settling into a new home in Atlanta, back in the WPP.

The take home? Paid professional killers are necessary to set things aright. Things will go horribly awry because there are bad men out there, but thank goodness there are equally bad men who will do the right thing and neutralize them, vendetta-style. You would not know from this program that our system had evolved from the Magna Carta.

Also, there is a subtext of collective zombiefication. We, as a nation, are not swift, smart or clear enough to be able to deal judiciously with bad guys. Instead, they must be dispensed with a form of frontier justice, lest they rustle up some horses and abscond under cover of night before their hanging. It is a posture of sheer, terrified impotence.

But this is all to the good, as it helps lighten the court docket, relieves prison overcrowding and basically gives us a chance to cheer for our bad men. They are mercenaries sanctioned and welcomed in the civilian world.

Why do all of these programs read from the same sheet of music?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

That's some cold shit, throwing my man Leroy
out the window. Just picked my man up
and threw him out the Goddamn window
--Shaft (1971)

But being as this is a .44 Magnum,
the most powerful handgun in the world,
and would blow your head clean off,
you've got to ask yourself a question:
"Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
--Dirty Harry (1971)
____________

Dirty Harry is no longer anti-hero.

This is a continuation of the recent critique on the t.v. show Dexter, about the eponymous homicidal police department technician who plies his dark trade in the service of all of mankind.

The episode which aired 4/13/07 confirmed Ranger's thesis on the seriously morally bankrupt place the writers are taking the series. It is a place in which legal meister John Yoo and Co. would be comfortable.

In this installment, a bad ass homicide cop is introduced, played by a hard black dude who also happens to be a Special Forces, Black Ops-type. It is strange to envision a SF type crossing over into this sort of police work which is usually the purview of MP's once released from active duty, but that is another story.

Bad ass former Black Ops black guy sees someone walking down the street, bag of groceries in hand. Bad ass jumps out of his car, runs the guy down and then carries out a field adjudication. In short, he of the grocery bag is executed and a throw down is placed next to his body.

After the normal yadda-yadda, it is revealed that the dead guy was a death squad type from Haiti. Bad juju, no doubt, and it was a black-on-black crime, after all. Back to a little old blaxploitation. But the long and short of it is, the death was sanctioned and the bad ass cop was covered for his expediency.

The take-home? Serial killers and former death squad members are so bad that they don't deserve to stand before a judge and jury. They can be shot down in the street like dogs, of course only by trusted SF types or homicidal maniacs made-good, like Dexter. Welcome to America, 21st century style. Meanwhile, a document called The Constitution sits yellowing under glass somewhere--an annoyance for 6th grade Civics classes to study.

Both the programs "24" and "Dexter" dwell in the same moral vacuum shared by the advocates of walking the dark side in our current administration. This series has tapped into a vein that pulses through the body politic of the U.S., and we love it and accept it as entertainment. However, this enjoyment is a reversal from early Hollywood types. Good guys wore white, or the blue police suit.

In the past, the media looked unfavorably upon rogue cops who took the law into their own hands, usually for their own benefit. It could be argued that after Vietnam, anti-heroes like Dirty Harry assumed a more tolerated and even revered place in the pantheon. Perhaps the trend to social disillusionment began earlier, after the McCarthy witch hunts. But certainly, the anti-hero was just that -- against type.

Still, the anti-hero had to throw his badge away at the end as he had broken a social covenant, witness Dirty Harry and Marshall Kane in High Noon. Though they were often fighting corruption within the system, they were punished for not being company men. In police dramas, that meant not only following the Blue code, but social norms as well.

However in Dexter, the bad behavior is sanctioned both from within the force and without (by we, the audience and society.) We accept that the rogues serve the greater good and possess the wisdom of discernment. It is justice meted out on the cheap, Dirty Harry meets Dick Cheney.

Prognostication: Dexter and the Bad Ass cop will begin to work hand in hand to eliminate national security threats as well as serial killers. It is the creation of a perversely protective social milieu in which brutality becomes the long arm of the law. You just have to trust that they won't mistake you when you are walking home with the groceries one day.

If they do, you will not have your day in court.

Dirty Deeds

And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy
--Excitable Boy, Warren Zevon

We can't let you go. You're dangerous to us.
Don't fight it, Miles, it's no use.
Sooner or later, you'll have to go to sleep
--Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create
And time for all the works of days and hands
--The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

The world needs a wake up call, gentlemen...
we're gonna phone it in
--They Live (1988)
____________

"They Live" was a classic zombie movie about keeping people blinded to reality. It should be remembered for the vapid enthusiasm of the television commentator:

"The feeling is definitely there. It's a new morning in America... fresh, vital. The old cynicism is gone. We have faith in our leaders. We're optimistic as to what becomes of it all. It really boils down to our ability to accept. We don't need pessimism. There are no limits." Sound familiar? All of this, if you just keep the reality glasses off. Right-o.

Here's your pop culture fix, with a national security slant. Don't say Ranger doesn't try and raise the discourse level above that of the madding crowd.

Dexter is a new, slick series on commercial t.v. about the titular Dexter, who has the asocial affliction of being a serial killer. It is o.k. though, because he only kills other killers. He is an avenging serial killer. In these vigilant days, it is a simple and attractive premise.

Instead of buggering up the judicial system with his likes, he is employed as a Darwinially well-adapted fixture of society. Extending the fitness theory to the biological level, Dexter is a macrophage, an organismal garbage man. And of course, per Hollywood, Dexter is preternaturally good-looking, young, intelligent and engaging.

As childhood background, Dexter ends up in the care of a police detective who recognizes Dexter's proclivities and channels them into his current constructive homicidal behaviors, i.e., scouring the streets of killers. The youth is trained early on in the art of the kill.

Now, Dexter too works in the employ of the police as a crime scene blood-spatter expert, giving him the inside track on tips to facilitate his righteous serial killing. There is a not-so-subtle subtext that sometimes, the good guys (=police) must do some bad things to effect justice.

Torture under the aegis of government, anyone? John Yoo as script consultant?

However, one disconcerting aspect of Dexter's clearing of the dead-enders is that he takes glee in their destruction. Dexter stalks and kills in the name of justice, but he tortures them before their demise as a sociopath is wont to do. Reveling in murder and mayhem outside of the boardroom generally is not kosher. Typically, he dismembers the victim's bodies, disposing of the remainders in a shrink-wrapping.

Dexter's psychopathology is justified by the vendetta-like nature of his kills. Though attractive, Dexter is a sociopath, despite his self-deluded and convenient justifications. The program is symptomatic of a shifting morality in the U.S. viewing audience, and it occupies a key Sunday night viewing slot.

The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) infects the media yet again. In effect, Dexter is following VP Cheney's injunction that to defeat terrorism, it is necessary to walk on the Dark Side (Don't do it, Luke.) The U.S. has now walked that dark side, so as embodied by this series, it is not a stretch to believe that good is the result of evil.

If the evil is directed at achieving their perverted interpretation of good, then evil has become a good. It is Neitzche's mad and arrogant transvaluation of values come home to roost. But the ubermensch doesn't much care.

For the simple mind inclined to see every battle as a Manichaean struggle, it is simplicity itself for good to employ evil to its own end. Ho, ho Silver and happy trails, to you. In this show, Dexter-cum-Cheney is a hero because he has fashioned a higher good out of dirty doings.

The father figure in Dexter is GHWB, former CIA director clearly versed in dark side etiquette. As on the show, he has taught his son how to sublimate his murderous impulses into acceptable channels. Terrorists and accused terrorists are bad, so you can torture, kidnap and kill them with impunity; in fact, with societal approval. Or at least, implicit approval. This is the era of don't ask, don't tell. Just don't get caught, for that is the cardinal sin.

Like Dexter, George W. Bush presents as a hale, well-met fellow, but underneath he is an unprincipled killer. Unlike Dexter, he tortures nations vs. individuals, per se.

The remaining characters also analogize nicely to the current paradigm. Dexter's sister is a fledgling homicide detective with an inkling of Dexter's after-hours romps. Her character equates to Condoleeza Rice: she is striving, hungry for acceptance and success, and will do anything legal to climb the career scaffold. But in her silence, she is the unwitting tool of Dexter in his murderous pursuits.

Dexter's girlfriend and her children reflect the U.S. population at large. She struggles to hold her family together as a single mother. Dexter hides his unsavory reality from her by presenting himself as a loving and caring individual. She buys into his persona as America has bought into Mr. Bush's version of reality.

Dexter and GBW are heartless, unfeeling murderers walking amongst us while pretending to be normal functioning beings. It is a vision of America straight out of a George Romero nightmare. We the viewers and we the voters have bought into the illusion of goodness.

How much longer will Americans play the dupe?