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
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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?