I’ve been sitting along the sidelines for a couple days now, watching in disgust at the proceedings swirling around the Arizona shootings. As the oh-so-symbolic ordinance whizzes back and forth I’ve been tempted to lob one in for the home team (Note to Time Magazine: Want to sell some issues? Put Palin on your cover framed by a riflescope reticule! Call it “Caught In The Crosshairs”). There, I said it. Which illustrates something about the animalistic urge to vent, not to mention the need to establish copyright precedence.
American culture as a whole strikes me as a particularly violent one, and I do believe that there is such a beast as a national culture. We are a people that go nuts when a breast inadvertently falls out of a dance costume, yet sit back expectantly in our Barcaloungers as humans are savaged for our nightly entertainment. Martin Scorsese, that national treasure, seems not yet to have unearthed every form of human carnage imaginable. Dexter surfaces each week to tickle our collective fetish for the gruesome. What is it with us?
Humans feed on a hubris that convinces us the cosmos has been intelligently intended as our personal playground, we perched at the apex of some divine handiwork. I say bring on the meteor, the second coming, whatever Armageddon fantasy tickles your fancy. I am done with the species. To hell with us all.
