Reply #6: Goals, methods, motivations [View All]

[boobooday]

Here is the problem. People have now come to accept that the Good Guy can use the same methods as the bad guy. It used to be, in those Westerns, that the good guy had different methods to get what he wanted -- that is, if he wanted to stop a bad guy, and he had no choice but to shoot, he shot the guy in the leg or something. That was the difference. The bad guy would do anything, hurt anyone (with exceptions to this as well) to get what he wanted, and the hero didn't want to hurt anyone, and only resorted to violence reluctantly (although decisively, of course).

Now we have "heroes" who kill people gleefully, playfully, with vengeance and great satisfaction -- in so many popular narratives the good guys use the same methods as the bad guy, and often with the same motivations (24).

Transfer this to the polticial arena and you get people who call themselves Christians becoming cheerleaders for the war machine, and you get Abu Grahib, etc. Because now they've boiled the hero down to "goals" only, and the goal is domination, because we are exceptional, and deserve to dominate, and we're superior, and God loves us more. The motivations (or at least what are publicly stated as motivations) can change with the seasons, and the methods . . . well . . . the methods have brought shame on us all.

They are not heroic.

Our national narrative is broken, at the moment. I think the only solution is for individuals to create their own heroic narratives of citizenship, which is what I think we are doing here.