CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

America is the Bad Guy in This Movie

Image by Carol Highsmith’s America.

“We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal” -Ingmar Bergman “I could have killed ’em all, I could kill you. In town you’re the law, out here it’s me. Don’t push it. Don’t push it or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe. Let it go. Let it go.” -John Rambo

“We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal”

“I could have killed ’em all, I could kill you. In town you’re the law, out here it’s me. Don’t push it. Don’t push it or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe. Let it go. Let it go.”

I hate all the ‘good guy/bad guy’ talk belched out into the ether by law-and-order types, especially when it comes to the moral complexities of foreign policy. “We’ve gotta get in there to get the bad guys.”, “The world needs American strength to take care of the bad guys.”, “The bad guys don’t care about human right so why should we?” “I beat my wife to death last night with a tire iron but in my defense, she cooked the roast like a bad guy.”

It is all just one big, offensively over-simplistic, PR device designed to infantilize the American public around the complicated issues of life, death, and extrajudicial murder by erasing the mirror of moral ambiguity and replacing it with a black and white cartoon reality.

The end result of this specific macho genre of manufactured consent is Pete Hegseth, our swaggering Secretary of War Crimes, who seems to honestly believe that he is living in an eighties action movie. However, it isn’t always clear weather he’s trying out for the role of the hero or the villain, the good guy or the bad guy. When this flexing baboon isn’t praying to White Jesus to inflict “overwhelming violence” on “those who deserve no mercy” at creepy Pentagon prayer breakfasts, he’s bragging about America’s superhuman prowess when it comes to raining down “death and destruction” on the deadly 5th grade schoolgirls of Iran in some hopped-up press junket.

The only thing marginally more sickening than that creep’s Bratpack jock antics is the fact that a frightening percentage of Americans are somehow still falling for it even while the rest of the world cringes and clinches their collective sphincter.

I hate to........

© CounterPunch