There's Nothing Romantic About Terrorists

For the better part of the past two centuries, military deserters and traitors were sent before a firing squad.

It was an admittedly messy proposition: the traitor was bound to a chair. Behind him were sandbags to absorb the splattered blood. In front of him a row of five shooters took aim at the prisoner's heart, then discharged their weapons in unison. If they happened to miss the vital organ, the crumpled prisoner was left to slowly bleed to death.

Sometime after the Civil War, the firing squad began to fall out of favor in the United States. Critics denounced it as cruel, capricious and not well suited to the civilized world. You don't empathize with traitors to your country. You eviscerate them. I write this not as an expression of free-floating sadism, but because there seems a tendency in this country to empathize with our worst criminals--to romanticize their sense of oppression and struggle. From Tony Soprano to Clint Eastwood, to Ayn Rand's Howard Roark to Snoop Doggy Dog, there is no other cultural archetype that Americans react more readily to than the antihero who challenges some oppressive segment of society. Our capitalist myths have conditioned us to distrust fate and worship the individual--hence our pathologically cheery view of cowboys and gangsters.

This makes for good movies. It also betrays a sense of just how decadent our society has become. Especially in the post-cold war era, our faith in the roaring engine of American society is complete. Our union hauls along the international economy and keeps the world safe.

It is a luxury of the American empire that we can widdle away our days romanticizing thugs, criminals and traitors. Removed from a sense of genuine threat, we can ponder their motivations and romanticize their daring. Sometimes we can even sympathize with the sense of oppression that led them to act against the common good.

 

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