In the glow of his 12-point font manifesto, the writer’s eyes tighten above a crooked Cheshire sneer:
Sixty-seven cents of every dollar that has ever been spent in the entire existence of modern currency has been devoted to combating evil, in one form or another. These mounds of pounds and dollars and cents have been spent in service of good, countering villainy, disease, and undesirable politics. This figure, a totally fabricated statistic, represents the clear and definitive weight of the good guy proportion of the population.
Consider every coin of every dollar striking that blow for the good side. Consider every regal head of state on one side and the patriotic national symbol on the other and how they share a common purpose in this world but will never see the same perspective. Which is the benevolent side? For all of you out there thinking tails, does that make all those famous heads wrong? It’s a bummer sometimes to have a world with all this perspective.
It is clear to me, based on what I’ve gathered from cable news, action movies and my own assumptions, that we are, barring a percentage of exceptions, a society of good guys. We regularly band together in support behind the handsomer members of our political and ethnic communities, when the numbers are required, to sit back and speculate. We keep our place in the audience, in the gallery, waiting for our chance to re-evaluate the type of good that we support.
We like the good guy,
We cheer the good guy,
We buy the good guy’s running shoes,
We are the good guy.
Victories are measured by the task overcome. Games are measured in points, elections and American Idol in votes, races in heats and times, hotels and movies in stars, and good guys are measured by the bad guys they stand against.
The real question: Who is the bad guy?
Traditionally, the bad guy wears the black hat, at least when the good guy wears white. He proposes the con to the good guy’s every pro; he opposes his and our values and therefore in some way threatens the way we choose to live. Traditionally, the bad guy rides alone, he seeks to fulfill his own selfish ends without a thought to another person or idiom on the planet. He spares not woman or child, he fears a fair fight, he is doomed to be overcome.
Traditionally the bad guy is killed by Clint Eastwood.
Realistically the story is somewhat different. Realistically the bad guy is actually a person. He is the bad guy not because of his actions but because of whom he opposes. He wears hats of any number of colors, and sometimes no hat at all. He is from a place that has a flag or a church or a family tradition that differs from ours. He has the opposing viewpoint because he perceives his plight from a different part of a different chain of the mechanism of the world. Different victories of different values are important to him. His victories for those who perceive his own good are meaningful. He is the good guy in his community. Realistically the world is full of mirrors and contradictions, and completely devoid of Hollywood endings. Realistically, the bad guy is the good guy to someone.
On our dirty green and blue and real Planet Earth, with our good and our bad, and our boundaries and flags, there is no real bad guy. At least not the kind of bad guy we’ve been sold.
There is no one out there who actually wants to conquer the entire world, enslave all of humanity, murder women and children along the way, and defeat Clint Eastwood. Any similar aspirations are born of unsound faculties, and not part of the real world anyhow. The ill and the influenced, the misled, the disturbed, and the sometimes mislabeled members of our society who are not acting of sound mind or free will; they are excluded from the purely evil ranks. Even the most self-serving, egotistical Chief Executive Officer is not really seeking evil as an end to itself. Typically, again according to my trusted movie reference source, their goals are more related to personal wealth, and malevolence to others tends to be a byproduct. Not to mention that these conglomerated reality-show boss figures are in fact clearly heroes to somebody in some measure.
The problem is that the idea of a bad guy has been marketed and sold to us. And though it works for Superman and it works for Clint it doesn’t work in the real world.
The problem is every culture, every boundary, every flag and every fence is rife with good guys, and populated with perspective. The problem with perspective is that it tends to be myopic, and we don’t allow ourselves to see more than our own.
Is anything inherently evil? If none us of us bought it, do you think we’d stop following the leaders that sell it?
It’s just as unjust to presume yours is the only good as it is to assume your opponent is only evil.
Whether the threat is a political entity winged to one side, zealots of religious inspiration, earth-shattering environmental catastrophe, or a clever mélange of the three, nothing sells like terrorist cells, tsunami swells, or communist shells. An unseen enemy twisting his mustache and plotting our doom makes us watch more, buy more, cheer more, and permit more in the name of the crusade.
Forrest Gump famously said ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’ Dismissed by most under its dumb dull drawl, I’ve always thought he meant, ‘there are no stupid people only stupid actions’. The evil acts, the insidious performances we’ve all witnessed, imagined and entertained are the enemies we have to protect each other from. They’re always going to happen; weaker moments, misunderstandings, acts of aggression, crimes of passion, religious incongruences, movies with bad endings, fashion faux pas… We just have to maintain the objectivity of Forrest’s wisdom.
The likelihood of the existence of the kind of opponents in this world that we have been led to detest are about as likely as a man in a red cape flying to your rescue. Not to mention that this unlikely man will be wearing a yellow belt to hold up underwear worn over his tight blue pants. There are no archenemies or criminal masterminds bent on world domination. As close as the meanest and nastiest CEOs and political leaders might get to the cartoonish super-villain, ringing their hands and cackling maniacally, none of them actually have the misguided hubris to actually aspire to take over the world. Who would actually want the responsibility?
Self-preservation is not inherently evil
Revenge is not inherently evil
BO is not inherently evil
Poor fashion sense is not inherently evil
As much as I hate to admit it, offensive custom car paint design is not inherently evil
REAL EVIL
Stealing your girlfriend
Farting in an elevator
Leaving the toilet seat up
Re-gifting Christmas gifts
Ending sentences with prepositions
Ending essays with bad humor
Hahaha…(I’m wringing my hands)
