Tag Archives: Evil

The Modern Prometheus doesn’t fear your Second Amendment. He fears fire.

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By HE I mean Dr. Frankenstein’s penultimate scientific industrial creature, Capitalism. Everything I know about bringing down the system I learned from horror movies. Maybe. Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker knew not only the evils to be feared, but which fears paralyze evil. For Frankenstein is was fire. For Dracula, daylight. Pretty damn spot on.

The Second Amendment sidearm may protect you from troops quartering in your house and raping your maidens, but guns don’t have the stopping power to bring down man-made monsters. Capitalism is preoccupied about being immolated however. Maybe that’s why people can easily get a license to concealed carry, but will serve years in prison for possession of incindiaries. Molotov cocktails have stopped heavy tanks. Whether or not fire brought down the WTC, the state definitely doesn’t want you to have it. Mankind’s first tool. DIY.

Frankenstein the Modern Prometheus was undeterred by bullets. Like every undead monster since, Frankenstein was held off by fire.

Dracula was likewise impervious to human might. His bloodsucking immortal reign was vulnerable to daylight. By outward appearance, vampires represent our most jaded celebrities, thought their immortality and superhuman power more closely resembles our corporate trusts, or the sociopath olygarchs They too cannot be shot down or beaten, so long as no one believe they exist Exposed to light vampires are reduced to ashes. As moviegoers know, that takes some clever thinking, on top of the laborious coming around to believing vampires for the evil they are. Dragged into the light of day, Nosferatu is history.

After ten years, Bush has insight into lesson of 9/11: Evil is real. Evil and courage. Two. Two lessons of 9/11…

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Did you hear what George Bush said at the dedication of the memorial to the passengers of Flight 93? Apparently he said “One of the lessons of 9/11 is that evil is real, and so is courage.” Two lessons, I mean. I’m not sure I could have handled seeing a group of people not throwing their shoes at Bush as he pretended to expound on a lesson, let alone about what’s real. George, the truth is, your audience obviously doesn’t understand the half of this lesson, how truly evil the perpetrators possibly were, they still can’t conceive it. As to courage, I don’t mean to diminish the heroism of the first responders, who show tremendous bravery every day, but for the slain of September 11th, their courage was not something new. The police and firemen who rushed into the stairwells of the WTC had no inkling it was going to come down. A building like that never had before. Planes have flown into the tallest skyscrapers, flames have engulfed entire buildings, but steel structures have never fallen. So the rescuers were their usual courageous, but the only lesson of that day, was that the world around them, and its physics, would turn out to be not what it seemed. Bush was almost certainly reflecting how 9/11 schooled him on courage, a trait whose reality would have been news to him.