Id-side out

It’s interesting that people, or some people I should say, have been fascinated with monsters ever since Hollywood began cranking monster movies out from early films like Dracula to Jaws to the wide range of slimy dripping hideous and gooey monsters who lurk and pounce on today’s modern screens, the nightmare spawn of computer graphic magic.

As a kid I grew up with Lon Cheney Junior, Boris Karloff, and the like. My personal favorite was the Wolfman as played by Lon Cheney Junior whose transformation into the ravening beast ‘neath the fool moon “when the wolf bane blows” as the old gypsy intoned was just about the greatest thing under the sun (or moon I should say) or so I thought at the time. Then there was the march of the rubber monsters, men in monkey suit movies I used to call them the most classic of them all was of course Godzilla (great name) who many amateur shrinks associate with the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII. I suppose that could well be for wasn’t that a monstrous act? The wiping out of so many Japanese civilians in such a short amount of time is perhaps one of the all time monster acts of, well, all time.

I think deep down we know who the real monsters are and where they lurk and skulk hidden from the light of day lest they evaporate like one of Stoker’s vampires. We know who the bogy man is hidden in the velvet darkness of our childhood closet. It’s that chaotic spot at the core of our being, the fear that turns to anger, the violence that we are all capable of as human beings and it is frightening. We know that monster, that slavering idiot monster that rages and wails while hiding behind the veil of civilization just waiting to be released at the right provocation. Israeli soldiers taking pictures of each other standing over their trophy kill a dead Palestinian. American soldiers laughing as they cut down civilians, national leaders promoting themselves on the merit of the Mount Everest sized pile of bodies they stand upon, indeed bet their careers on, people who see and say nothing while the monster rages on, a news media that encourages wars to increase their profits, respected news anchors or whatever you call them using their very respectability to tell you less than nothing, perhaps that it rained last Thursday. These are the monsters, shake their hands, they don’t look like monsters or talk like monsters but the results of their action or inaction is monstrous indeed.

On any given normal day in anywhere USA people aren’t monsters. Well, most aren’t but what the government does in our name with our money with our silent consent is not too different than a crowd of people standing disinterested as a girl is gang raped in front of them repeatedly. On a larger scale Americans stand by as our government rapes the world, an act most monstrous. These are the most monstrous acts, not the mindless violence of the righteous or the depraved, it is the plotters and the planners and all the little weenies that enable the plotters and the planners who use violence like a tool because it is a tool, their tool. It’s not even personal because their victims are but bugs crawling on the floor, it’s about money and it’s about power and if they could get it without the mayhem and the chaos, without the mass murder they surely would but these are the tools of choice used without anymore remorse than when you spear a pea with your fork. There is something unspeakably evil about the idiots who rule our lives, the lack of any scant atom of humanity, incapable of any kind of empathy sympathy or remorse. Their actions have ruined lives and whole nations and left strewn in their terrible wake a multitude of body parts exploded over a Salvador Dali landscape in some LSD drenched dream as their thugs slap the grace from their victims with hails of bullets and bombs. And all this planned and done with the same level of emotion you would get from adding two plus two. Almost equal to this is another form of evil idiocy the determined and adamantine refusal of all too many Americans to admit that their government is a monster doing monstrous things with monstrous results on a daily and hour to hour basis.

Still, I don’t mind a good monster movie. Perhaps the person that monster just tore in half was the jerk that cut me off in traffic last month.