Idolizing Villainhood

I don’t know where I want to start so I guess I’ll start right here, where I am. I am sad, mad, and frustrated with our government, our country, our culture, and with the direction we seem to be headed. When did we begin to root for the villain and kick the hero down? When did we see bad as good and good as bad? As a nation and a culture, we seem to be obsessed with villains, seeing villains as better than heroes – re-marketing them as anti-heroes and embracing our villain eras. We see it in our ever-revolving true crime documentaries on serial killers, worst roommates, and missing people. We embrace it in our disdain for a happy ending and a need for dark and twisted plots, in the competition that movie makers engage in when creating horror and porn flicks – trying to win a race of who can make the sickest, most vile, gut-wrenching stuff with a forever extending finish line. And we are living it in the ever-increasing incarceration rates across the nation, in our epidemic of mass shootings, ever-increasing homeless and drug addictions, and in our acceptance that our leaders are not people to look up to, but instead the toughest negotiators (who are also thieves, liars, and crooks) because we assume that is what it takes to make our country succeed. We see the world as one giant competition where dog eats dog and we have to fight everyone off to enjoy the scraps we are given in a country rich in natural resources and ingenuity.

I wonder if a part of why we have become so welcoming of this ideal of villainhood is because we have, as a country begun to face some hard truths about our beginnings as a country, our past, how we became “great” and what our present is revealing. Perhaps we looked behind the curtain and saw how awful we were, how we destroyed nations in our pursuit of our own ideal world, carving this fantasy out of the blood and bones of indigenous people and enslaving millions to bear both the yoke of our dreams and the weight of those consequences. At this point we should choose to look at the pain we have caused, accept the choices we made in the past, and begin to heal. But we are choosing a different route it seems. Instead, we are doubling down on our sins, insisting that the past worked, the past got us here and so because we are where we are, it must be good. We must be good. We have been living a fantasy believing that we are good. That our country, the United States of America is good, is better than good, is a paragon of virtue. During WWII we positioned ourselves as the saviors of the world. We believed the hype, and during WWII it was a fight for humanities goodness – a fight that the Allied forces, with us included in the end did win. But because we saw our goodness in that moment, we as a people believed that our country would forever be good without fail. But we have never taken account of where we stand, not since then. We have not looked around at what we are creating, at what leaders we are gifting power and what that might mean. We assume that because we believe that we as individuals are good, that must mean that our country is good.

But when faced with the information of the bad our country has done we have taken the meaning of good and decided that good is defined by what our country does, instead of evaluating the choices of our country by what we know good to mean. In this, we have now inversed the meaning of good. We are embracing selfishness, greed, isolation, ethnocentrism, and idolatry and have twisted words to see these things as good, as something we should strive for.