I think it was somewhere around my 17th article on "Scooter" Libby's duplicitous vileness or maybe it was the umpteenth piece on Karl Rove's bleak sweatiness or Tom DeLay's toothy mug-shot "I'll be skipping prison" grin, like he'd just swallowed a whole baby seal and two live puppies and was coming for your cat.
Perhaps it was with the ongoing onslaught of soul-clotting details of Samuel "Guns 'n' Misogyny" Alito's record of nauseating judicial decisions that happily slap women's rights and bash the environment and support your God-given right to own a machine gun and basically uphold all that the rich white male power establishment holds near and dear that it hit me, oh my God, when did evil get so tepid and oatmealy and beige?
Which is to say, sure, we all love the drama of evil and we love the spectacle of evil and the media (and this very column) can beat the drum of evil's bloody lusciousness until we're red with yawning outrage, but after a while one thing becomes painfully true: We are not moved. We are not really all that scared. We might as well be shaking a fistful of sand: After a minute or two, there's just ain't nuthin' there.
But still we think there is. We are temporarily convinced. Because on one level, these people appear enormously important and significant, their every blink and utterance worthy of report (I should know -- I report it all the time), and hence we glorify and hype them all, these killers and these madmen and these hollow politicos as if they were hot roaring gods among men, as if they were something more than mere bloody blips on the cosmic radar, as if their daily comings and goings were the most breathtaking incidents since UFO anal probes.
But the fact is, they are nothing. Wisps. Yawns. Cosmic flatulence. It is the great existential duality of modern humanity. On one level, we have to care. It is, after all, our world, our life, the here and now, and we should pay attention to its clowns and dictators and devils, and take note and participate. But on that other, more significant level, you cannot help but scream, Oh my God please stop, I am just so sick of these cretins and who really cares about these hatemongers and thieves and can't I just have my wine and sex and books and won't they please just leave me alone?
Is it not true? Just look: Karl Rove has unleashed steaming piles of malevolence on this nation so tepid and lifeless they might as well have been buckets of duck-blood pudding. "Scooter" Libby -- and by the way anyone named "Scooter" should be officially banned from the "Evil is my co-pilot" club for life -- little boy Scooter just took the bullet for his black-souled torture-lovin' boss, Dick Cheney, over the equally boring Valerie Plame scandal, and Cheney is perhaps one of the most mediocre hunks of evil incarnate since James Baker or Dan Quayle or "Everybody Loves Raymond."
And oh my God, Samuel Alito, the white man's white man and the impending death of anything resembling a dynamic Supreme Court for the next 30 years, couldn't be any more pasty and quivery in his jellied evilness if you stuck plastic devil horns on his head and a "SpongeBob Is Gay" baby's bib on his sunken sunless chest and spun him around three times and hit him with a stick. I mean, please.
And by the way, am I the only one who looks at Saddam Hussein in those trial video clips and thinks, OK, yes, he sanctioned the murder of tens of thousands (with happy U.S. complicity) and he was ruthless and cruel and this much we know? So why does it feel like most anyone reading this right now could make him whimper like Paris Hilton in cheap polyester via three hard slaps and a nasty wedgie? Why is his supposedly titanic evil so shuddering and small?
You already know why. Because after a certain point, at a certain width of lens, they simply disappear. They fall off your personal radar, the things you let affect your soul. They pass right by our shared threshold of media interest and cultural fascination and race straight into the land of Get Over Yourself, we are all in this together so sit down and shut the hell up. Sure they can wail and scream and kick in the door, sure Bush can mumble "we do not torture" even as Cheney defends it and Gonzales trumpets it and even when we have the goddamn pictures to prove that we do. But ultimately you just look at them and you go, Are you serious?
Is that it? Is that all you've got? Do you not know how insignificant and silly you seem, like a grain of sand that's sitting on a beach, threatening the ocean that it's gonna drink it all up? Do you not realize how the planet brushes you off like chronic dandruff?
Which brings me to this: I have for some ungodly reason now suffered twice through the full trailer for the nauseating horror flick "Saw II" because it was there and because I was momentarily morbidly fascinated and because I simply cannot fathom why this shrill sadomasochistic swill exists at all, this grisly and gruesome tale of a twisted killer and his bizarre medieval torture chamber and the five awful actors who fail to survive it in the most disgusting ways imaginable, given how this movie is, to just about anyone with a pulse, repulsive and dim and jarringly repugnant on a dozen different levels. Just an opinion.
But here's the thing: You can only look at this gruesome slurm and wonder, Why does this exist? Why the hell does anyone, any human on this planet, want to pump this detritus into the world? What sort of boring chemical imbalance gave birth to this, what screenwriter and what producer are coming up with these films in their seedy unhappy basement and saying, lo, we have created something good in the world, something that will entertain the masses and give light and power and pleasure? No one, that's who. It is just repugnance. Repugnance and revulsion as a means to hollow profit. You know, just like politics. It is so easy. It is so small. It is so unerringly, unrelentingly boring.
Look. You want evil? Groupthink is evil. Mediocrity is evil. Hopelessness is evil. Decision by committee is evil. Glittery kitten sweaters are evil. Loveless marriage is evil. McDonald's marketing is evil. Spiritual homogeny is evil. Family sitcoms. Microsoft Windows. Disney cruises. Food poisoning. Yeast infections. Cruelty.
As for the rest, these warmongers and power sluts, well, theirs is merely an evil bred of ignorance and gurgling ego and impotent weeping in the night. Theirs is an evil so lukewarm and spongy it makes you recoil and shudder as if you accidentally touched a raw calf's tongue at the Japanese market. Hell, I can find better, more gut-wrenching evil in the Wal-Mart music aisle under "Simpson, Ashlee." The others, they're just the same ol' boring noisemakers howling into the Void.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.
As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.
Perhaps it was with the ongoing onslaught of soul-clotting details of Samuel "Guns 'n' Misogyny" Alito's record of nauseating judicial decisions that happily slap women's rights and bash the environment and support your God-given right to own a machine gun and basically uphold all that the rich white male power establishment holds near and dear that it hit me, oh my God, when did evil get so tepid and oatmealy and beige?
Which is to say, sure, we all love the drama of evil and we love the spectacle of evil and the media (and this very column) can beat the drum of evil's bloody lusciousness until we're red with yawning outrage, but after a while one thing becomes painfully true: We are not moved. We are not really all that scared. We might as well be shaking a fistful of sand: After a minute or two, there's just ain't nuthin' there.
But still we think there is. We are temporarily convinced. Because on one level, these people appear enormously important and significant, their every blink and utterance worthy of report (I should know -- I report it all the time), and hence we glorify and hype them all, these killers and these madmen and these hollow politicos as if they were hot roaring gods among men, as if they were something more than mere bloody blips on the cosmic radar, as if their daily comings and goings were the most breathtaking incidents since UFO anal probes.
But the fact is, they are nothing. Wisps. Yawns. Cosmic flatulence. It is the great existential duality of modern humanity. On one level, we have to care. It is, after all, our world, our life, the here and now, and we should pay attention to its clowns and dictators and devils, and take note and participate. But on that other, more significant level, you cannot help but scream, Oh my God please stop, I am just so sick of these cretins and who really cares about these hatemongers and thieves and can't I just have my wine and sex and books and won't they please just leave me alone?
Is it not true? Just look: Karl Rove has unleashed steaming piles of malevolence on this nation so tepid and lifeless they might as well have been buckets of duck-blood pudding. "Scooter" Libby -- and by the way anyone named "Scooter" should be officially banned from the "Evil is my co-pilot" club for life -- little boy Scooter just took the bullet for his black-souled torture-lovin' boss, Dick Cheney, over the equally boring Valerie Plame scandal, and Cheney is perhaps one of the most mediocre hunks of evil incarnate since James Baker or Dan Quayle or "Everybody Loves Raymond."
And oh my God, Samuel Alito, the white man's white man and the impending death of anything resembling a dynamic Supreme Court for the next 30 years, couldn't be any more pasty and quivery in his jellied evilness if you stuck plastic devil horns on his head and a "SpongeBob Is Gay" baby's bib on his sunken sunless chest and spun him around three times and hit him with a stick. I mean, please.
And by the way, am I the only one who looks at Saddam Hussein in those trial video clips and thinks, OK, yes, he sanctioned the murder of tens of thousands (with happy U.S. complicity) and he was ruthless and cruel and this much we know? So why does it feel like most anyone reading this right now could make him whimper like Paris Hilton in cheap polyester via three hard slaps and a nasty wedgie? Why is his supposedly titanic evil so shuddering and small?
You already know why. Because after a certain point, at a certain width of lens, they simply disappear. They fall off your personal radar, the things you let affect your soul. They pass right by our shared threshold of media interest and cultural fascination and race straight into the land of Get Over Yourself, we are all in this together so sit down and shut the hell up. Sure they can wail and scream and kick in the door, sure Bush can mumble "we do not torture" even as Cheney defends it and Gonzales trumpets it and even when we have the goddamn pictures to prove that we do. But ultimately you just look at them and you go, Are you serious?
Is that it? Is that all you've got? Do you not know how insignificant and silly you seem, like a grain of sand that's sitting on a beach, threatening the ocean that it's gonna drink it all up? Do you not realize how the planet brushes you off like chronic dandruff?
Which brings me to this: I have for some ungodly reason now suffered twice through the full trailer for the nauseating horror flick "Saw II" because it was there and because I was momentarily morbidly fascinated and because I simply cannot fathom why this shrill sadomasochistic swill exists at all, this grisly and gruesome tale of a twisted killer and his bizarre medieval torture chamber and the five awful actors who fail to survive it in the most disgusting ways imaginable, given how this movie is, to just about anyone with a pulse, repulsive and dim and jarringly repugnant on a dozen different levels. Just an opinion.
But here's the thing: You can only look at this gruesome slurm and wonder, Why does this exist? Why the hell does anyone, any human on this planet, want to pump this detritus into the world? What sort of boring chemical imbalance gave birth to this, what screenwriter and what producer are coming up with these films in their seedy unhappy basement and saying, lo, we have created something good in the world, something that will entertain the masses and give light and power and pleasure? No one, that's who. It is just repugnance. Repugnance and revulsion as a means to hollow profit. You know, just like politics. It is so easy. It is so small. It is so unerringly, unrelentingly boring.
Look. You want evil? Groupthink is evil. Mediocrity is evil. Hopelessness is evil. Decision by committee is evil. Glittery kitten sweaters are evil. Loveless marriage is evil. McDonald's marketing is evil. Spiritual homogeny is evil. Family sitcoms. Microsoft Windows. Disney cruises. Food poisoning. Yeast infections. Cruelty.
As for the rest, these warmongers and power sluts, well, theirs is merely an evil bred of ignorance and gurgling ego and impotent weeping in the night. Theirs is an evil so lukewarm and spongy it makes you recoil and shudder as if you accidentally touched a raw calf's tongue at the Japanese market. Hell, I can find better, more gut-wrenching evil in the Wal-Mart music aisle under "Simpson, Ashlee." The others, they're just the same ol' boring noisemakers howling into the Void.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.
As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.