Leave it to Hollywood to show us our ugliness in the mirror and make us proud of it. The “Hurt Locker” perfectly communicates America’s dirty addiction to war, which is the driving force behind our militarism. As this film plainly demonstrates, young Americans like the adrenaline rush, the danger, and the bonding that comes from warfare. Those that want to mainline the war drug go to fight. Those who can’t tolerate a heavy dose watch it depicted on TV or in Movies like “Hurt Locker.”
There may have been a time when the post-9/11 wars could have been justified in terms of national “defense,” but that time ended years ago, with the revelation of the Bush administration’s lies and the calculation of the horrible toll of destruction unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan. Not even the dumbest American recruit has any excuse to disguise the quest for action and adventure in a combat zone.
What makes the popular reaction to “Hurt Locker” so revealing is that the soldiers depicted in the film are not viewed as freaks or unfortunate victims. They are seen as exemplars of a new nihilistic heroism, in which all that counts is personal style and a savage kind of courage. It is this decoupling of sacrifice from reason that is the essence of America’s moral collapse. The soldiers in “Hurt Locker,” like most American consumers, are just living for their next buzz. That is all their lives have been reduced to – long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of great excitement.
This is the end of the line for our sick society – when it no longer cares what it is fighting for, and it simply relishes fighting. We have become a wicked people who delight in violence for its own sake. Future historians will find “The Hurt Locker” provides a simple answer to the question “What were they thinking?” The answer is: “They weren’t thinking; they were just a bunch of war junkies.”
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you can see it in everything from the schools, to their jobs, movies and camouflage bikinis.
as William Burroughs tried to tell us long ago.
In my lifetime I’ve seen the destruction of this country. Yes, it was carefully crafted through the most sophisticated and effective mind-control techniques ever seen in human history, but it was also based on our cultural tendency to live entirely on the surface of life. Without the ballast of the old-fashioned protestant and humanistic virtues that were at the heart of the elite when the U.S. started it’s imperial quest almost 100 years ago we have nothing deep in our cultural background to sustain us. Hedonism is not enough. What passes for spirituality in this country is usually fundamentalism or the versions of the practices of Yoga and Buddhism adapted to American palates — which can bring us to profundity but usually becomes more of a pose and a fashion statement than anything else — though it is, at least, going in the right direction — but it is also very limited to a small segment of the population.
It is the elites now that must step up. They own everything and control everything without any need to consult the average person who has lost his/her interest in anything other than the next fix of whatever fantasy happens to be current. We live in an oligarchy that is complete — there is no room for reform as we have seen.
Violence and cruelty is the favorite rush for narcissists — having been exposed to one in my early life — I know what it means viscerally.