June 13, 2005
“How To Kill Americans”
Describing the arrest in northern California of a suspected father and son terrorist sleeper cell, the local Los Angeles NBC affiliate reported that Hamid Hayat had been “trained in how to kill Americans.” At the least it was a strange choice of words, the kind of phrase one might expect law enforcement types to spout, but not an objective reporter. The charges are serious. Hayat, is suspected of having connections with Al Qaeda and may, if the allegations are true, have actually trained as a terrorist. Never mind the, hopefully unintended, implication of the phrase “trained in how to kill Americans” – don’t American’s die like everyone else, or is the connotation that Americans must be killed in some special sort of way akin to zombies who must be shot in the head? Never mind that the arrests came one day before Dubya and his ilk launched their PR campaign to try and save their Patriot Act, a.k.a. their bid to revoke the United States Constitution. It may not seem like much, may seem frivolous, in fact, but the threshold of yet another form of cultural regression was crossed. War propaganda commonly demonizes the enemy. The difference is in our attitude to the enemy. In a surprisingly lucid radio interview in the mid-70s, Rocky Erickson, the lead singer of the Texas psychedelic garage band The 13th Floor Elevators who was institutionalized, some say, to avoid the draft and then put out some amazing solo material afterwards, discussed the changes in his lifetime about our attitude to the monster. Erickson, whose songs are steeped in horror imagery, pointed out that when he was a boy in the 50s the demon came from outside; they had a form and it wasn’t ours. By contrast the monster of the 60s and 70s became less and less easily distinguishable from the victim. In other words, the monster became psychological. As Erickson put it: “If you’ve noticed when you were a kid you used to go to horror movies. Every Friday and Saturday they would have about three or four horror movies, When Worlds Collide (1951), or, Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), and then films went to the horror of Dracula and things like that. They became really good but they began prying on your inner fears.” The more overt implication of terrorists “trained to kill Americans” is that they are not themselves American; they must somehow learn to understand us in order to kill us. It is no longer the monster of our “inner-fears”, a monster who makes us question our self-doubt, the flaws of our ways, and our repressed motives, but the much cruder monster of the 50s that is re-invoked: the monster as a suspicious stranger, the outsider with unchristian, evil, maybe even otherworldly, ways (at a time of unprecedented remakes, note Steven Speilberg's timely move to revisit the classic "us" verses "them" epicWar of the Worlds). The original failure of the 50s monster, and the need for its subsequent cultural reassessment, might, however, be nowhere better expressed than in the verdict in Michael Jackson’s child molestation case. It should not come as a great surprise that the pop icon was acquitted on all charges. The jury apparently identified with Jackson and chose to reject those who made the case against him. Yet another music icon made one of the clearest cases against the total xenophobia of the 50s version of the demon in his movie / theme album. Frank Zappa’s Uncle Meat is all about our relationship to the monster. What interested Zappa was our empathic relationship to the villain. In one way or another we were, he proposes, all cut-down in some way, made to feel imperfect by parents or other authority figures. It is only natural, then, that we should sympathize with the shortfalls of the monster. The monster, so it follows, is only the mirror of our own imperfect selves.