Sigh, America…
In the weekend following its obligatory nomination for a best picture Oscar, Clint Eastwood’s bullshit biopic about deranged psychopath, Chris Kyle, the one with the embarrassingly awful title American Sniper, racked up 90 million dollars at the box office, breaking the record for a January opening and proving, once again, that America’s appetite for mind-numbingly stupid and ethically abhorrent war propaganda is a veritable black hole of regressive cognition.
I get it, America – we all love heroes. We want, maybe even need heroes to help us tell comfortable narratives about our lives and times. Movies provide this need. But, when we glorify psychopathic pieces of shit like Chris Kyle, how are we any better, essentially, than the Islamic terrorists who praise their famous criminals who carry out mass executions like the one we saw in Paris a few weeks back? The answer is, we can not.
If Chris Kyle had been born in Nigeria, he’s be the pride of Boko Haram right now. They’d be celebrating his deranged blood lust. We’re doing the same fucking thing, because he was on ‘our side.’
Well sorry, I won’t join the chorus of celebratory glee. ‘My side’ is not the side of murderous thugs who kill for pleasure, brag about it, and tell lies to increase their global kill count. I’m more interested in truths than comfortable, flag-waving narratives that paint rose-tinted pictures about who we are as a society.
The truth may be ugly, but it’s better than living a lie.
The title “American Psycho” had already been taken