Death Cult Nation - Serial Killers, Superheroes & Imperialism, Part 2

Any discussion of serial killers has to start from the fact American culture is probably the largest death cult in human history. Even the Aztecs, famous for their mass human sacrifices, weren’t as obsessed with killing as we are – nor did they kill as many people as has the United States of America. Death is the air that we breathe and for that reason its omnipresence is normalized and made invisible. Some day people will take a look at our worship of death and see a culture in desperate and flailing decline.
Video games provide a key example here. They have become a central part of our leisure culture, exploding in sales over the last decade, with sales of $9.5 billion in 2007, representing 268 million units. A significant number of these games are about killing and death, with the biggest selling video game of 2008, Grand Theft Auto IV, built around vicious mob violence and the guiltless murder of competitors and enemies. The game broke all records upon its release, garnering $500 million in sales in the first week, by moving 6 million units. And of the top 5 selling video games of 2008, violently themed games, in which loss and victory are measured in deaths, make up three of them. The Entertainment Software Association suggests that violence isn’t key to video game popularity by pointing to the fact that only 15% of games sold are rated “mature”. However, the top-selling SuperMario: Galaxy, a game rated “everyone” is still about violence, it just happens to be stylized for young minds, not yet ready for spurting blood, entrails and shrieking. SuperMario is the cute gateway drug that leads the player towards the mass killing mayhem of Resident Evil or Gears of War.
Our movies and television: the same. Romantic love and death are our two greatest obsessions, next to the shallowest conceptions of beauty. If we’re not falling in love or shopping, it seems, we’re killing people. The top three films of 2008, for instance, involved multiple murders and a violent protagonist.
But it would be a mistake to think that video games or movies are making people more violent or crime prone, per se. Rather they are a reflection and reinforcement of social values that are as American as apple pie and a handgun hidden in Dad’s underwear drawer.
The Americas were built upon murder and theft. And the Europeans were only really bringing to the New World what they practiced in their own backyards, from the Enclosures in Britain to the Inquisition of Spain – and the Crusades just beyond Europe’s borders. The wealthy and powerful pursued a model of social engineering that set the terms for interactions all the way down to the base of society. Americans still cling to the Second Amendment of their Constitution, which proclaims the right to bear arms.
The validation – and necessity - of violence is a product of a class divided society and of colonialism. It is an extension of a whole series of coercive relationships infused with open or implied violence that hold our society together – from the economic coercion that forces you to work that miserable, alienated job, to the coercion of the police who patrol our neighbourhoods, guns at the ready. And make no mistake, forcing people out of their homes at the end of a sheriff’s baton – as millions of Americans have experienced in the present crisis – is also a form of violence. Hobbes primeval “war of all against all” isn’t the thing that society was created to end – it is the sine qua non of “civilization” itself.
Beyond the boundaries of our countries – whether that is across the world or across the wire fence between the dominant group and the occupied, forced onto reservations, ghettoes and Bantustans – our leaders still exercise mass violence to achieve foreign policy goals, territorial expansion, to open markets or access resources, etc. It is worth remembering that during the Gulf War in 1991 the United States murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis on the infamous Highway of Death as they retreated from Kuwait. The invasion of 2003 led to the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
And, of course, in the recent invasion and bombardment of Gaza by Israel, there were thousands of casualties during the three weeks of the operation, with hundreds upon hundreds of civilian deaths, not to mention the mass destruction that will cripple Gaza for years, if not decades. All of which was passed over without too many tears shed with the kind of crass “we think the price is worth it” that drives the plots of violent, quest-based video games.
And even here in Canada “the Peacekeeper” we have our share of murderous history that is still being written, as the indigenous population could well attest. Our present mission in Afghanistan was described by General Rick Hillier, former head of the Canadian Armed Forces as being to slay the “detestable murderers and scumbags” of the Taliban. And kill them we did, with greater joy the larger the number of them that we slew. After all, as Hillier said on another occasion, “We're not the public service of Canada; we're not just another department. We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to kill people. This job is celebrated every time millions of commuters drive down the Highway 401, a section of which have been re-named the Highway of Heroes for the bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan that are transported along its length.
So, there can be no claim that mass murder is an aberrant behaviour in our society. It is the way we get the job done. Mass murder is government policy, carried out by soldiers who are rewarded for killing more people than the next guy. No, the problem for “serial killers” is that they don’t carry out the killing in the service of power.

Serial Killers, Superheroes & Imperialism: Part 1

There’s certainly nothing new in our obsession with serial killers, particularly the gory details of their crimes. Jack the Ripper was perhaps the first and most famous of a long line of mass murderers that have inspired films, books, and articles. His combination of brutal, ritualized murder, sex, and the taunting of legal authorities set the archetype for almost all future representations.
Since the time of “Saucy Jack” the interest in mass murders of this type has grown, becoming a genre of film and novels unto itself, with probably dozens of each produced and published each year, from teen slasher films to art films like “Man Bites Dog”. The subject warrants multiple Wikipedia pages and hundreds, if not thousands, of “fan sites” dedicated to either specific serial killers or to serial killers in general.
One of the interesting things about serial killer representations in popular culture is how plastic they are. That is, the character of a serial killer, beyond having some specific technical similarities (ritual, emotional disconnection from victims, lack of guilt, etc) can fit almost any mould.
There is the award-winning Showcase series, Dexter, about a serial-killer-as-boy-next-door-slash-vigilante-superhero. We all love Dexter because we don’t see anything wrong with executing bad people. He’s a working class, lower tech, less ridiculous version of Batman. And he’s just so huggable.
He’s like you and me. Hell, if you were Dexter, wouldn’t you kill that murderer, those heartless and brutal smugglers of illegal immigrants, or that nurse with an enthusiasm for euthanizing patients? Dexter, the mass murderer, ironically, satisfies our desire to overcome that sense of powerlessness we all feel towards one of the greatest bogeymen of our time: random killers specifically and criminals more generally. We become the mass murderer, in a sense, through our identification with him.
In this way he’s not so very different from the more monstrous and more aristocratically charming character of Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector. If Dexter is Batman, Lector is Lucifer, the fallen angel. His ultimate history, in many ways similar to Dexter’s – and all superheroes – is one of childhood trauma that marks him indelibly, followed by a struggle to understand and control his special powers. Hannibal Lector is reminiscent of Magneto, the vengeful Jewish mutant from the X-Men series who seeks to destroy all non-mutants as a result of his experiences in World War Two.
These aspects of the serial killer - his/her plasticity and their kinship superheroes/supervillains and supernatural figures – vampires also come to mind - is worth exploring further. All of them say something about our culture more generally that could be valuable in unearthing the origins of our society’s pathologies.

TOMORROW: Part 2, Death Cult Nation

Donut Semiotics

Out walking the other day with my wife, we had occasion to stop and rubber-neck at the new Tim Hortons Donuts going in around the corner from us. Already in the neighbourhood there are two Coffee Time donut shops, plus a Portuguese bakery that serves espresso.
Now, coffee and donut shops are thick as locusts in Southern Ontario. Nobody eats the sugary holes or drinks the bitter, black stimulant more than us it seems. Though it has to be said that the donut craze is not just about Ontario – Americans consume something like 10 billion donuts per year, or about 33 donuts per person – almost a donut per week. And given that there are those of us who never imbibe in the deep fried doughy circle, someone out there is eating a lot of donuts.
Canadians as a whole are no shirkers either, with 15 million of us spending $5 billion in coffee shops each and every year.
The omnipresence of the donut and coffee as a staple, not only of our diet, but of our culture got me thinking about the meaning of the donut and the coffee. I think we can all agree that The Donut exists on multiple levels of meaning – there’s the elegance of the crueller, the decadence of the jelly filled, the asceticism of the plain. Then there’s the hybrid donut semiotics, for instance the sprinkle covered old school hole; which I think of as the post-Vatican 2 Catholic donut.
But let us return to our neighbourhood Tim Hortons. I have to admit that my partner and I were both a little disappointed that what was coming into the neighbourhood was a Tim’s and not a Starbucks or a Second Cup. And yes, I feel shame at this; yes, I know Starbucks owner is a big-time supporter of Israel and America's War of Terror. We talked about this emotional response and realized that it all has to do with the meaning of Tim’s vs the meanings of Starbucks. The latter indicates a more upscale community, greater education levels, higher disposable income, more discriminating tastes. Starbucks goers don’t eat deep fried circles of dough – they consume oat and date squares or biscotti with their mochacino soy latte.
But neither is Tim’s at the level of Coffee Time, which are to cafes what crack houses are to wine bars. Universally dirty, it seems, they are on the corners of low-income neighbourhoods, gathering in the filthier elements in the neighbourhood. Used to be, before it was banned, that they were smoke filled and you could guarantee that jelly-filled, sugared donut you were about to scarf down would taste like stale tobacco. The tables are fixed to the floors and the chairs are attached to the tables – to keep people throwing them, I presume, or knocking them over. In any case, a February 2007 CBC article revealed that Coffee Time’s were receiving an inordinate number of health violations – something like 78 percent of inspections resulted in citations and 35 percent of Toronto outlets were on probation.
As an aside - just for the record, no, I don’t think that low-income people are dirtier than everybody else. Hell, I’m low income – as are most of the people I know. I think that corporate donut franchises want to maximize profits by minimizing quality, including health conditions, and low-income people often can’t afford any better. And it’s not like there’s publicly funded community centres on the main streets of our cities and towns. Places that people can drop into and engage in healthier activities than eating fat-drenched, sugary, carbohydrate heart-attack bombs. Donut shops are the community centres of the new, overweight millennium.
Looked at in light of all this, the arrival of Tim Hortons to our neighbourhood is a sign of things changing. Our coffee shops may not sell ten varieties of coffee, in 36 combinations from 22 countries. But, dammit, at least we now have those cute little Tim sandwiches and soup of the day.
We live in an area of Toronto’s west end where rising property values has put pressure on the local poor and on drug users, dealers and prostitutes in the neighbourhood. They are literally being forced out, though I often wonder where they are going – to the suburbs, I presume. We are not yet ready for the sophistication of a Second Cup/Starbucks – or even less a Lettieri – but we are definitely moving up from Coffee Time. The arrival of Tim Hortons – just like the Shoppers Drug Mart that opened down the street last year – are all signs that the demographics of our neighbourhood are changing fast.