Of course Yglesias loves Dexter, a show I have diligently resisted discussing. Oh, how very clever that his name is the noun for 'dexterity.' We just have to be able to make sociopathic serial killers as sorta loveable as we can make everyone, anyone else. The power of ironic self-referentiality must extend everywhere. Our ability to interpose an artificially intimate critical distance between ourselves and the radical heteronomy of evil must be plumped up and stroked at literally every opportunity. Oh what a house of cards will collapse around someone's head when they discover suddenly that they are being murdered while chuckling snarkily and so very semi-uncomfortably along to Dexter. Critical masturbation in the alloted hall of mirrors portion of the house of horrors is the new whistling in the dark -- a self-gratifying distraction worked up in full knowledge of what knowledge of the real we're so actively repressing. And therapeutically we learn to withstand longer and longer sessions before an ever-more-extensive array of mirrors, longer and longer expeditions within an ever-more-gaping house of horrors. Channel that urge to recoil into the ability to calculatedly pose curling around. Demonstrate that death and insanity and the abyss are no more and no less than casual acquaintances, visages safely slotted as several among million Facebook friends. Every lesson American Psycho was ever supposed to teach us has been laughed out of the assembly by Dexter, and, yes, I do know this without having seen even one clip from one episode of the show. I detest that smug little studiously affected prep mug, and I bristled with animal instinct every time I glimpsed him on Six Feet Under. Boy next door indeed. Patrick Bateman never had it so good: his hall of mirrors was still a howling torment, and he could only masturbate himself safely into a torpor by staring out the window at a model on a billboard. How primitive. What advancements we have made. He still warned the occasional hooker -- meaning, truly, himself -- that something horrible was about to happen. How long until we can replace the palsied laughter at Bateman's poetry -- "black man is de...debil?" -- with the perfect imitation of real laughter (adequately contextualized, of course)? Neo-nazi humor: the final frontier. Already unembarrassed pedophile humor seems within our grasp, and that reality show about busting 'net pederasts brings us to the doorstep. Laugh at the would-be child rapist stumbling fat, old, and naked across the lawn as the Man brings him down. Oh, were he only not fat and old! That would be true entertainment. Wait for the hip, sexy Neo-nazi. Who 'happens to' desire youngish children, perhaps sixteen-year-old Catholic school girls. She has needs too, we must admit. Everyone knows hot sixteen-year-old Catholic school girls are hot, and some of them even want to have sex. Maybe even slightly...transgressive sex. The act of painting ourselves into a corner of relativist, cosmopolitan justification, therapeutically suggested to be something other than a response to the guilt at our own flight from fact, reality, and truth, slides swiftly, imperceptibly, into fantasy, human nature's final comment and trump card against the arrogance, the hubris, the pride of denial. No, I do not suppose that the venomous spittle I am spraying here in the faces of the hip pop culture establishment ethic is nothing more than old-fashioned reactionary falangist puritanism, and yes, one can be a moralist these days without also being the most awfully laughable of all laughably awful monsters: a cross between Michael Medved and John Brown.
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I do recognize this is an intemperate screed. But consider: I had thought about how to do it quite patiently before typing this out and I could not come up with any other possible way of conveying the opinions and judgments set out above with an amount of conviction and force that would justify the exercise, either by your standards or mine, or by those of the Great Magnet. At moments like this I see no point, given the stakes, in shying away from the risk of absurdity, of going clear over the top. True horror is already absurd; its antidote, the re-learning of the proper reaction to it (true horror), must push out from madness, newly recognized as such, in order to recover the senses of the light of day. Incidentally I also think this is the lesson of the better zombie movies, especially George Romero's color remake of his Night of the Living Dead.
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