Hostile aliens crowd the streets, controlling the minds of the feckless human hayseeds with manipulative billboards and newspaper ads. And only Rowdy Roddy Piper can see them!
The Piperman took care of that problem, of course, and in high style. But new iterations of the alien mind-control problem keep popping up. The hapless Ted Bundy, to name an example we all remember, was forced to murder women after deviant (and clearly extraterrestrial) operatives from the likes of the Flynt Publishing empire planted lascivious photographs under his nose. Bundy was -- as he helpfully explained shortly before being sent back to the mother ship by unforgiving employees of the Florida correctional system -- powerless to resist as the consumption of sexual images made him become sexually violent, pretty much entirely without his own active participation. The various ayatollahs of both the religious right and the loopy academic-feminist fringe warmly embraced the serial killer's insightful causative theory.
More recently -- just about three years ago -- tens of thousands of children were placed at risk because of a silkscreen T-shirt tacked to a wall. The offending outerwear hung in a public library in suburban Los Angeles, where unsuspecting librarians permitted local community groups to display such deceptively innocent-sounding items as "books" and "posters." This worked fine until a group called Catalyst reserved the display cases. Catalyst, it turns out, was a gay and lesbian organization, and their books and posters made shameless references to (gasp!) their own deviant lifestyle; there was even a photograph of two men holding hands.
Predictably, if pathetically, the usual suspects reacted in the usual way, swarming down on a city council meeting to warn about "recruiting" and the threat to decent families. City council members scratched their chins and expressed a promise to, like, have city staffers look into it, but one councilman informed his colleagues that he'd already looked into the matter personally. Some of the propaganda, he warned, including the T-shirt emblazoned shamelessly with a pink triangle, hung dangerously close to (cue thunder) the children's wing. And you know how that nasty little bit of recruitment technique works. Here's little Johnny on his way to the library, toting his homework in a Boy Scout book bag. He takes a table in the main hall, works diligently on the appropriate basics (phonics, applied mathematics, the aphorisms of President Reagan), and decides to end his study session with a little spadework in the Old Testament. He's kicking ass in Deuteronomy when he feels the burn in his eyes from too much reading. He looks up to rest his virginal peepers. And then, in a flash, it's all over. He catches a glimpse of an oddly alluring geometrical symbol -- and is instantly struck gay.
Living in that town at the time and covering the recruitment controversy (in a previous lifetime as a reporter), a certain Suck contributor found himself openly rolling his eyes at the they're-after-our-kids crowd. We were pretty sure they were channeling General Ripper: afraid of foreign, purity-sapping active ingredients in seemingly inert packaging, which can't be resisted because you don't even know you've consumed them. "Homosexual speech," the argument went, causes homosexuality. It was a notion we mocked with vicious, consistent glee.
And so it's awfully strange, three years later, to finally be hearing the echo from the other side of the canyon.
Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student who, in October, was murdered in particularly horrifying style, quickly lost his specificity as a victim. In rallies and speeches (and breathtakingly lame newspaper columns) across the country, he became an illustrative gay man killed in typical fashion by a homophobic culture.
As Tony Kushner calmly explained in The Nation: "Trent Lott endorses murder, of course; his party endorses murder, his party endorses discrimination against homosexuals and in doing so it endorses the ritual slaughter of homosexuals." And the Senate majority leader had an accomplice. Kushner also calls the pope "a homicidal liar" who directly led Shepard's killers to commit the crime -- by, for example, refusing to ordain openly gay priests. ("Let's follow the lead of the crazies who killed Matthew Shepard, and take the Pope at his word.") Despite the high-school-poetry phrasing ("And then, after we've drawn a few skin-prickling breaths of the aroma of torture and agony and madness, we shift a little in our comfortable chairs....") and the omission of any evidence at all that Shepard's killers were either Catholic or even vaguely aware of Trent Lott's existence, Kushner's argument is only about half-wrong. But this particular brand of misguided and oversimplified blame strikes us as just another example of that common condition in which the clear-eyed observer sees the manipulative intent behind the media item, while all the other poor, dumb bastards can't help but fall into the trap; everybody else is tragically susceptible to papist mind-control techniques and the pernicious voodoo of dangerous, unstoppable smoothies like Newt Gingrich.
In Kushner's turgid fantasy, Little Johnny is on his way to the mailbox with his check to Lambda when his eyes fall on a pamphlet fluttering in the gutter. The next thing he knows, he's lurking about the streets of West Hollywood with a baseball bat and a shaved head. He's helplessly struck homophobic by a bit of Q&A with some shithead who got himself elected to the Senate.
Back when Trent Lott was still in knee pants, Eric Hoffer tried to make sense of 40 million World War II dead and the other mounting casualties of the century -- despite the fact that he'd never directed a single movie. Hitler and Stalin moved masses with hate speech, Hoffer allowed, but only because the people who formed those masses were looking to be moved. "A man is likely to mind his own business," he wrote, "when it is worth minding."
The men charged with Shepard's murder, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, might as well have been lifted straight out of Hoffer's 1951 book The True Believer. The "vast ennui" and "unwanted self" described by Hoffer is all over the picture. Both were marginally employed high-school dropouts; McKinney was hospitalized at the age of 8, after a drinking binge, and locked away in a detention center six years later for stealing a cash register. Last year, aiming high, he pleaded no contest to another theft charge after being caught robbing a Kentucky Fried Chicken store. ("Drop them biscuits, and show me your hands.")
In the days after McKinney's arrest for the attack on Shepard, his father handed out unfortunate quotes to any reporter who asked: "Aaron was pretty much on his own at 17," for example, and "Aaron hates to be embarrassed more than anything" in front of his friends -- bad news if you're a young gay man, and Aaron thinks you're hitting on him in a bar.
Neighbors of both men described the experience of living next door in less-than-glowing terms. Henderson, the Denver Post reported, had put in some time as an employee at a Taco Bell with his neighbor's children, but was still a problem neighbor, "often firing bottle rockets into her yard, throwing beer bottles, and once starting a brush fire."
But if only Trent Lott had kept his mouth shut, right? These two would probably have been Matt Shepard's best buds, buying him drinks and stuff, driving around with the radio on. Hey, you know what, Matt? You're all right, man.
We remain willing to hear arguments to the contrary, but if recent history offers an accurate picture, hate speech mostly causes big surprises at the polls. And that's no crime.
