Will They Bring Supervillains to Your Town Next?
Just in time for a planned follow-up post to the one last week on fantasy-based politics, we have the spasm of fictionally-inspired idiocy over the Gitmo closure. Check that, according to the keyboard waggers at the New York Times, idiocy is now called a “singular political opportunity” for the Republicans.
Gitmo prisoner as envisioned by John McCain and friends
“Where are we going to send them?” Mr. McCain said in an interview on Fox News, just days after the inauguration. “That decision I would have made before I’d announced the closure.” Referring to the not-in-my-back-yard uproar over the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, he added: “You think Yucca Mountain is a Nimby problem? Wait until you see this one.”
. . . The conflagration has been fanned by the determined focus of Republican leaders, fed by the alarms of talk-show populists and aided by the miscalculation of a new president who set a date for a closing without announcing a detailed plan for the inmates. The debate now threatens to make it much harder for Mr. Obama to keep his campaign promise.
Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles.
Talk radio and cable news hosts warned viewers that dangerous terrorists might end up in a neighborhood jail, with Sean Hannity of Fox News even broadcasting an online video from House Republican leaders that juxtaposed the security of the detainee camps with images of the twin towers in flames. And from California and Virginia to the small town of Hardin, Mont., Democratic lawmakers began fending off questions about whether they would admit terrorism suspects into their own communities.
Since presumably not even “talk-show populists” are claiming that Obama is going to place the “detainees” as 3rd-grade teachers in those local communities, the ever-so-deep fears in question would seem to turn almost wholly on the action movie and comic books trope of the superhuman killer that no prison can hold: through some combination of manipulation, luck, and mad skills, the mad dog will get loose and continue his criminal career, wiping out all his path. (Perhaps some sort of radiation-based powers will be involved, as McCain seems to suggest. Radioactive Man from the Iron Man comics [see image] was a Chinese Communist, which is pretty much the same thing, or plays the same function, in the GOP POV.)
More likely the scenario the Republicans want to suggest is some kind of Islamist version of Con Air. Unless you assume inevitable escape, it is hard to see a mechanism by which the Gitmo prisoners would threaten any American communities where they happen to be imprisoned. By this logic small-town Americans should be horrified at the idea of building any prisons in their communities, because that would amount to bringing rapists, murderers, and child molesters to live right there in River City or “the small town of Hardin, Mont.” On the contrary, small towns all over the country have competed to get prisons built to replace lost factory jobs.
In the real-life United States, escapes by well-known criminals or mass murderers from maximum-security prisons are incredibly rare, and long-term getaways almost unknown since Dillinger. Yet in fictional melodramas spectacular escapes have become almost the norm. Melodramas are usually only as good as their villains, and good villains are very difficult to create, so they tend to get reused. The trend probably started with comic-book supervillains who constantly came back for more. Where was Batman without the Joker every six months or so? Where was Spider-Man without the Green Goblin? (Actually, recurring villains probably goes back even further than that, to adventure comic strips in newspapers and the pulp novels that inspired them.)
The jailbreak habit was picked up in the 80s by a sequel-addicted Hollywood, and since then villains (and jeopardized heroes temporarily challenged by jail time) have been escaping as a regular, expected thing, even in non-sequels and non-serials. We in the audience know that any emphasis placed on the rigorousness of the prison’s security procedures is only setting us up to be more impressed with the character who inevitably breaks out. We’re just waiting to see how they do it. One of the most indelible and influential escape scenes ever filmed came in the period I am thinking of, involving one of filmdom’s most popular supervillains. That would be Dr. Hannibal Lecter in 1991′s Silence of the Lambs. [The film clip in this post keeps disappearing. Look it up on YouTube.]
Now that I think about it, the trope of the escaping villain goes right along with the modern conservative drive to diminish everything government does, even if it is something they agree with, like punishing criminals. According to decades of conservative propaganda, reinforced by popular culture, the constitutional protections of the American legal system only serve to let clever criminals thwart justice. The elaborate prison cells that the Hannibal Lecters of fiction escape so easily serve as a semi-conscious metaphor for a democratic government’s supposed powerlessness against evil.
Next time I come back to this political fantasy theme, I promise to have an early American history angle. Certainly the problem goes all the way back, even if Jefferson and Jackson did not get their political fantasies from the movies.
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Now playing: The Exploding Hearts – Boulevard Trash
All of the conservatives who are supposedly speaking up for the people of prison towns (I live in one myself) ignore one fact – the transfer of detainees to domestic prisons would undoubtedly result in expanded funding for those prisons, which means more jobs for correctional officers and a boost to struggling local economies. If you asked the locals themselves, instead of just the Washington blowhards who never met a TV camera they didn’t like, I’m guessing you wouldn’t find nearly as much opposition as we’re lead to believe.
There’s no conceivable reason to fear that terrorist suspect detainees are any more likely to escape than the murderers and rapists already being held, so I can’t see why locking up detainees in maximum security prisons is such a threat to local communities. Obviously, I object to the entire process on habeas corpus grounds (weren’t we supposed to be returning to honoring human rights by electing Obama?), but if we’re going to lock up the detainees there’s no reason why we can’t do it here.
Comment by Pete — May 25, 2009 @ 10:53 am
I’m guessing that most of those opposed to “hosting” detainees aren’t actually scared that those imprisoned will escape and wreak havoc; rather those opposed are concerned that having detainees associated with Al Queda present will make communities targets for that organization or Queda “wanna bees.” It does seem unlikely; after all, if Al Queda or some other group was actually able to pull of such an operation, it wouldn’t really matter exactly where the prisoners they hoped to release (by seizing hostages) were kept.
Comment by Daniel Mandell — May 25, 2009 @ 8:03 pm
Jeff: I had similar thoughts about Gitmo and fantastic visions of terror: http://www.joshbrownnyc.com/ldw341.htm
Comment by Josh Brown — May 26, 2009 @ 3:42 pm
Interesting site, but much advertisments on him. Shall read as subscription, rss.
Comment by RichardOn — May 26, 2009 @ 4:46 pm
Ahem, opposing bringing the detainees into the US is just another manifestation
of Democracy, much like the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, sit-ins, and other
violence I remember from my young days. Unfortunately the spreading of radicalism
of any sort (and this includes Aryan nation drivel) among prisoners is a well-
documented fact. Furthermore, the propensity of the federal judiciary to do radical
and arbitrary acts is also well-documented; the likelyhood is there that a federal
judge WILL order detainees released unsupervised into the US population; it is in
character for them, so to speak, the widely-regarded jail-break that was the Warren
Court being especially borne in memory.
As for Super-heroes, pure drivel. Popular Culture in America is now
fundamentally about being deliberately stupid. No point in watching TV; even PBS
and NPR are dumbed-down and too predictable. Lose the Super-villian analogy; this
is Common-place, not Entertainment Tonight or American Idol. We are intelligent.
As for the where-to-put-the-detainee-issue, it’s nice to see Obama squirm, it’s nice
to see him get treated just the way he treated Bush. If I were into trite popular
drivel I’d resurrect Harry Truman’s kitchen line; instead it’s pleasant to watch
Obama slowly disintegrate. Perhaps within a week we will be at war in Korea (Biden’s
testing?); more probable is that Judge Sotomayor’s nomination will be withdrawn,
possibly at her ownb request.
Comment by Thomas Engel — May 31, 2009 @ 10:57 pm
Mr. Engel–Thanks very much for your remarks, but I have to take issue with your objection to the “pure drivel” of Jeff’s blogpost. Our readers will find much erudite material in the main issue pages of Common-place. This blog, however, like many weblogs, exists for a different purpose–to supplement the main journal by entertaining off-the-cuff, more playful ideas about history and contemporary issues. If that inspires the blog’s proprietor to draw an analogy to popular culture, then I think even our “intelligent” readers might welcome his broader insights (or, failing that, they can always ignore a blogpost that doesn’t appeal to them). If this is too “dumbed-down” for you, I urge you to scale the ladder to the more highbrow segments of our culture. Why not take up reading more academic journals? In the meantime, I’ll cite some of the “trite popular drivel” my mother attempted to ingrain in me as a young boy: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it.”
Comment by Benjamin Carp — June 4, 2009 @ 10:17 am
Thanks, Ben. I had been letting Mr. Engel get his harrumphs out. Even under Obamanian rule, readers who don’t want their “Masterpiece Theatre” costume drama buzz disrupted by references to modern politics or popular culture are still free not to click the “Publick Occurrences” link on the C-P home page. Blogs will be blogs, and so is this one.
Comment by Jeff Pasley — June 4, 2009 @ 2:37 pm