Sunday, May 31, 2015

Atomic Supermen and Geriatric Soldiers: Captain America, We Need a Hero

In recent years, the concept of security has become an increasingly popular topic in our collective consciousness, what with political and military unrest abroad, the seeming rise in terrorist activity both international and domestic, and a whole host of other atrocities like school shootings and the various unnecessary death of non-white citizens at the hands of their much paler police brethren that seem to be plaguing the United States like some kind of..., well, plague.

Though on the forefront of our consciousness, there has been very little actual rumination from the common folk, or really anyone in the upper echelons of our governments and world leaders, and the Band-Aid solutions they usually slap on the most recent wound inflicted at worst are completely ineffective and at best mostly ineffective.  Perhaps highlighted best by the Patriot Act, the discourse surrounding security seems to have drifted more and more towards some strange social economy where capital in the form of freedom must be exchanged in greater and greater amounts to achieve higher and higher levels of safety. The problem with this particular paradigm is that, taken to its ultimate conclusion, the only way we can achieve Total Safety (the abandoned and admittedly less action-packed sequel to TOTAL RECALL) is by bankrupting the Bank of Civil Liberties, which may be the only bank in the Western world that may never be deemed too big to fail. While it is true that you can keep your dick free of sexually transmitted infections by keeping it in a hermetically sealed, temperature-controlled, fragrance-enhanced plastic enclosure with a tube up your urethra for proper drainage, it wouldn't be all that conducive to fucking, which is a fairly self-defeating system.