Mugged by Faith: Ch. X - The Violence Myth

The more and more right-winged I became, the more and more I was drawn to violent movies.
I am not one of these freaks who gets his jollies watching blood and guts, though many of my favorite movies are quite violent.
I didn't enjoy the destruction, but the action: the refusal to sit there and take it, and instead the will of movie heroes to punish evil to allow good to prosper.

Above I have a picture from Rambo which is one of the purest examples of such a movie.
Westerns are another choice. It is my favorite genre, especially the classics with John Wayne.
His movie serve as a breath of fresh air from the self-serving egotism that runs modern-day action movies like Pulp Fiction.
With the exception of Red River and The Searchers, the John Wayne persona is a chivalrous man of honor, dignity and a dedication to higher things such as knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.
He became an icon for my wish to counter the mopey-dopey self that I was in my adolescence.
He represented what I should have been: standing on two feet in the face of such Godlessness and facing it head on, rather than taking it.

But I will eventually discover that Wayne wasn't becoming an icon, but an idol; and my Conservatism was gradually changing from resistance to outright revenge.

Liberals like to complain about the violence in John Wayne movies. They say that his movies praise reckless violence.
I always argued that they fail to understand that violence on screen is much different than the destructive act of our reality.
It's a mythological element that isn't evil, but instead constructive in that it obliterates that which prevents prosperity.

Besides, I wasn't a violent person for watching these movies.
Was I?

Well as I recently wondered about Jesus' advice to know the tree by "judging its fruits", I found myself wondering how honorable is it that one of the fruits of Conservatism is war.
Clearly there are some wars that must be fought. Others, including the current war on Terrorism, is not so certain. I tend to support our efforts to stopping these evil people from their jihad against Western Civilization, but that doesn't change the fact that we went into Iraq under questionable circumstances.
I don't wish this to be a discussion over whether or not we should have gone to Iraq and continue to remain in Afghanistan. But the fact that there is a question raises enough doubt for a reasonable person to be cautious of.

So I started to look around for various opinions on the whole issue of violence.
After all, I am a firm believer that there is a difference between killing somebody and murdering somebody. The Bible makes a clear choice of words between the two; and I don't think that War is murder unless its conducted for evil business. Even then, the guilt of murder is more on the national leader and not the soldiers.

I discovered this article which was quite shocking to read.
It claims that there is indeed a mythological concept of violence that is about construction, rather than destruction.
The problem is, it reveals a disturbing side to the motivation of such a concept.

The article recounts the Babylonian Creation Myth, in which the world is created when a group of second generation gods kill the first generation gods, their parents.
They do this because their parents find their children quite annoying, and wish to escape their noise. It's a case of us vs. them.
The blood from their mother spills on the world and from it springs life.
The blood specifically comes from Tiamat, the god of Chaos.
Creation comes from the destruction of Chaos.

Logical, but think carefully and you see a catch: both generations of gods are inherently violent.
This justification of one to kill another comes from the us vs. them mentality.
Hence, the younger gods killed their parents by projecting their evils on the older gods.
Instead of acknowledging that they are equally evil, they think of their parents as the embodiment of this evil, kill them, and everything is resolved with a new beginning of order.

To make the argument even more clear, the article goes on to compare this story to the Judeo-Christian Creation story in which God is inherently good and it is people who commit violence, which brings no good things.
The first murder is of Able at the hands of Cain, all because Cain was jealous.
Cain projected his insecurities onto Able and killed him, instead of dealing with them himself (Wink).

I don't believe this article makes a compelling case for resisting the advances of an evil empire such as the Nazis.
However, I do believe it serves as a strong cause to stop and wonder exactly where one's aggression and enjoyment of violent movies comes from.

I am not a violent person.
I've never been in a fight, never had to harm anyone in my life. I hope never to.
But as I began to think about it, I was quite a violent person in a different and deceptive way.