Firing at the Typical Villains

There is a simple truism to life: people like to see good succeed.

There are all kinds of folks in this world. Good, bad, apathetic. But stories have to include a happy ending. There is no sequel without a hero to star in it. Even in horror movies, the hero usually wins. The bible? Forget it. Satan never had a chance.

Let’s look at this for a minute. Does the real world work like this? Well, kinda. But usually it is not exactly a pretty or truly pure process. Villains might go down, but not without taking millions of dead people with them. I guess you could say that good usually wins, but there is never a guarantee that the planet won’t go down in a sudden inferno. So what do we do to get through the day? We pack everything into a nice little ball of faith and stick it in whatever basket we feel comfortable with.

I write a daily message to one of my Christian blogs. When I provide optimistic messages, my feedback is great. When I provide sobering, in your face messages, the feedback is not so good. So, in order to pleasure my audience into staying with me, I’m stuck. I actually believe this is a type of pandering that all broadcasters must engage in. What do you do if the audience bolts?

I have been Catholic my whole life. Every week, positive message. HOWEVER...I once saw a scathing criticism of marriage in general. I guess Catholic priests think they have a wiser view than those of us living the life. As this priest was ripping off critical comment after critical comment, you could feel the audience clenching their hindquarters. As we walked out, the facial expressions were easy to read. My dad even mentioned that the guy had guts to bring up those topics. Let’s face it, pandering is safer.

Have you gotten tired of the typical hero/villain arrangement? Tough! The world wants it. The world wants it so bad that the authors of the world have been forced to feed it to the audience forever. Yes, forever! That means before the bible. What do you do if you want to write about something else? You get creative. You don’t sell as many units. Then you go back to writing hero/villain stories.

I have been railing against Satan for....too long. In a lot of ways I would prefer to write about Satan Jr. or something by now. There must be an option for guys like me. However, the king of all lies who kills those in his way is hard to improve upon. Frankly, the shit streams just naturally flows toward him, as do my pithy one liners bashing him.

What I love about American politics is that when things are bad, the blame goes up the chain, not down, like in the business world. In American business we heap huge money and benefits on our top folks. When there is a significant problem, we don’t really expect them to be in trouble. Usually they have golden parachutes to take care of them. So if you are a new CEO for a big company, you are in a win-win. There might be some risk, but you are not shouldering it as much as your soldiers.

Politics is completely different. Heck, we even pulled a governor out of office in California a few years ago, and stuck a movie star in his place. What was the result? A bunch of failing years for the state as a whole. We are in a much worse situation than we have been in. Heck, California might be bankrupt soon enough. Why? The accountability is not where it should be. We want to blame our leaders, and we definitely put a lot of effort toward it, but still we have no rules to make true changes to the system. Look at California to become West Nevada soon.