Oct
11

A law abiding citizen shouldn’t be fucked with

House Minority Leader John Boehner, part of the problem

A couple months back I watched A Law Abiding Citizen, with Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx. Butler plays a character whose wife and daughter are raped and murdered by a couple of criminals during a home invasion, then he exacts a disturbingly brutal revenge on them after they were sentenced to only a couple years of prison. He also focuses his vengeance on the system that let them get out early, meaning the judge, arresting officers, prosecutors, etc., killing them in cinematically spectacular fashion apparently you learn he was an assassin for the Defense Department who used complex techniques to kill Taliban, Al Qaeda, whatever the enemy du jour was for the US government. Foxx is the prosecutor from the case that got a plea bargain so as not to fuck up his conviction record in court, so he could be more electable as district attorney, or mayor or something. In all, a fantastic movie, but something bothered me about it, or at least triggered neurons in my brain to start firing. I didn’t really have a grasp on it till recently, which made that movie much more eye-opening when seen like that. Without getting too wordy right off the bat, the character Butler plays in that movie is an embodiment of popular disgust with the system as its set up now, sort of the Tea Party prior to its astroturfing by the right wing, with Foxx as the Obama character, the one trying to make it right and get Butler to stop what he’s doing. It’s a movie not unlike Network, somebody snapped and said “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

President Obama. Wrong place wrong time. It's not his fault, the (untenable) system is just collapsing around him.

It’s rare to see a movie these days that’s an allegory of our times, at least if you don’t watch Oliver Stone movies. But this Law Abiding Citizen is an example of what will happen when the average public is trodden on, the people who pay their taxes, go to work, work hard, and build a life for themselves and their families. In theory the system is there to help these people live that way, but this movie showed the machinations that go on in politics and the legal world, two places that have no true comparison with the real world. Butler was frustrated with the way the politics of the situation cast aside the need for a family and how that is the basis for a stable life, and the elimination of justice in the legal system. Just as the Tea Party wanted to bring real people back into government, and stop government from working for its own sake like Foxx’s character did by getting a plea bargain so his conviction rate remains high, something so simple and meaningless for everyone except a guy looking to rise higher in public office. Butler was fighting against the wrongness of that whole idea, that the system is a game. He saw it instead as a set of rules that all people have to adhere to, because that’s how society survives. It was wrong in his eyes, as with the Tea Partiers today, to use the system to improve your lot in life or to muddle things up so much it’s impossible for the common man (who the government is theoretically designed to defend) can succeed, live, or even survive.
This whole idea of government not working for you, that it’s not a healthy way of doing things, was central to the movie just as it is in the political chatter today. Butler’s character worked for something like five years constructing his revenge plot, but it wasn’t just so he’d feel better. He wanted to draw attention to the injustice of the justice system as it became. Foxx is a good man at heart, a family man with career ambitions, but he lets the career ambitions get in the way of what he should be doing. Government work is often referred to as public service, and that’s what Butler was pissed about, that the government was not serving the public but instead itself. Politicians have to be re-elected, because, obviously, that’s how they stay in power. Therefore they are willing to sacrifice their personal stands on issues in favor of the popular issue. I can’t believe every Republican candidate doesn’t believe in climate change, just as I don’t believe every Democrat wants to repeal the Second Amendment. But the modern discourse has been filled with loud voices of indiscriminately basic thought processes, and the moderate, normal aspect of thought has been pushed out. Ignoring compromise is unhealthy in every situation. Moderation, as they say, in all things. Including moderation.

My connection of Foxx to Obama comes from the idea that he is trying to be a voice of reason in the film. Obama has made several speeches and statements (sometimes ill-worded or timed) that he Tea Party has no real direction, and Foxx says the same thing, that the revenge is for revenge’s sake. They just don’t understand the problem at its heart. The problem is not with the Tea Party and neither was it with Butler. The problem is the history of the established system of rewarding those who played the game and used loopholes or rules that were meant for one thing to do something completely different. Butler is the symptom of that, as with the Tea Party. It’s not Obamas’ fault in the grander scheme of things just as it wasn’t all Foxx’s fault. They just did what had been done the whole time, but it had reached a critical mass in the form of Butler, who happened to also be a former Special Forces assassin. They are the best possible candidates to be in government but that’s just not good enough anymore. Tea Partiers are quiet, kind of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan used in the 80’s to get elected. They don’t want to make waves, and for the longest time assumed they were protected by their government. Their leaders have told them they are working for the people, parroting the same ideas seemingly forever, and have continued today. Unfortunately for the establishment it doesn’t work for them anymore, and the people are pissed. They’ve reached that critical mass, or are reaching it, and it will result in people like Christine O’Donnell or Rand Paul now being front-runners for office. Now, the Tea Party has been taken over unfortunately, but when it was at its height, prior to Palin and her ilk that took it and twisted it, it involved all people, those that were just sick of the situation in government as a whole and had to take it into their own hands to make a change.

Rep. Ron Paul, part of the solution (hopefully)

Violence is almost never an answer to any situation. Though Thomas Jefferson said (and has been repeatedly quoted by Glenn Beck) “The tree of liberty must refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”, that doesn’t mean go blow everyone up (at least don’t always go blow everyone up). In Law Abiding Citizen, Butler sacrificed himself as well as those that caused the problem in an effort to get the world to screw its head back on straight. Don’t go out and blow a bunch of people up, but at the same time don’t just sit there quietly while the world caves in and is handed to those that shouldn’t have the power. Blood isn’t always literal, it’s just what keeps something alive. And sometimes you have to go old school and bleed someone to get the sickness out. A clichéd saying goes that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. Maybe this movie was supposed to, in part at least, scare people into not taking the law into their own hands, because the government will GET YOU, but for me at least the point was the exact opposite. Citizens of a country have a duty to check their leaders, to make sure they’re doing what’s right for everyone and not just themselves, or else we have to “blow them up”. If you have to, you might even have to become a terrorist. And sometimes (watch me kill any future political career here) that’s your only choice. Sometimes you gotta drop a logic bomb on the whole country.