The Good, the Bad, the Boring

You ask the average
person what they think
of themselves and they
will tell you without
hesitation they are not
evil. Oh, they might not
like everything about
themselves -- the way
they look, their personality,
how their nose whistles
when it’s clogged -- but
they usually will not think
of themselves as all that bad.
Of course, I refer to the
average person, not one
obsessed with TRYING to be as bad as possible. Those
people deviate from the norm a bit too much to fit into the
category of vastly generalized humanity.

Even those fucked up souls will generally see themselves
as a ray of light when hard-pressed. And when interrogated,
we find out that trying to be bad and seeing one’s self as
evil are really just self-loathing and abuse.

You take Hitler, sit him down with Barbara Walters and
he will look you right in the eye and with a straight face,
tell you he thinks of himself as a quiet, stay-at-home sort
of guy who likes dogs because no one, not even the most
evil man in history, thinks he is evil.

And maybe most of us are right. Maybe no matter what
kind of heinous shit we perpetrate, good and evil just don’t
enter into how we see outselves. We see ourselves as trying
to survive, working out issues, fighting temptation, doing
what's right for our people, defending ourselves.

Put enough time and cultural spin on anybody’s biography
and they become heroes or villains. Alexander the Great
conquered 80 percent of the known world in his time, killed
thousands of people and laid waste to great big portions of
the planet and yet he is remembered as basically the greatest
stud of western civilization. Even people who hate homosexuals
will do backflips to keep him in the same category with all the
other greatest men in human history.

In their time, the Romans killed more people than Hitler ever
dreamed of, enslaved entire races, invented about 27 brands
of perversion never before seen by man or god, popularized
blood sports not to mention matricide, patricide, regicide,
fratricide, infanticide, suicide, homicide and crucifixion to
unheard of levels. They killed Jesus, but they gave us indoor
plumbing so we forgive them.