the bogeyman that has so unsettled the US is none other than the evil kiddie snatcher. that's right, that nefarious entity that's the object of every amber alert, and every parent's darkest nightmare scenario -- that some malicious goon will pluck their adorable darling up at the bus stop, and vanish without a trace....
while this is kind of sarcastic, there is a point or two to be made here.
this is the greatest country in the world. maybe the greatest country ever -- or so you'd better claim, if you want a serious shot at getting the GOP presidential nomination to challenge our traitorous, marxist, negro president next year. and yet, at the same time, there's some sort of infection or pestilence or malevolent force that has spread across our blessed land. where once the little children could walk through blizzards to school unmolested by perverts, now moms across the land have to physically deposit their young ones at the stoop of the school bus to be sure their precious cargo makes it on board safely.
once, when i was a lad, certainly we lived in simpler times. the president was assassinated by the CIA and states south off the mason-dixon line operated under an apartheid system of legally enforced racism, abortion was not allowed by executions were carried out at a lively pace. in those days i walked to school myself, and for six years no one even once tried to lure me into a car by promising candy. not even once!
fast forward 45 years and local TV news seems obsessively concerned with reports of missing children, which are repeated with such regularity and ferocity that our drama-addicted population has internalized the threat and projects it onto every and each stranger who may happen to co-inhabit the physical vicinity with their vulnerable spawn.
let's pause for a second to consider that according to FBI statistics, serious crime is at its lowest point in decades, and continues to decline. also consider the huge number of incarcerated individuals in the nation -- the highest in the entire world. finally, in this paradise of material abundance and consumer fulfillment, enlightened attitudes and just general, all-around goodness, how could it be that we produce a supposed army of kiddie snatchers to create the alleged pandemic of kiddie-snatching that -- at least in the popular mind -- has engulfed the land?
i have no answer. we are the most affluent nation in history, perhaps, and have benefited from being the inheritors of the legacy of enlightenment values, of science and progress generally. we live in a land where even the destitute and homeless have access to "services," that ensure that the number of those who perish from society's neglect is kept minimal. in short, our society is very efficient at pushing the wreckage of unproductive lives out of sight.
statistically, we may fare well in the measures of serious crime, and the hysteria that drives mothers to distraction over their childrens' safety may be grossly overblown -- but there's still something out there in the land, something fearsome and menacing.
yes, america. there are kiddie snatchers. they are out there, and their crimes have been meticulously documented by the hype-masters of our corporate, bloodsucking media machine. it's exploitative and grotesque, and yet there's a real phenomenon at work: the deranged individual who is unable to control his impulses, and unleashes them upon the unsuspecting.
these guys are the detritus of a system that cannot deal effectively with the defective, the failures. jeffrey dahmer, jared lee loughner, ted bundy, john wayne gacy, and a thousand others, toiling in obscurity at their grisly work. they are the deeply hidden, darkly repressed excrescence of dysfunction, the gross ejaculation of our dystopian society.
their malignant outputs are a direct correlative of the bent axis upon which our values rotate -- off balance and careening to a crash.
who are these guys, and why are we obsessed with them? their crimes are rare, the statistical probability of one striking close to any one of us is impossibly small, and yet beyond any conceptual 1 percent solution we take their presence as a certainty, the kiddie snatching which we expect a certainty.
as fears go, this surpasses the threat of terrorism by several degrees of magnitude, as it hits closer to where we live than any headline-grabbing bombing or anthrax-laced letter. in effect, this is the true nightmare that possesses the american psyche, and has drawn us into a paranoid fetal position of primitive dread.
sometime in the past few decades, when TV stations realized how easy these fears were to exploit, we gradually were seduced by nightmare scenarios too terrible to consider rationally, so most of society, in one great, flying leap, dove head-first into a miasma of perpetual cowering before monsters too numerous and yet stealthy to confront.
the kiddie snatchers are the fear we don't have in reality, that must be manufactured and evoked by the idiot box in order to keep the zombie hoards supine and helpless. cowering in abject horror behind the brave and resolute defenders of order, the police establishment. now that's a cozy arrangement that we can all live with.
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