Blurring the Lines of Villainy
In Wicked we are shown one of literature’s arch-villains as less villainous. In fact, there’s a lot to admire about her from that angle. From that perspective, Dorothy is kind of the bad guy which is a mind-bending flip of the script.
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the blatantly bigoted Dixon (Sam Rockwell) solves the rape and murder case thus, in some minds, redeems his character from villain to sort of hero.
Eric Kilmonger in Black Panther might be the villain but his points about the ridiculously wealthy Wakanda passively allowing almost a century of bigotry to beat down black people is one hundred percent correct.
Even Thanos had a debatable point.
Mostly we like our villains to be evil through and through. The Good vs Evil binary is juicy and fun but as we grow a bit and end up doing terrible things for the right reasons and good things for the wrong ones, we start to enjoy villains with a tad more depth. We love Walter White because we understand him even as we know that if he was a real person we’d want him imprisoned until the cancer ate him alive and as far away from us as possible. Harley Quinn is a blast unless she showed up at your kid’s birthday party and started swinging her anarchist giant croquet mallet into the faces of the screaming parents.
Few things sting the ego more than when the villain does something with which you agree.
For at least half this country today, Donald Trump is the villain. I’d argue Mitch McConnell is more subversively evil but Trump is the figurehead of all things we despise and hate and cause us to go out of our way to take selfies of us flipping off his hotels and tweet “Fuck Trump” with complete impunity.
Admitting that he did something right is fucking hard. It doesn’t mean we agree with almost anything he has done or represents but it takes a toll on our unwavering certainty that Magneto was the bad guy despite the fact that his position that humanity will try to kill off the mutants is proved correct in every movie he appears in.
Last week, Trump the Villain did something right for all the wrong reasons.
Critical Race Theory has no more business being proliferated in the federal workplace than does Intelligent Design or Creationism.
Despite the fact that an unarmed black man has a better chance of being struck by lightning than killed by a policeman, the propaganda game is afoot and the theory which is based entirely upon anecdotes, lived experience, and the foregone conclusion that, as Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford gets paid to teach in corporate workshops to adults, “white people are born into not being human” has reached the masses.
Sure, Trump decided to block funding for CRT Diversity Training because he’s a white nationalist, a bigot, and is counting on his bigoted followers to re-elect him out of fear and hatred of black people. He is, no question, the villain. In calling out this bizarre secular theology for what it is, however, he manages to do a good thing for all the wrong reasons but, as so many on the Far Left will tell you, intent does not matter. Impact matters.
In other words, why Trump defunded CRT in the federal workplace is irrelevant. The fact that he defunded a segregationist race grift is all that matters.
I eagerly look forward to the day in January 2021 when that fat fuck is sitting outside the White House in a Budget Truck filled with his furniture whining about fake news and voter fraud. And yet few things sting more than when the villain does something with which you agree.
By accident, by complete obscure happenstance, he got this one right.
