Fascinoma

First thing this morning I heard a Bush spokesman arguing retroactive immunity for their wiretap crimes, by claiming, 'The American people should be afraid after 9/11, and grateful that we haven't had another such attack....' and it sent me into a little sci-fi reverie.

One film for which Denzel Washington definitely didn't get nominated for anything was Fallen, a cheesy, creepy horror flick about how the soul of an executed serial killer gets transferred metaphysically from person to person, and so the serial killings go on and on. The movie was pretty b-minus, with some flashes of adequacy, but the meme has a peculiar resonance. An earlier incarnation of it was the original Star Trek's episode 43, The Wolf in the Fold. That's the one where Scotty is accused of knifing a belly dancer on during the crew's sojourn on a free'n'easy R&R planet. Of course he didn't do it; it was a spectral entity called Redjac, apparently once also Jack the Ripper, and some other serial killers. The thought is that this electromagnetic meanie nourishes itself on the emotion of terror, so Doc chills everyone out with some good drugs and... something happens and they flush the thing out into vacant space.

That nourishing itself on terror part reminds me of so many parasitic "freedom fighter", including the Taliban and also their mirror/symbiotes, the Neocons. But the Azazel-demon, jumping-from-soul-to-soul part reminds me of how we didn't really kill fascism or Nazism in World War II. We "won" that war like any total war, at the cost of becoming our enemy. And we nsatched up as many of the Nazi weapons wizards as we could. And so fascism thrives on in American -- even coming out of the closet now.