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Salt
in the Wound
Evelyn
Salt is an uber patriot, I thought, watching the eponymous
film the other night. She is such a patriot that she will
kill and kill and kick and kill some more. Such a patriot
that she will kiss the ring of a Russian terrorist and feign
nonchalance at the death of her beloved husband.
Evelyn Salt is a patriot. She does not retreat. She reloads.
It was difficult to watch Salt in the aftermath of
the Tucson shootings. Already the airwaves were full of punditry
and blame, speculation and woe. After all, how else are we
to respond to something that is, at the same time, both shocking
and unsurprising? Does it matter if Jared Loughner is a lone
fruitcake too aberrant even for the Tea Party, or a zealot
in the cause of sealing borders and arming the citizenry against
a host of enemies? Either way he enacted the kind of violence
that has come to characterize not only our forms of entertainment
in TV, movies and gaming, but also our political, social and
internet rhetoric.
Michael Daly remarks on Sarah Palin’s now-infamous Facebook
depiction of Gabrielle Giffords in the cross hairs of a rifle
scope with the words: “Don’t retreat! Instead—reload!”
“Palin
would no doubt say that she was only speaking in metaphor,
that she only meant her followers should work to unseat Giffords
and 19 other Democrats who had roused her ire by voting for
health care. . . . Palin should have taken it as a warning
of what might happen when a Tea Party hothead dropped a gun
while heckling Giffords at an earlier Congress On Your Corner
event, more than a year ago. That did not stop Palin from
declaring Giffords a “target.”
It’s tempting to point fingers and Sarah Palin is low-hanging
fruit. But the reality is that she’s no maverick when it comes
to martial and violent rhetoric. In fact, spend a casual ten
minutes with your car radio and you will come across dozens
of voices on Christian radio stations invoking the imagery
of battle to characterize how a person of faith is supposed
to live in this country. There is very little beating of swords
into ploughshares.
And indeed, Westboro Baptist Church, legendary for its anti-gay
protests at military funerals, is planning to protest at the
funeral for 9-year-old Christina Green, the youngest victim
of the mass shooting. This time the good people of Westboro
Baptist won’t be wearing their anti-gay hats, but their anti-abortion
ones.
As for Arizona, the state got 2 points out of a possible 100
in the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence state scorecard,
avoiding a zero only because its Legislature has not—so far—voted
to force colleges to let people bring their guns on campuses.
And Loughner was able to buy his 9 MM semiautomatic Glock
because the law restricting its sale expired in 2004 and Congress,
under pressure from the National Rifle Association, did not
extend it. Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign, observes
that a Glock is “not suited for hunting or personal protection.
What it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people
quickly.”
Much is being made of the need to tone down the violent rhetoric
and hate speech that has become such a commonplace thing in
public discourse. That’s not a particularly laudatory observation,
however; it’s merely a necessary one. But the problem isn’t
only a matter of speech; it’s a matter of action. When the
means of violence—whether it be the emotional sort wrought
by a protest at a loved one’s funeral or the physical sort
that claims lives—comes to be protected as an American right,
something is deeply askew in collective national identity.
Which brings us back to Evelyn Salt. She’s a fictional, nearly
genderless machine of a human being and if the viewer sympathizes
with her at all, it’s because she’s manic in her patriotism
and sense of duty to the United States. For the better part
of the movie, she is thought by colleagues and law- enforcement
personnel to be a threat to the nation’s security. But what
the viewer knows—and what government officials that Salt leaves
alive will discover—is that her violence is her patriotism.
And, watching her desperate choreography of killing and maiming
in the film, I was reminded not of a superhero dedicated to
her country, but of the many voices screaming about love of
country in tones of hatred—voices brought to life in a character
whose patriotism is a threat to humanity.
—Jo
Page
jopage34@yahoo.com
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