By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal”

-Ingmar Bergman

“I could have killed ’em all, I could kill you. In town you’re the law, out here it’s me. Don’t push it. Don’t push it or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe. Let it go. Let it go.”

-John Rambo

I hate all the ‘good guy/bad guy’ talk belched out into the ether by law-and-order types, especially when it comes to the moral complexities of foreign policy. “We’ve gotta get in there to get the bad guys.”, “The world needs American strength to take care of the bad guys.”, “The bad guys don’t care about human right so why should we?” “I beat my wife to death last night with a tire iron but in my defense, she cooked the roast like a bad guy.”

It is all just one big, offensively over-simplistic, PR device designed to infantilize the American public around the complicated issues of life, death, and extrajudicial murder by erasing the mirror of moral ambiguity and replacing it with a black and white cartoon reality.

The end result of this specific macho genre of manufactured consent is Pete Hegseth, our swaggering Secretary of War Crimes, who seems to honestly believe that he is living in an eighties action movie. However, it isn’t always clear weather he’s trying out for the role of the hero or the villain, the good guy or the bad guy. When this flexing baboon isn’t praying to White Jesus to inflict “overwhelming violence” on “those who deserve no mercy” at creepy Pentagon prayer breakfasts, he’s bragging about America’s superhuman prowess when it comes to raining down “death and destruction” on the deadly 5th grade schoolgirls of Iran in some hopped-up press junket.

The only thing marginally more sickening than that creep’s Bratpack jock antics is the fact that a frightening percentage of Americans are somehow still falling for it even while the rest of the world cringes and clinches their collective sphincter.

I hate to sound like one of those harping church karens who blames all society’s ills on the latest TikTok dick joke but the only reason that this seemingly obvious line of garbage works at all is because of Hollywood and its incestuous relationship with the Military Industrial Complex.

For nearly a century, mainstream American cinema has regurgitated, devoured, and re-regurgitated the same foaming popcorn mythology in which it is presented as basic common sense that America is always the good guy and that every foreigner with a funny accent who stands in his way is a totally otherized human bowling pin who exists for the sole purpose of being obliterated again and again and again in a voluptuous bacchanalia of endless machine gun barrages and bottomless stacks of bloodless corpses.

Your average American is raised on a steady diet of this schlock with a side of paint-by-the-numbers public school history teachers who can turn any warzone into a beige labyrinth of names and dates to memorize for next week’s ludoviko scantron test. I may be terminally jaded but I’m no exception to the rule. My own uniquely Queer neurodivergent otherness just left me with the odd habit of almost always rooting for the bad guys in the movies which in turn led me down a shockingly short road from Darth Vader to Molotov Remembers. That tripped me up for a second truth be told, but it also provided me with an extra pinch of perspective.

The brutal and deeply unpleasant reality at play here is that when it comes to the state and the war that gives it meaning, there are very few good guys, just different kinds of bad guys. Some of them wear black and some of them wear white. They all use different excuses, but they all kill people for a living, and they are all just as defined by “the enemy’s” continued existence as they are by their triumph over that other shade of bad guy which somehow never seems to last longer than fifteen minutes before the next one appears from the abyss.

With that being said, upon closer assessment of the undoctored historical statistics, it very quickly becomes hard to avoid the fact that the most brutal and deeply unpleasant reality at play here is that America has become the worst kind of bad guy. America has become the Dath Sidious of our era. The kind of Third Reich-grade big-bad that unites bad guys like Molotov and de Gaulle in existential climactic battle for the survival of the human race. This is far from a recent development, but it is definitely getting worse.

Since its inception as a republic largely defined by genocide and slavery, the United States has engaged in nearly 500 foreign military interventions with over half of them occurring after our victory in World War 2 and about 25% of them occurring after the demise of our only real rival on the world stage, the Soviet Union. In other words, the more America “wins”, the more violent it gets. The weaker America’s opponents become, the higher the body count reaches.

Donald Trump’s latest request for the annual military spending budget in 2027 breaks all previous records at $1.5 trillion dollars, which is not only more than ten times that of our supposed big-bad, China, it is more than the next dozen highest defense budgets combined. And all of this tax accumulated slush goes to maintaining a global network of around 800 overseas bases in 80 countries on every continent on earth. None of this is good guy behavior. It isn’t even bad guy behavior. This is fucking Death Star behavior, and we should all be at least a little bit terrified right now.

With that being said, this can hardly be surprising for anyone who’s history education didn’t end with Rocky IV. This whole fucking horror show is merely the natural result of Manifest Destiny; the cult of the omnipotent good guy that has long governed the zeitgeist of Western Civilization.

Super creeps like Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are merely the first cracks in the facade big enough to frighten the neighbors. Our fellow NATOcrats have ridden Robin on every Batman drive-by the US has orchestrated over the last century. They cringe at MAGA not because of the grizzly nature of its recent quagmires in the Middle East but because America’s current administration is blackening the international cache of the West’s good guy/bad guy brand with open and unabashed displays of B-grade schlock-buster villainy.

And I Quote: “Our war fighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the President and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This war was never meant to be a fair fight and it’s not a fair fight. We don’t train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. We are punching them while they’re down. Which is exactly how it should be. If a nation confronts you, they are the enemy, an enemy deserves no mercy.”

Now, most of that quote comes from Pete Hegseth’s chest thumping announcement of the launch of his administration’s bloodbath in Iran, but parts of it come directly from the dialogue of Cobra Kai Sensei John Kreese in the 1984 cheeseball classic, The Karate Kid. But I challenge any of you to tell me who said what without the assistance of C-Span or IMDB because it appears that Hegseth has modeled his entire public persona on a B-movie bully who beats up on high school kids to feel like a big shot.

Of course, Hegseth is far more grotesque, going to elementary school playgrounds with bunker busters to validate his fragile manhood. But this is precisely the kind of public display of ‘good guy’ villainy that makes Europe cringe, but this was also the inevitable result of the cult of humanitarian interventionism that all of the sainted First World has been baptized in.

We can’t go back to Barack Obama. That character doesn’t sell anymore. As delusional as the American people are about their place in the world, they recognize the tired sales pitch of the woke neoliberal as being a glass of bullshit too tall to swallow. Americans had two choices in the last election, a Sith Lord who offends what little intelligence any of them have left by behaving like a Jedi or a Sith Lord who talks like Java the Hut and promises to at least get them a good deal on the next war crime. America chose the more obvious bad guy because that was just slightly easier than doubling down on denial and way easier than actually taking responsibility for the violent world we created in the name of being a good guy.

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