Recounting his weekend spent readying a New Orleans chruch for renovation, Tom Lee writes, "plus, reality was being a bit over the top. I mean, c'mon: ladies' shoes? A destroyed organ? A waterlogged Bible? Mud encrusted children's toys?! It was all very maudlin and, frankly, unbelievable. That sort of lack of subtlety would never fly on HBO."I'm occasionally struck by the same thought. Watching Rambo a few weeks ago, I remember feeling irritated that the evil general was so evil. He would take sinister drags from his cigarette while he watched villages being razed, would impassively oversee gruesome atrocities from behind his reflective sunglasses, and was even a pedophile. What a reductive, overly simplified portrayal of a villain, I thought. Except....there are villains like that! There are soldiers who oversee gruesome atrocities, who carry out genocides, who rape and pillage and use their power to indulge their perversions. Many of them probably smoke cigarettes. Even more probably wear sunglasses. It's outdoors work! Sometimes reality has little interest in nuance.(Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Yovanoff.) EVIL.
Recounting his weekend spent readying a New Orleans chruch for renovation, Tom Lee writes, "plus, reality was being a bit over the top. I mean, c'mon: ladies' shoes? A destroyed organ? A waterlogged Bible? Mud encrusted children's toys?! It was all very maudlin and, frankly, unbelievable. That sort of lack of subtlety would never fly on HBO."I'm occasionally struck by the same thought. Watching Rambo a few weeks ago, I remember feeling irritated that the evil general was so evil. He would take sinister drags from his cigarette while he watched villages being razed, would impassively oversee gruesome atrocities from behind his reflective sunglasses, and was even a pedophile. What a reductive, overly simplified portrayal of a villain, I thought. Except....there are villains like that! There are soldiers who oversee gruesome atrocities, who carry out genocides, who rape and pillage and use their power to indulge their perversions. Many of them probably smoke cigarettes. Even more probably wear sunglasses. It's outdoors work! Sometimes reality has little interest in nuance.(Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Yovanoff.) 
