What is bad and what is good? This is a question I have been thinking about since the end of Breaking Bad.
Chuck Klosterman takes a mostly light-hearted look at Bad Guys. Near the start of the I Wear The Black Hat, Chuck identifies the single most evil act a person can do to be seen as Evil-tie a woman to a railroad track. Yes, he sees Snidely Whiplash as the poster-child for villains. After all, his name is Snidely.
I’d never heard of Chuck before picking up I Wear The Black Hat, but I get the feeling we are kindred spirits. We share a lot of the same memories, although he has about ten years fewer of them than I do. I can relate to his tales about N.W.A. and Andrew Dice Clay and his general feelings about Adolf Hitler. There’s a lot of funny stuff here.
On the other hand, he seems to be trying to put forward a few serious ideas about the philosophy of good and evil. He wonders, for example, why
Batman is a hero in the movies, but a real world Batman would be viewed as a criminal. He also wonders why D.B.Cooper has a fan-base and explains why The Diceman doesn’t. He mentions several celebrities from the past few decades and talks about how the world has viewed them. Some of this stuff is interesting and some of it shrug inducing in a so what? kind of way.
I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)
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