Wanted Undead or Alive:. Джонатан Мэйберри

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      Chad Savage, Nightmare Visions

      “Any good story is based on some sort of conflict, and the simplest conflict possible is good vs. evil—even toddlers can understand that one, hence fairy tales. The storytelling gets more complex as we get older, but when you boil ’em down, they still usually have pretty well-defined Good Guys and Bad Guys. I think that’s why stories that fall into gray areas are so disturbing to us—stories that end on a morally neutral (or amoral) note are often very jolting. As a culture, we like to see evil punished, maybe because we know in real life that often doesn’t happen.”—Chad Savage is the artist behind Sinister Visions, Inc., a full-service visual design studio catering to the horror, Halloween, and haunted house industries.

      Many people kill. Some enjoy the hell out of it and are rewarded for it. A suicide bomber, though viewed as evil by the families of the survivors, is regarded as a great hero by the followers of his own ideology. A preacher presiding over the funerals of the victims of terrorism will shake his fist and speak of the evils of such actions; while on the other side of the world another cleric will praise God and speak of the heavenly reward for the killer. Same person. Is he evil or good?

      A soldier who kills the enemy is a hero. A soldier who continues to kill the enemy after a cease-fire is announced is a murderer.

      If someone kidnaps a random person, straps him to a chair, and inflicts torture on him, we view this as evil. Yet during times of conflict governments have given official approval for torture. It’s interesting to note that torture isn’t generally called that by the sanctioning government. Since we—and the general public—associate torture with evil, we don’t want to regard ourselves as evil, and therefore we give it a more acceptable label. During the Bush administration torture was called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Has a much cleaner ring to it, though I doubt the subjects of the torture appreciated the difference.

      And that raises a conundrum. Call it the Jack Bauer paradox, and unless you’ve been living in a cave you’re probably aware that Jack Bauer is the lead character on the Fox television show 24. Jack is undoubtedly the hero, but he has done some questionable things during his race against the clock. The argument goes like this: We absolutely will not torture. Never, under any circumstances. Okay, fair enough. It’s a view most sane and moral people would agree to without reservation. Except…what if there was a nuclear bomb set to explode in the center of a densely populated city and one person, a terrorist, knew where it was. The clock is ticking and hundreds of thousands could die, but everyone could be saved if someone can get to the bomb in time. Every second matters. Would it be acceptable to torture the terrorist for the information so that all those lives could be spared?

      Most people would pick up the pliers or wire the terrorist’s testicles to a car battery if it meant saving all those lives. If anyone insists they wouldn’t, put a polygraph cuff on them and tell them that their own family would die in the blast as well. Then ask if they wouldn’t cross that line.

      This is what philosophers have labeled an “acceptable evil” or a “necessary evil.” Jack Bauer isn’t a bad guy, but the scriptwriters keep putting him in positions where there are no other doors left open and only “hard choices” are left. So…under those circumstances, what would Jack do?

      What would you and I do? If it meant saving a hundred thousand orphans from being murdered, I think Mother Teresa would have gone medieval.

      That’s necessary evil. No one has yet been able to come up with anything approaching an answer to this conundrum.

      UNNECESSARY EVIL

      Some evil acts can be labeled as temporary insanity or crimes of passion, and maybe they are. These labels cover everything from popping a cap in an unfaithful spouse to road rage.

      Take that up a notch and you have multiple individuals committing antisocial or violent acts—mass hysteria, the mob mentality. Psychologists have made careers out of explaining and defending this kind of behavior. But when we turn the dial all the way up to ethnic genocide, can there possibly be an explanation or have we crossed the line from a momentary lapse of reason into true evil?

      “Genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin during the Nuremberg Trials; it is the systematic and deliberate destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. It’s not a spur of the moment thing. It isn’t the end result of a frustrating screaming match or a riot over a soccer game. It’s cold and calculated. It’s a choice, and that makes it evil. We’ve seen it happen. The Srebrenica Massacre of July 1995 resulted in the slaughter of an estimated eight thousand Bosniak men and boys, an atrocity carried out during the Bosnian War by units of the Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladi. A year earlier in Rwanda, a Hutu power group known as the Akazu perpetrated the mass murder of Tutsis and Hutu political moderates; and over the course of one hundred days they slaughtered an estimated eight hundred thousand people. Some estimates put the number higher, at a million victims, a number equal to 20 percent of the total Rwanda population.

      These massacres were years in the making, as was the Nazi Final Solution and other campaigns of genocide. Not rash acts, but cold choices.

      It makes you wonder why we look so hard for our evil to be of supernatural origin. We humans seem to be pretty talented at it without demonic help.

      MONSTERS (AND THE PEOPLE WHO HUNT THEM)

      However, the belief in supernatural evil persists. Exorcisms still occur. Hauntings are investigated. People wear charms against evil. Congregations pray for protection against unspecified harm.

      It can be argued that the belief in monsters persists as much because of pop culture as because of ignorance. Possibly more so. Books, movies, comics, TV, video games, and all of the other forms of entertainment continue to showcase vampires, werewolves, vengeance ghosts, demons, dark gods, and other unnatural nasties.

      Scaring the bejesus out of people is big business. If you’re reading this book you grasp that concept. You probably have horror movie DVDs at home, maybe some dog-eared Stephen King novels. Shows like Supernatural and Fringe are on your TiVo, and a lineup of American remakes of Japanese horror flicks are in your Netflix queue.

      Go ahead…admit it. You like being scared.

      Maybe…you even like to imagine what it would be like to be the monster. A lot more people empathize with Dracula than Van Helsing. The monsters are more fun.

      Does Good Win or Does Evil Fail?

      “In general, good survives in my books by holding to its principles…by believing in the things that I want to believe in, in my real life. Evil fails, when it fails (which, truthfully, is most of the time), by underestimating the good guys’ willingness to sacrifice their lives. Because that’s what heroes are: people who, without regard for their own safety, are willing СКАЧАТЬ